Senator Vance, Can you Imagine?

I don’t want to write about this. There are so many more fun, beautiful things to write about, but for the last week or so I have awoken at around 4 a.m. unable to sleep, thinking about this. In part what triggered it was Michelle Obama’s passionate speech on October 26, 2024, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, particularly the portion about reproductive rights. Here’s an excerpt:

I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health — all of it. There are good reasons why so many women and physicians are horrified by what’s happened since Donald Trump’s justices overturned Roe v Wade. We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Y’all, we are teetering on the edge.

And this will not just affect women, it will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancy won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.

I nearly had my own dream of college upended. Allow me to set the stage. No one in my family had a college degree. My mom worked graveyard at UPS during most of my elementary school years. My father struggled with both bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and after he and my mom separated when I was 8, he spent several years homeless, including stints on Skid Row. He died at 53, the age I am right now. He was dear to me.

My teenage years were quite rough. We had a two-bedroom apartment near Cal State Northridge—my brother had one room, and I shared a room and bed with my mother. At 15, I got a job at Jack in the Box to pay for my own braces. After school and on weekends, I biked through the hazy smog of the San Fernando Valley to earn $3.15 an hour. I got the braces. I was determined.

I loved learning, loved reading and writing. At 16, a sophomore, a former teacher offered to mentor me. His sister was a journalist, and I thought I’d like to be one someday too. But instead of helping me become a journalist, he helped me become pregnant.

Had I not had access to a safe and legal abortion, my life would have been totally derailed.

It was a very difficult time. I felt sullied and ashamed. My grades plummeted. It seemed that with every step forward, I fell two steps back.

My senior year of high school, my mom and I moved to an apartment in Redondo Beach, which allowed me a fresh start. I ran cross country, made friends, went to football games for the first time, dated high school boys. Still, the damage to my grade-point-average—along with a lack of funds—meant I wouldn’t be attending a four-year university. Rather, I enrolled in a community college, El Camino College. My AP English teacher, Mrs. Bourette (sp?) told me I would never get out of there—that I might as well go to beauty school. I’m certain her goal was to demean me rather than motivate me.

I worked a retail job, got my own place, and took classes—biology, physics, general chemistry, Spanish, racquetball. I cast a wide net. I loved science and math but was also drawn to language and literature. Preparing to transfer to a four-year university, I moved back in with my mom and started waiting tables, which earned more money than retail. I transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara, kept working, paid my way through college without a cent of help from anyone, paid for a year abroad in Argentina and Chile, and graduated from UCSB with honors.

From there, I married my pen pal, moved to San Luis Obispo, went to graduate school at Cal Poly, and then started teaching at Cuesta College and Cal Poly, where I taught for 16 years. I gave birth to Diego at 35 and to Charlie at 36. Whereas I had lived in a dozen different places by the time I was 18, I raised my sons not only in the same town but the same house. Today, Diego is a freshman in college at Western Washington University. Charlie is a senior, captain of the San Luis Obispo High School water polo team; he’s graduating early to spend a semester in Barcelona, and in the fall, he’ll go to a college to study economics or architecture.

It seems like Republicans would really appreciate this arc, which I think represents grit and tenacity, a pull-yourself-up-by-your-boot-straps self-reliance that they really seem to admire. I can guarantee one thing: None of it would have happened had I given birth at 16 to my former teacher’s baby.

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This summer, I was talking to a family member about J. D. Vance. I had read Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, and appreciated how Vance had, like me, improved his life through education and sheer grit. I told the family member I was disappointed that Vance had moved so far right, that he was so anti-abortion. I’m pretty sure the family member said, “Ugh, you and the abortion thing.” Yeah, me and the abortion thing.

But I was disappointed in the fact that Vance, having come from a poor household, wasn’t taking into consideration how abortion bans or restrictions especially affect poor women, and not just because I’d been one when faced with my own unplanned pregnancy. But most people who seek abortions are not teens.

The statistics usually surprise people.

According to Forbes magazine:

•     59% of women who seek abortions are already mothers

•     49% are poor while the national poverty rate is about 12%

•     75% of women who seek abortions are low-income

•     55% of women who seek abortions report a recent disruptive life event such as the death of a close friend or family member, job loss, the termination of a relationship with a partner, or overdue rent or mortgage obligations.

And, according to Forbes, “These women also overwhelmingly lack access to paid maternity leave or to affordable childcare.” They are living at the margins, on the fringe.

Vance says he wants to be pro-family, so that women don’t feel like their only option is an abortion. But his party is the one that consistently votes against healthcare, childcare subsidies, maternity leave. And the state where he is a U.S. senator had one of the nation’s strictest abortion restrictions. Passed on April 11, 2019, the “Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Right” was signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine. The law, which amounted to a six-week abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or fetal viability, lasted for more than five years until it was struck down in October of this year by an Ohio judge.

I just wonder, Senator Vance, can you imagine what your life would have been like if you had been a girl and gotten pregnant at 16? Do you think you would have been able to finish high school, enlist in the military, finished college and then law school? The thing about imagining. It requires empathy. It asks you to put yourself in her shoes.

I’m not a single-issue voter. But reproductive rights encompass much more than just the right to abortion, and the stakes are so high for girls, boys, men, women and society at large. I really don’t understand how men, if they are looking out for their daughters and granddaughters, would vote for a man who is willfully curtailing the rights of those women.

During her speech, Michelle Obama declared:  

So to the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women and how it will affect every single woman in your life. Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out of state or overseas or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up. Your wife or mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care. Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy. Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.

If you think this is an exaggeration of risks, I implore you to read this ProPublica article about an 18-year-old who died when her pregnancy, which she hoped to carry to term, took a turn for the worse. She made three visits to emergency rooms and doctors did not help her.

Michelle Obama also said:

To think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equality….We are more than just baby-making machines.

I got to decide when I was ready to make all the emotional, physical, and financial sacrifices motherhood demands, to undertake it when I was mature and calm enough to reap its rewards, which are so surprisingly plentiful and profound. I have loved—love—being a mother. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me, because I got to choose.

At 16, I was not ready.