Today I am going to tell you my deepest, darkest secret. This is my secret shame, my greatest embarrassment.

Are you ready?

Okay, here it is: I used to be a pro-lifer.

Yes, it's true, I used to be a social justice warrior who insisted that all abortions were avoidable and evil acts of murder. I was raised Roman Catholic and often had this idea driven into my head by the church — though not, it should be noted, by my parents. My mother always taught me that, when possible, abortion should be avoided. but also that it is not always possible.

One day, I stumbled across a video that scarred me: a video that illustrated and described in great detail how a late-term abortion occurs. Please do not Google it. It is truly horrific, and the idea that such a procedure occurred ever, but especially in my own country, a country I like to think is developed, compassionate and increasingly progressive, absolutely terrified me. Thus, a social justice warrior, pro-lifer was created within me. And then, a miracle occurred in the form of this Tumblr post.

This is the Tumblr post that changed everything for me, the very thing that made me pro-choice. Two stories were shared, two stories where a woman was refused an abortion and yet life was still lost.

I lost a baby brother at something like 14 weeks because he’d attached to the uterine wall backward, and when he started kicking he tore himself away and hemorrhaged to death. My mother was bleeding with him...My mother was dying with him. And the hospital she was in? That fine pro-life hospital? Refused to let her transfer to another hospital to abort. She had a ten-year-old and an eight-month old at home, but making sure Joey didn’t die “before God’s time” was more goddamn [sic] important than making sure my mother survived...My mother asked the nurse if she’d take pictures, saying that the ultrasound images were really blurry and she’d at least like something to remember him by. The nurse, after Joey was dead and my mom was in recovery, threw pictures on my mother’s bed. This fine pro-life nurse gave my mother pictures of a baby that was jet black where he wasn’t blood red. He didn’t even look human. And she threw the pictures in my mother’s face, like it was her fault that there was a terrible, terrible biological mistake that made it impossible for her baby to survive...We wanted him. Not that the fact that you’ll notice he already had a name picked out would’ve clued you in. I would have had a baby brother just a year younger than me. My sophomore year in college I spent a lot of time crying alone in the student union, thinking it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, I should be taking my brother to dinner with friends or helping him study for his first midterms. I’m a big sister with no little brother to show for it, and there was a year that pain and loss came back eighteen years after the fact to wound me when I least expected it. There was a year when there were songs I couldn’t bring myself to listen to without crying because they reminded me of what I could have had. And I still wish, I still wish, they’d aborted him. Because the end result would have been the same. And my family would have been spared a world of pain believing we were losing brother and mother both. -- Anonymous

Last year my cousin Emily (Emmie) actually did die from not being able to abort her baby. When she was just under 20 weeks along with her second daughter they found out she had a condition which causes high blood pressure and protein in urine. The doctors gave her like a 5 percent chance of being able to bring the baby to term with both of them surviving. She and her husband were DEVASTATED.

She regretfully scheduled an appointment to terminate, but people found out. She went to church for comfort, so that she would have people there for her when she would need them but she got the opposite. Her church threatened to ex-communicate her, even though she tried to explain she didn’t want to abort, she had to to survive. People told her that a good mother would be willing to risk her life for her child, and sent her letters saying she was going to hell and threatening to physically attack her if she went through with it. Someone even told her four-year-old daughter, who was really excited about getting a little sister, that “You aren’t going to get a little sister because mommy is going to kill the baby.” They told that to a FOUR-YEAR-OLD! The harassment got so bad that on the day of her appointment, she didn’t go. About a later[sic] her liver started to fail, then her kidneys. Within a few days she was dead. They did deliver the baby at 23 and a half weeks, but she didn’t survive more than a few hours.

Emmie was already vulnerable and distraught and she went to those people looking for comfort and they turned on her so brutally that she was too terrified and ashamed to have a necessary medical procedure. That’s NOT pro-life. That’s not even anti-choice, because she didn’t have a choice, she NEEDED that abortion to save her life. That is pro-birth. Congrats, the baby was born. She lived for 2 hours and 48 minutes, the entire time in pain, but she was born. Mission accomplished. But now the baby’s dead, Emmie’s dead at only 28 years old, her husband is a widower, and her now 5 year old daughter gets to live the rest of her life without a mother.

Late-term abortions are almost always wanted pregnancies that are terminated because the life of the mother and/or the baby was in critical danger. The baby is either already dead, actively dying with no chance of recovery or the pregnancy was actively killing the mother. This is never a decision that is taken lightly. Furthermore, the current, brutal method of abortion was adopted because pro-lifers fought against the idea of a mother being allowed to deliver and grieve an intact fetus as a way to deter people from choosing abortion even when it is medically necessary.

Pro-lifers are not succeeding in saving lives by fighting late-term abortion. When a woman is denied a late-term abortion, the baby or the mother will almost certainly die anyway. What pro-lifers are succeeding in doing is making the process of grieving of lost child that much harder, with the possibility of adding the loss of a mother, daughter, partner and human being. When a person chooses a late-term abortion, it is never an easy decision. Usually they are forced to choose between saving their life or their baby's life, or between grieving now or spending weeks or months knowing they are going to lose their baby soon.

Late-term abortions make up only about 1.2 percent of all abortions, and 88 percent take place before 12 weeks, before the baby has developed a nervous system, when the fetus is hardly more complex than a tadpole. If you have a cat who kills mice and small birds, you cannot argue against early-term abortion. Most mammals are functionally identical at that stage of gestation. No one decides to randomly abort a pregnancy after several months of gestation. This is a decision that happens because it is medically necessary, and it is a horrible, life-changing event just as any child loss would be. Fighting for pro-life is only fighting against women who are already suffering the death of a child.

Being pro-choice does not mean I am pro-abortion. I am not a supporter of infant mortality, but as a nursing student who hopes to go into the NICU, I know that infant mortality is an inevitable and horrible fact of life, just as is all death. I am pro-choice. I am a supporter of allowing women to grieve in the best way for them, and no politician or social justice warrior can decide that for them.