Life Announcement + Rant

I don’t tend to post much personal stuff here, but this is a development that deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. If you know me IRL or follow me on Twitter, you probably saw the announcement a while back – I’m pregnant!

It’s been a long road to get here. In May 2021, I was diagnosed with infertility. We’d already been trying for about a year (since getting married in 2020) and no luck. After some diagnostic workup, we found out that I can’t (safely) get pregnant the natural way, due to blockages in my tubes. No clue how that happened, but armed with the knowledge of what was wrong, we were able to move forward with IVF. There were some bumps along the way – an ectopic pregnancy and a failed egg retrieval cycle – but we’re finally here.

I think it’s important to be open and honest about fertility struggles, as it’s definitely more common than many people think. And I know I’m not alone – there are at least three other people in my social circle who have also struggled with fertility and shared their journeys in the last two years.

Plus, it’s responsible for my lack of writing lately – between mental health struggles trying to manage stress and all kinds of medications messing with me, I’ve hardly been able to write anything at all. My priorities have been elsewhere, and they’ll likely continue to be elsewhere for a long while (no matter how much writing I hope/think I’ll get done during my maternity leave).

I don’t want to get political about it, but as I’m writing this, the news that Roe v Wade was overturned just came across my screen, and I’d like to make it clear that abortion is healthcare. I mentioned that I had an ectopic pregnancy. For those that don’t know, ectopic pregnancies are NOT salvageable. The embryo implants in a spot where it CANNOT survive. If left untreated, ectopic pregnancies can kill the pregnant person. The treatment is an abortion. It was either that, or I could have died or been left with irreparable damage and no child anyway – not very pro-life if you ask me.

Now let’s take it a step further. Overturning Roe v Wade doesn’t just affect access to abortion, it’ll have repercussions for those of us who have undergone fertility treatments. IVF, more often than not, involves discarding embryos – aka abortion. Anyone who thinks “oh, but they only target abortion when the embryo is already in the body” is naive, short-sighted, and making it obvious that it was never about saving the lives of babies. The overturning of Roe v Wade is about controlling the female body, and sending us all back to a time where we were either pregnant and barefoot or dying from pregnancy-related complications.

If you can’t tell, the tone of this has quickly gone from being happy to announce my pregnancy, to being furious at how this will affect not just my future, but the future of anyone born with a female reproductive system and the thousands of unwanted children who will certainly suffer as a result. Because let’s be real – once the kids are born, the same people who overturned Roe v Wade don’t give a fuck about what happens to them.

I’m infuriated, and anyone with an ounce of decency and common sense should feel the same.

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