An Open Letter to a Young Texan
Dear Young Texan,
I am not sure how to address you. I do not know your name. I do not know your gender. I do not even know, definitively, whether you will grow up in Texas. Many years will pass before you will be old enough to read this. But with a few clues, I hope that this open letter can reach the right person:
- Your mother is Texan.
- You have three older siblings.
- You were likely born around March 15, 2022 (your due date).
- Your mother was incarcerated at the time of your birth, about seven months into a five-year sentence. Her conviction was probably drug-related.
I know these things because before you were even born, you were featured in a news article. The title of that article, which appeared in 19th News, is “67 abortions in 17 hours: Inside a Texas clinic’s race to beat new six-week abortion ban.” The Texas Heartbeat Act went into effect on September 1, 2021. Your mother took you to an abortion facility to die on August 31, 2021.
Thankfully, you survived. In the article, abortionist Marva Sadler laments that she was unable to kill you. The thought that Sadler “couldn’t help everyone” destroy their babies that day gave her “waves of sadness and pain.”
You have come to my mind many times since I read that article. The Texas law that saved your life was blocked for two days, then reinstated. The media coverage has been intense. Mainstream reporters may occasionally mention women “being forced to carry pregnancies to term” — but they never, ever mention you, or anyone like you.
I hope beyond hope that when you read this, America’s attitude will be vastly different. I hope you learned about Roe‘s reversal in history class. I hope that your classmates reacted with horror when they read about the “pro-choice” ideology that motivated people like Marva Sadler. I hope that in your time, mothers in need receive real solutions, not violence.
I hope that you were able to forgive your mother for considering ending your life. She was desperate, and the abortion industry worked hard for decades to make killing a baby seem like an acceptable solution to women’s problems. I thought about you while I recently watched the 2012 film ParaNorman; its central message is that fear can make people do terrible things, even kill an innocent child. I hope that your mother was able to conquer her fear and have a relationship with you.
Above all, young Texan, I want you to know that you are precious. You are not “irreparable harm.” You are a human being. And if all the efforts of all the pro-life people in Texas and throughout the country resulted in only your life being saved, the effort was worth it.
[Photo credit: Brandi Alexandra on Unsplash]
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