*Please note this is an extra post for the week, the main post which went up yesterday about Hannah will follow below this one

A few weeks ago, I was sitting with my sister in a VUU sermon being given by their then interim minister, Rev. Wooden, and he clearly and concisely articulated a sentiment I have expressed before: “are you pro-life, or pro-birth?”

Today Roe v. Wade was struck down, and this is, as I have stated before, a very controversial subject. While I always respect the sanctity of life, I recognize there are some very difficult circumstances people can find themselves in. So these days, I generally don’t take any official position other than choosing to sit in non-judgment. But sometimes, I think someone still needs to ask hard questions and listen to what others might have to say about it, even if it doesn’t feel easy or pleasant in the moment.

So I ask each of you to think about Reverend Wooden’s question: “are you pro-life, or pro-birth?”

What follows is my own take on this question which asks us to dig deep within ourselves and our collective social views. As I have stated before, we never planned on being in our current position in regards to having a child with significant developmental and behavioral challenges. The reason the entire month of May, a month which sees several special occasions including our marriage anniversary, saw me posting about therapy related celebrations is because when you are the parents of a loved one with Tony’s level of challenges, unless you are able or willing to place them in a facility, your entire life becomes care and therapy and nothing can be celebrated in the manner our American culture finds normative. On my birthday, I still did a full day of therapy. On our anniversary, I still did a full day of therapy. You get the idea.

As I have stated many times, there were and continue sometimes to be challenges in finding babysitters for our son. I have even had people I never approached to babysit come up to me and say things like “don’t ever ask me to babysit. I can’t babysit him. I can come over and sit and talk to you while you fold laundry or clean, but I just can’t babysit him.” If you are reading this and you recognize this statement, please know that I love you and I understand this is hard and would never want or ask someone to step into a situation they feel like they can’t personally handle. It’s OK for you not to be able to handle this. Even though the limited amount of support we have had much of the time has not been anything I would wish on another, it’s not good for Tony or you to be put in a situation you feel incapable of handling and I absolutely honor that.

However, what most people were seeing when they said something like that to me was usually only a fraction of the challenges. So what I would want anyone who feels like they couldn’t even handle stepping into my proverbial shoes for an hour to think about is how fair is it for us to dictate and mandate motherhood to someone who is confident they’re not up to an entire lifetime of this?

For me, I don’t want anyone to twist my position into anything it is not. If I had been pregnant with Tony, and genetic testing had been done, and I had been given the option to terminate the pregnancy because of his genetic disorders I would not have done so. But what I do has required me to give up virtually everything about my own wants and dreams- his quality of life has been entirely dependent on what I/we have been able and/or willing to sacrifice (even in the face of chronic illness) to make his therapy programs and opportunities possible. What our family has and hasn’t been able to afford.

So what quality of life do we as a society give an individual with significant disabilities if we force their unwilling mother to carry them forward into the world? Are we providing her and her family adequate support? Or are we saying “don’t ever ask me to help” and then looking away at what unfolds in the absence of sufficient supports? Are we providing adequate, humane, affordable housing and care options for disabled individuals whose families cannot take care of them, or is there a dramatically insufficient amount of all the above, resulting in individuals with disabilities quietly being pushed out into the streets or eventually landing in the prison systems? Are we committed to not just ensuring a person comes into the world alive, but to giving them any kind of quality of life that involves love, community, and opportunities for advancing to the best that they are capable of…or are we consistently under-funding services for the developmentally disabled (because it would require more of us in taxes) in ways that create therapist and facility shortages?

The road I walk is hard. If you don’t think that, re-read all of my posts and then let it sink in that they represent only a fraction of what has been going on. So even though I would have chosen every time to carry Tony to term and moved forward as I am even if I had been his birth mom, I will absolutely not sit in judgment on a person who looks at all of this and says to themselves “I know I can’t do that,” and painful as it might be for me to think about for myself personally, I’d want their rights to make that choice for themselves protected. Each and every one of you knows the depth of the love I have for our son, but most people I have ever known wouldn’t want to adopt a baby who was already known to have his level of challenges. We’d be collectively lying to ourselves if we suggest otherwise.

What are then the moral issues in requiring someone to be born into circumstances that only increase their risk for abuse, neglect, or worse?

So I ask again, as Rev. Wooden did: Are we actually fully pro-life… or are we just pro-birth?