Unpublished, but not Unsent v1

In September of 2020, I began writing a series of Letters to the Editor of the New York Times, which I submit, but which are, needless to say, never published. The letters are lamentations, mainly, on dealing with the consequences of, as I saw it originally, a post-trump reality. What I’ve learned since is that what, for me, was “post-trump”, was just normal, everyday life for other people.

I write these letters to self-soothe, whenever my Current Affairs anxiety needs leveling.

Dear Editor,

When I was teenager, about the age a mother-daughter relationship is just beginning to transform into a friendship, my mother told me a story she’d told many times before, but with a new twist.

When she became pregnant with me in her late twenties, she was ecstatic. My parents were married but their relationship was rocky and she wasn’t sure where he stood on the subject. So she made an appointment with a doctor to listen and learn more about abortion. This was 1975, only two years after Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now an option for her, a freedom she had the right to exercise. “I wanted to have you,” she told me, “but I wanted your father to choose you, too.”

He did, and I was born. But it was the abortion right that helped my parents commit to having a family. When it came time to have my own family, I felt honored to access the same right to a safe, legal abortion as my mother. I, too, did not exercise it and now have a beautiful daughter.

The terrible thing is, I desperately wanted to have more children but after battling endometriosis was unable to conceive a second time. And at the same time I lie awake at night drenched in fear that Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment and Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death will destroy the one freedom that made my family possible. The right to an abortion did for my family what it was supposed to, it allowed me to choose to have a family. How can I now be expected to parent a daughter knowing she will not have that same right? I already carry with me the painful burden of unfulfilled longing for more children; now I must brace myself to say goodbye to my daughter’s right, as a woman, to seek an abortion and, terrified for her future, carry that burden too.