Dear Everyone: Stop using my dead daughter as a political prop

I'm tired of the left and the right treating dead babies and abortions for medical reasons as political tools.

When I was 5 1/2 months pregnant, I sat in an OB’s office and got the terrible news. Early in development, a single gene had encoded incorrectly, causing my daughter’s development to go haywire.

1 in 62,000 babies, the OB told me.

Rare things aren’t rare when they happen to you.

I listened to all the things that were wrong with her, all the ways she would suffer. I felt my dreams for her future and mine die. I wondered what would happen to my 3-year-old, how she would cope.

Only one thing was certain about my baby's future.

She would die.

One way or another, she would die.

And I had a choice to make about how.

The choice I made is much less relevant than the fact that I had the ability to make it.

But now, thousands of parents across the country no longer have that choice. Or they have to get approval for their choice from a doctor, judge, or police officer who doesn’t know their child, doesn’t love their child.

Thousands of women will be told, sorry, you don’t love your baby if you don’t want her to suffer.

Sorry, you’re going to have to risk death to give birth to death.

People love to talk about us. The moms who had to decide whether to carry our babies to term, desperately hoping for a single living moment with them, only to watch them die, or to have an abortion before our babies could know suffering.

My daughter died.

A lot of people like to use softer terms like passed away, to make it easier for them to talk about it.

The loss will never be softer for me. Sometimes I wake up, and for just a moment I can still feel Ember here before I realize that she is gone. I feel like I am suffocating when that happens.

That’s true for those of us who had a late abortion.

It’s those of us who carried the baby and had a stillbirth.

It’s true for those of us who got to hold our living baby for a few moments as they took their last breaths.

The only person equipped to make decisions about these babies is the person carrying them. The person who loves them, who knows the risks. The person who will bear the weight of the suffering, who will have to continue living after the baby dies. The person who, in a grossly unjust for-profit medical system, will one way or the other have to pay money for the privilege of watching their baby die.

It is sacrilege to suggest that a politician is better equipped to decide what should happen to my children than I am.

When my daughter died, she almost took me with her. I suffered a catastrophic postpartum hemorrhage. My story is not unique, because Georgia has the worst maternal mortality rate in the United States, which in turn has the worst maternal mortality rate in the wealthy world.

Shitty care is normal.

Losing a child is a lonely experience. It subjects you to callous, cruel judgments from people who think you should get over it, who think you should pretend your baby never existed.

The lack of support is stunning. The silence is deafening.

So I guess it’s unsurprising that our culture of cruelty wants to make things even worse, by telling loving mothers like me that we are so incompetent, so cold and callous, so disconnected from our children, that men who have never called forth life, men who have never brought a baby earthside in pain and fear and courage, who have never faced death while creating life, are more equipped to decide what is best for our children than we are.

But you don’t get to talk about how much you love babies, and how much you want disabled babies to take a few breaths earthside before suffocating to death, or before having 25 surgeries and eventually dying anyway, if you’re not already supporting real, living, disabled people.

Do you listen to the disability rights community?

Do you support additional funding for disability services, everywhere, at every level?

Do you call out ableism?

Do you actively lobby your representatives to ensure that the parents of disabled children have paid leave, support, free health care, and access to every service they could possibly need?

Do you believe in accepting kids no matter who they are?

Because if not, you need to stop talking about my dead daughter, stop telling mothers facing an agonizing decision what to do, and start working to help living, breathing children.

I am tired of people who care nothing for my daughter’s life treating her as a prop, pretending they care so very much about her life.

I’ve seen how they treat us after our babies die.

I’ve seen how the Catholic church refuses to baptize stillborn babies.

How pro-lifers mock grieving mothers or insult their dead children.

How everyone slinks away from those of us who have lost babies.

There is no culture of life on the far right. They don’t care about us or our babies—when we’re pregnant, when we’re birthing, when we’re making the worst decisions of our lives, when our babies are dying, when our babies are living.

I can feel my friends on the left getting on their high horse already.

But I want to say the same thing to you, too:

Stop using my daughter as a prop.

You, too, care little about the suffering of mothers in ordinary times. There’s been a maternal mortality crisis in this country for years, and the mainstream liberal movement only ever discovers it when it’s using it as a political fundraising tool.

I watched people on the left disregard me in the wake of my loss, only to later cite stories like mine in support of abortion.

Acting like they care.

Acting like they’re deeply invested in our suffering.

They’re not.

I’ve seen people on the left refer to stillbirths or late terminations to save the mother’s lives as “pregnancies the mother wished turned out differently.”

I had someone on my Facebook page tell me that my daughter wasn’t actually my baby at all, and that I just “wish she had been.”

I’ve watched a local abortion clinic repeatedly behave in unkind and abusive ways to women terminating wanted pregnancies, only to turn around and yammer on about their compassion and their support for grieving families as a fundraising tool.

We are not people to those on the left, either.

No one talking about abortion seems to understand that they are talking about people.

People cared more when my dog died than when my daughter did.

We are completely alone in these decisions, and in the suffering they cause. People do not show up for us if we give birth to a baby who dies. People do not show up for us if we choose to humanely end the life of a baby whose death is inevitable.

So let us make these decisions in peace, in privacy, and without being held up as a prop when it is convenient to you.

Her name was Ember (a low burning spark that can burn out of control) Lucy (bringer of light). Keep her name and her story out of your mouth unless you are prepared to honor her as someone who mattered.

That begins with honoring her mother.

With trusting her mother as the one and only person equipped to make decisions about the body that was simultaneously hers and mine.

I asked Ember Lucy if she wanted to be born. She gave me an answer.

She didn’t give her answer to anyone else.