The Sad Irony of "Pro-Life" Laws

I am a woman of childbearing age, and even tho I saw this coming, having the reality settle in is just shattering

It just feels SUPER weird — here I am, a human being who lives and works in the US state of Iowa, whose children are Iowans conceived through IVF, trying to wrap my mind around this bizarre new reality:

I would not have my children if the law decided today were the law 10 years ago!

I would not have my children, because IVF, for me, meant creating embryos and creating high-risk pregnancies. To do it now, I’d have to risk my life even more than normal: knowing that my health would be a secondary consideration to someone else’s politics. Which means my life would have been entirely different: my two precious babies, native-born Iowans, would never have been!

Here’s a little taste of what the world would have missed out on:

Oh man.

Abortion law in the United States is such a fucking mess, it’s hard to talk about it sincerely without people taking you in bad faith or responding to you in bad faith, so it’s really hard to write something like this, just honestly, just trying to communicate how astonishing it is, to realize that someone else’s misguided ideas about how to get to “more babies” would have, in your life, led very directly to “no babies.” And what a complete tragedy that is.

This isn’t unique to Iowa — I’m from Florida, and Florida is under a similar ban, and facing a referendum this Fall that, even if it passes (which is likely), will be fought by the state legislature, so committed are they to this wrongheaded project. The Dobbs decision of the Supreme Court of the United States has thrown half the country into a scramble for the basic human right to do what’s best for your own body.

Even the Republican-appointed Chief Justice of the Iowa state Supreme Court said, in her dissent, that this is an affront to bodily autonomy, personhood, self-determination, a decision reflecting the values of an era in which owning and abusing humans was considered acceptable.

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My kids and my family are Iowans, we drive Iowa cars and pay Iowa taxes, we ride Iowa horses and go to Iowa summer camp; when relatives visit, we show off the state: its beauty, its quirky treasures, its opportunities. But how can a place ever be your home if it doesn’t recognize your rights over your own health care?