Dear Mr President,
After seeing you sign the Anti-Abortion Executive Order on Monday, while all your boys all watched over, I was stunned to silence from seeing such an archaic act being carried out in 2017.
I get that it's tradition with you presidents, that "The policy is rescinded and reinstated based on which party is in power. President Bill Clinton did away with it, President George W. Bush put it back and then President Barack Obama rescinded it again when he took office" (that is some power struggle between boys), but I'm totally gobsmacked that you chose to stay so defiant in following this particular tradition but not the one where you let your office run your Twitter account (as all previous presidents did). Maybe if you had of, you wouldn't be neck deep in Twitter beef right now? How is your Twitter account more worthy of fight than the Anti- Abortion order?
Mr President, I feel we need to have a little chat about abortion.
You see, abortion isn't just for careless teens, or girls with loose morals who put it around too much.
It's also for women and girls who have been raped or sexually abused and impregnated against their will by strangers.
It's for women who aren't in a stable enough position themselves to raise a child, either through disability, mental health or poverty.
It's for white middle class, middle aged women who get caught out whilst having an affair and who decide on abortion rather than blowing apart two families brought on by their sheer stupidity, just for fun, living in the moment mistake. Surely you can relate to that situation? What would you choose should you have found yourself on the receiving end of such a dilemma? Another mini Trump or a secret abortion where all your sordid secrets can be swept under the carpet and you can go on to win the presidency?
But the abortion story I really want you to hear is one that is closet to me.
It's a woman who spent her whole life being told by her own mother "you're only here because I don't believe in abortion".
She had spent her whole life knowing she was unwanted and only born at all due to her mother's simplistic moral code.
She spent her whole life wishing she'd have been aborted, rather than raised so openly as an unplanned, unloved, resented accident.
This woman got married, had kids, got divorced, ended up in an abusive relationship and pregnant, an accident, totally unplanned.
And so she found herself having to make the no win decision about whether to abort, the whole time her mother's message ringing loud in her ears.
Should she bring a child into a relationship where there was abuse just because 'she didn't believe in abortion'? Is that the best thing for her to do? She was already keeping the abuse secret from her family and her kids, how could she choose to inflict this life of secrecy and pain on an innocent child who never asked to be born?
A child who would grow up to find out that it's own father stood in a court of law and pleaded guilty to beating its mother?
Nobody deserves to be brought into that. Not while women have 'choice'.
So she booked to see the GP, a man, she sat and poured out her story and tried desperately to justify her decision, whilst trying to hide her abuse, her internal and external bruises. He sat back listening and then he said "I can't refer you for abortion as I feel abortion is ethically wrong"
She was defeated, she went home, she sobbed, she felt even more trapped.
She booked to see another GP, another man, she sat and poured out her story and tried desperately to justify her decision, whilst trying desperately to hide her abuse, her internal and external bruises once again. He sat back listening and then he said "I can't refer you for abortion as I don't agree with abortion on religious grounds"
She once again went home, she sobbed even harder, she felt even more alone.
She would not bring a child into this situation; she would not inflict her lifetime of hurt on another child. She knew what she needed to do.
She got herself an overdraft to cover a private abortion, she took herself and her gruby secret(s) to the clinic and walked herself through protesters and placards that shouted 'murderer', she took that hit and went inside.
Once inside when she was called for her turn, she sobbed so hard, deep guttural cries of not wanting to go through with it but feeling she had to.
Still alone, still trapped and now publicly judged and in debt.
She was sedated, a luxury only offered to the most distressed, and the abortion was carried out.
She didn't celebrate, she didn't feel free, and she would never be free of the choice she made.
ALL of this heartbreak and judgement, fear and loneliness, self-loathing and extra finical burden could have all been so different if men like you Mr Trump understood the pain of being women who is faced with making life changing decisions. Who stood besides us and had our well being at the forefront of your mind.
But just like the GPs that turned her away, you will never know the truth about abortion and why women chose to do it, and that's simply because, luckily for you, you only have to 'grab her by the pussy' and put the baby in, after that it's all on us right?
Women deserve to have autonomy over their own bodies in EVERY sense of the word, and freedom of choice should be available to ALL women, not signed away in some game of historical hierarchy and never assumed it was a flippant act by a nasty girl.