This post is about abortion in the U.S.

In 2018, as a side project, I started writing a contemporary YA story (working title: Proverbs for the Forsaken) about two kids escaping an abusive home. I was inspired by the boogeyman: I was a middle schooler in 2005, when Texas adopted a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage.

13 was not too young to hear adults debate how sinful and corrupt me and my friends were, and how they needed the law to control us so we wouldn’t make decisions against God. Whose god??? Not mine. I was surrounded by people spewing hateful words: “You’re a sickness. You’re a sin. You’re disgusting. People like me shouldn’t exist. People like me should be shot.”

I wasn’t even old enough to articulate that I liked women, but of course that didn’t stop the hate. Other 13 year olds in class would look me in the eyes and repeat unthinkable cruelty. A girl whose existence I had never noticed lied and said that I touched her butt. I suspect it was because I dared to express discomfort with the idea that the government should seek to punish ‘disgusting people’. Fortunately for me, her lie was clumsy enough to be immediately obvious, and I didn’t have to argue my innocence.

Ten years later, Obergefell v. Hodges guaranteed the right to marry regardless of gender. That decision was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. So was Roe v. Wade.

There are camps for people like me in today’s America. Queer children are still routinely sent to abhorrent conversation therapy facilities. Despite overwhelming evidence of abuse, it’s still legal in many states. (And yes, I’m saying queer here. Everything else I could call myself has been used as a pejorative too. If I must pick a label, for the purpose of discussion, I’m going with the widest umbrella.)

Do I trust this Supreme Court to uphold states’ bans against conversion therapy? They didn’t for concealed carry. The conservative opinion on states’ rights seems to flip-flop to whatever ensures extreme, unpopular outcomes.

When I still lived with my mother, I didn’t worry about my her knowing I was queer and sending me for ‘treatment’. While she was incredibly abusive, it was never about that. She was just a broken person. But I did worry about all other adults. So, when a vice principal called me into his office to ask pointed questions about my home life, I lied. I lied even though, for many years, I thought living in my mother’s house would kill me.

I was lucky. I got out. So I wanted to write a story about other kids getting out. I created Micah Parks, a mirror of me at 14, obsessed with controlling how other people saw him, miserable, isolated, and driven by totally justified fear. And I created Lacey Parks, 18, to be the girl I wished I was: bold, defiant, self-assured, and uncompromising. Micah is the main character, but I saw Lacey as the hero.

I don’t have firsthand experience with conversion therapy, which is central to the story I’m trying to write. I lucked into a supportive dad and stepmom who never minded that I’m not straight. Micah’s reality, shipped to a camp in Alabama by parents who want to punish him for not being the son they wanted, wasn’t a personal fear. But it was my friends’ fear, and I love my friends, so I wanted to break that fear open and pin its parts down. I wanted to splay the gore and terror under sunlight and create a diagram of victory, healing, and safety found in the aftermath.

I sent Lacey to save Micah. But she had another role to play in the story, another boogeyman of mine: It is the evilest thing in the world to let someone die for the possibility of saving a fetus. When abortion is outlawed, that’s what happens. Necessary, life-saving medical intervention is forestalled or denied to give a fetus a chance— The person carrying it reduced to an incubator. We know this from cases worldwide. And in no other instance is it legally acceptable for someone to be forced to risk their life for another. Fully trained and armored cops don’t have to for children under gunfire.

Legally, you can’t even be compelled to give blood to save a life. But now half the states in the US will compel pregnancy because of the religious view of a minority that has been brainwashed into imagining that a fetus deserves more rights than you or I.

I know what it’s like to be faced with someone who thinks the world would be better if I would just die. I gave one form of that fear to Micah, another to Lacey, and wrote no advocates for them. I thought I would write a story about them saving each other. Throughout 2019, I wrote about Micah trapped in Alabama, keeping his head down while witnessing the astounding abuse the reform camp used against his peers. In 2020, I wrote him running away. In 2021, I wrote Lacey rescuing him in Mississippi, and keeping on north, away from their parents.

And then the draft opinion leaked. It was obvious what would follow. Did anyone out there seriously believe the contemptuous, transparently evil conservative justices on the court would respect public opinion or settled precedent? Their political careers revolve around serving the special interests of the far-right religious zealots who made sure they were appointed.

I immediately knew that I should throw out the entire planned ending for this book, because many states, including Missouri, where Micah and Lacey’s road trip was meant to end, have trigger laws. Missouri’s law fired the moment the Supreme Court decided, for the first time in living memory, to abrogate human rights. There are something like a million miscarriages every year in the US.  The vast majority of them aren’t medically dangerous. But, in red states, a tiny percentage now represents death for unambiguously thinking, feeling people. Like Izabela and Savita.

To the pro-“life”, who do not deserve to call themselves that: Look me in the eyes and say that people like me deserve to die because of what your god says about sin. Your god. Not my god.

There is a virulent strain of hatred in America. Every year, so-called Christians who profess to love life cast out their queer children by the thousands. A fetus is convenient to defend, because it is not a person, and can make no demands of someone. A queer child is anathema. These extremists have the gall to say they should rule, because the nation will be better when it’s been crushed under their malice— When everyone outside of their camp has been destroyed.

The last scene I wrote for my WIP: Micah waiting for Lacey in the hospital, while she has the ultrasound that reveals her fetus’s faltering heartbeat. She’s terrified, in pain, sweating, bleeding. Homeless, she is not equipped to carry a pregnancy to term, even if it was healthy. I feel empathy for her and others like her. I challenge that anyone supporting the SCOTUS decision does not. The events I’m describing, like everything else in this book, are based on accounts from survivors. This is real. And it happens to people like Lacey: young, poor, with no support network, already barely hanging on and now fighting desperately for their lives.

Do I even need to say what medical care costs, in this country? Is anyone in the dark about that? Do you know what percentage of American workers have any paid time off at all? I’ll give you a hint: it’s even lower for young, single women without degrees. Even if abortion was attainable, recovery following dangerous pregnancy complication has cost people their jobs; some employers are completely unsympathetic to unscheduled time off for any reason. This is legal in “right-to-work” (red, always red) states.

I planned to write about Lacey’s turmoil, faced with an agonizing choice. But the world changed. She doesn’t have options. Her beliefs, once spotlighted, are now immaterial. In Missouri, she can only pray while waiting to see if the fetus’s heart stops— And hers too. This was supposed to be a story about two kids who hit rock bottom and, in the absence of loving parents, pull each other up. Now I’m having trouble imagining how real people who share their circumstances would survive.

Some Republicans are saying the quiet part out loud: They want these people dead. People like me. And they are using their power to shape the law into an instrument of execution.

Reproductive coercion is widely understood to be abusive. It’s a strategy that forces people to stay in violent relationships. It works by eliminating choices, safety, and futures. And now it can operate on a more massive scale.

Forced pregnancy is an abhorrent, intimate form of violence. Those who are celebrating have a sickening lack of empathy. I don’t believe they see fetuses as more human than a pregnant person, not really. I don’t believe they see the rest of us as human at all.

And I don’t understand how someone can betray their partner and force pregnancy, but there are thousands of victims with more insight than me. I want to write Lacey overcoming this. But I haven’t yet figured out how someone in her situation would. America is a crueler place now.

Queer youth are overrepresented among the homeless here. They’re more likely to be cast out by their parents and experience sexual abuse. I know how much that hurts. I wrote this story from imagining the power of a fantasy that even just one family member will take your side. But, in this reality, someone in Lacey’s circumstances could not save herself, let alone provide for a child. I mean her brother here, but how could she keep a baby either?

Fortunately, these are characters, not people. I can change their story. I could erase pages and rewrite to make Lacey’s pregnancy healthy, or lessen their parents’ hatred, or have Micah find a wallet with a million dollars on the ground.

But deus ex machina is the realm of fiction. What power does a story that dismisses fear so cheaply have? What comfort can it offer to people for whom no miracles would come? The world doesn’t work like that. The horrors that the most vulnerable face don’t lead to happy endings.

More than ever, I crave happy endings. I want to believe in the power of empathy, mutual support, and action. This is how I try to approach life, and that will inform both how I approach the coming years and how I will rewrite the ending of this story. But first, I need to grieve for the people who will be irreparably harmed.