We've all seen those movies where there's a gut wrenching decision a family member has to make -- there's a problem in child birth, they can only save the mother or the child.
The family member is typically a man, and he typically chooses the child (it's a more interesting origin story) as if he had to make a snap decision. There's rarely a mention of the discussions that surely happened, where the pregnant woman would have made her desires known--in which scenarios should the baby be prioritized?
This sort of erasure of women's active participation in their own lives normalizes old white men in a marble capitol building room forcing all women to give birth by fiat. For this and many other reasons I am writing a letter a day until we end forced birth by writing reproductive freedom into law.
