All In . . .

This is not something I generally share or have shared with many people.

These are the times we live in, so it seems germane to do so. It is not an abstraction to me, and many people face agonizing choices similar to my experience.

In my life, I was going to be a father to a wanted son. We were overjoyed.

Then, at 27 weeks, we were told the indescribably worst thing.

Our son to be had extreme hydrocephaly and other developmental traumas and was too little to do anything about it. If she was forced to carry him to birth that would have likely killed my wife Lori before that could happen. At 27 weeks his head was already the size of 30–32 weeks. Lower body was only around 24 weeks. This pattern would have continued.

We were fortunate to live in Los Angeles where a brilliant and compassionate doctor had just started using a new procedure with laminaria to slowly open her cervix. By doing that the potential for permanent damage to her was reduced.

It took 3 days of laminaria implants. 72 hours, every minute felt. Every minute knowing what was coming, and living in and through the decision we had made. Minute by minute.

On the last day driving to the hospital I had to pull over the car. I could not drive. She held my arm so tight that her nails dug in and I was bleeding. We sobbed until we could not speak. Just held on to each other, spent and utterly helpless and bereft.

Because she could feel our son kicking.

It saved her life. And was one of the most heart shattering things I’ve ever had to endure. I still do. It will never go away really, that wound. And there is not a day in my life that I regret it.

It was not a choice.

But we had a choice. A choice to save her life. A choice in her right to bodily autonomy. A choice for her to be a human being, not a detached womb under state jurisdiction.

As the months wore on after, hour by agonizing hour, we could not sustain the loss. It tore us to pieces emotionally, and our relationship went on separate paths.

There is not a single day that I don’t believe we — that she made — the right decision. Not one. I regret none of it, and am forever grateful there was a choice to save her life.

And these bastards want to make what saved my ex wife’s life illegal.

To kill women by making abortion illegal or impossible to get because of barriers to access.

It is still incredibly painful to me when I think on it decades later.

The ruling to come has in some ways awoken this trauma for me. I am viscerally feeling the agony to come of women faced with impossible choices, and no choices at all.

I have unbidden found myself weeping of late with rage and empathic pain for all that is to come. I’ve been there as the partner to someone who went through unimaginable trauma and nobody should have to go through that, but almost even more so should not be imprisoned in state sanctioned faux morality from so-called “Christian” terrorists mandating state sanctioned forced births.

I am furious in a way only those who have been close to the most horrible choice one can make can truly understand — deciding on the life or death of a loved human being and one who would have become one. It hits differently in a bone level understanding in confronting the cavalierness, cold inhumanity, flexing patriarchal abusiveness and naked misogyny of this decision.

Alito actually quoted a man who presided over “witch” trials as an authority for this opinion. I cannot even fathom that this man is a lifetime “Justice” in our court system, actually making life and death decisions for millions of women in real time.

Quoting a man who murdered “witches”.

For people who say this is a “women’s issue” that is undoubtedly true. It is also a men’s issue, a trans issue, a non binary issue … a human issue.

No man — nobody — has the right to legislate anything about a woman’s body.

Full stop.

So when I hear these Christofascists saying a medical procedure that saved my ex wife’s life was murder, well they should not say that anywhere within my earshot. It will not end well for them. And they may end up understanding what it means to lose their own bodily autonomy very quickly and unambiguously.

We as a civil society, as human beings, as compassionate rational non Christofascists have one job:

DDD

Donate til it hurts, Dial GOTV, Deliver votes in November.

Gay marriage is next, then birth control, then prayer in schools, then inter racial marriage … its all coming.

This is a cross generational fight that will resonate for decades. If we don’t stop these unconscionable assaults on basic human rights, right here, right now, people growing up 20 years from now won’t likely know what it was like to have that medical choice, to love who they choose, to plan their families.

It is at once infuriating and horrifying and motivating.

By then those pols who did this will be gone, hopefully McConnell will be burning in hell, and a different social compact will have evolved — but the installation of 3 SCOTUS “justices” who lied in their confirmations, the mendacious and blatantly cheating way it was done breaking precedent and McConnell’s own words, installed by presidents who lost the popular vote by millions of citizens’ votes, will endure.

The MAGAs like to say to “save America”.

Well — its our turn to truly do so … this is personal to me.

And I am all in.

Are you?

As a postscript, my ex remarried and has two boys and is very happy.

I am in an enduring, loving relationship with Ivy — my best friend and life partner — and have been for over 15 years.

All because we had a choice.

Make yours.

How will you help to stop this?