'Choice' by Lisa B. Thompson

Choice

by Lisa B. Thompson | @DrLisaBThompson | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

This is the moment that my generation feared and fought against becoming a reality. As a Black feminist scholar and artist who often examines sexuality and Black motherhood, I know what the end of Roe means for this country. There is a special place in my heart for people and organizations that center reproductive choice, reproductive justice, and reproductive care. I’m grateful for their willingness to lobby, educate, and strategize. Their work allowed me to become a mother when it was best for me and my child. I want that for everyone.

 

I’m a daughter of a pre-Roe Black southern migrant. My late mother’s entire life was shaped by a lack of reproductive freedom. I’ll never forget my her laughing as she told me that all of her beloved children–me and my siblings–were “mistakes.” My mother and father had 4 children during their marriage. The oldest and the youngest are 14 years apart. I joke that I was their “old my Gawd child,” a baby who arrived at the worst time. At the start of middle-age, she thought she was finally free to go back to school, to become a professional, and maybe have time to take up hobbies—she loved the arts, gardening, reading and baking. She desperately wanted to define herself beyond the role of wife and mother, but here I came along.

 

When I started elementary school, she entered the workforce in earnest and eventually returned to college, but she never had the opportunity to truly pursue her dreams. Despite being unfulfilled, my mother never made me feel unwanted, in fact just the opposite. I always felt deeply cherished and supported. I suspect that she was living through me. As a believer in reproductive freedom, I’m fine if she had made the decision, could have made the decision, not to continue with the pregnancy that produced me. In my opinion that’s unconditional love.

 

I often imagine what my mother and her contemporaries could have made of their lives if they could have planned their entry into motherhood like I did or chose not to become mothers at all like so many of my friends. Reliable contraceptives, and abortion gave my generation that freedom. We built careers and families in ways our mothers could never imagine. I never took my reproductive freedom for granted nor did my friends. We knew the price of unfreedom whenever our mothers looked longingly at the degrees, careers and other prizes we were able to obtain that often stood beyond their reach.

 

As a university professor I’m afraid to think about what will happen to the brilliant and ambitious people that enter my classrooms every year with dreams of their own. How will this Supreme Court’s ruling shape their lives? Will it keep others from ever making it into a college classroom? The answer chills my soul, but also gives me the determination to fight for their reproductive freedom like the women of my mother’s and grandmother’s generation did for mine. I believe we will triumph just like those bold and tenacious women did. We must. Our lives and the future depend on it.

 

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Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor African and African Diaspora Studies and Advisor to the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts for Faculty Mentoring and Support at the University of Texas, Austin. Her latest play is The Mamalogues.