Birth control became fully legal for women 10 years before I was born, in 1972. My mom took advantage of her new rights, and decided to have just one child. Me.

Her sisters, and my father’s sisters, were older than she was. They missed the window, and did not get this right. Dumb bad luck.

So instead, these women had kids and kids foisted upon them. Kids they weren’t planning on, kids they didn’t know how to raise. They were babies themselves, in their teens and 20s.

When their children grew up, emotionally neutered from neglect, some went to jail. Others died. Many became alcoholics, having watched their mothers cope in that way. A lot of my cousins hate their moms.

Like my own mother, I had just one child. And I work, just like my her. While she was not having other children, my mom went back to school, earned her MBA, and in true trickster fashion got a job working for a Nordic company (with an outpost in the U.S.) that offered badass retirement and healthcare benefits. Northern Europe, amiright.

I love my mom, and I love my child; I pride myself on our close relationships. But I know, deep, deep in my truthful soul, that were it not for birth control, she and I would probably have turned out just like her sisters. Robbed of autonomy and selfhood, curdled into bitterness and despair, escaping into a bottle or pills.

Sometimes, when I see these men on the right, the ones whose thinly veiled hatred of women comes out in pseudo-intellectual speak about the sanctity of the family, I wonder — were you raised by women like my mom’s sisters? My dad’s sisters?

Addicts trying to find a way out?

Are you really trying to restore family?

Because this is what breaks a family: a woman without rights.

Something I heard

say that has always stuck with me: when you’re raised without sufficient love, the next best route to securing your safety is power.

And I see all these men, hungry for power. My old neighbor works for Ted Cruz. He doesn’t have a good relationship with his mom. I know he craves safety, deep down. They all do.

But raised by women who didn’t have the rights, the time, or the joy to love them like they wanted, they now think that if they can just control women enough, future children will get the things they wanted. Things like —

Eye contact.

Long, silly walks.

Inside jokes that make no sense.

I can give this to my daughter, like my mom gave it to me, because I have an IUD. Period. All of these things require time. I can devote my time to her because the IUD puts a boundary around it.

Listen. Abortion is the issue today, at this moment. But abortion exists on a spectrum of a woman’s self-directed authorship of her own life. Pro-life doesn’t mean much when those babies are left to shrivel. Not because they had “bad” moms. But because their moms didn’t get a full shot at life.

A free woman, who becomes a mother, can water the soil of her child’s being. Taking away her options does not restore “family.” It just parches the soil, making men toil for power, but never finding love.