CHOICE

When I was a kid there was a rumor that my Tia Teresa (the only sister my Father has) was able to have kids but didn't get a period. Ever. I used to pray that whatever that gene was, that I had it. It sounded awesome. Not until the year that I turned 27, until after writing the first draft of this piece, did my sister and then my cousin, my Tia's daughter, tell me that my Tia had been forcefully sterilized before the age of 30. A woman who read at about a 1st grade level until she was 40 was robbed of her choice. My Tia Theresa, like my Tia Lita, has epilepsy. Unlike Lita her reproductive right was stolen in the 1970's not the 1930's and not because she has epilepsy but because she was poor.

My father is one of 7 children (that lived, there were others that passed at birth or early in life). He's the baby. My grandfather, from all accounts I’ve ever heard, was not around while my father was growing up. I acknowledge that this experience was different for my uncles and aunt and they had more positive relationships with Jesus Juarez, Sr. I have never heard anything good about him from anyone. He died the year before i was born and my father did not attend his funeral.
I did grow up hearing of another man, Marcelo Herrera, the man my brother is named after and my Tia Lita's husband. Marcelo who was practically my father’s father, who loved Lita at a time when she was “sick” and no one really understood what was wrong with her. Marcelo who helped raise his wife’s sister’s children as his own when their father wasn’t around. You see, there were times when my grandmother, La Santa Ramona Juarez de Padilla could not care for her children alone so her sister, Lita, and her husband Marcelo, took them in and they lived together in a one bedroom home, with an outhouse, in Roswell, NM.

I heard lots of great stories about Lita growing up. She hated English and wouldn’t allow it to be spoken in her house. She said it sounded like dogs barking. So, in a time in New Mexico history when children were PHYSICALLY PUNISHED for speaking Spanish in school, my Dad and Tio’s HAD to speak Spanish at home. She would cook for all 9+ of them on a little wood burning stove and make the best tortillas and café. She thought indoor plumbing was gross and refused to put a toilet in the house.

She also couldn’t have children. When I was a young woman I asked my father why Lita and Marcelo had no children, why had he named my younger brother Marcelino Herrera after Marcelo, and he told me it was because she couldn’t have children. You see Lita had epilepsy, something that runs in my family, and at that time women who were “disabled”, “retarded”, or “insane” were FORCEFULLY STERILIZED, and the epilepsy made her all three of those things. So when she was a young woman a doctor, a medical professional, TOOK HER CHOICE AWAY. Lita and Marcelo didn’t have children not because they couldn’t afford them, didn’t want them, or couldn’t care for them, to the contrary, they cared for many children. Lita never got the chance to decide whether or not she wanted to have children, she was, very literally, stripped of that right.

As a young woman I was horrified to learn this. That someone with more education and power took advantage of my Tia and took her UTERUS. And even more horrified when I learned later in life about the campaigns against Puerto Rican women, both on the island and in the States, and Native women in the 60’s and 70’s that essentially did the same things. Hundreds of thousands of Native and Puerto Rican women were sterilized, many of them without knowledge or consent or with the belief that the process was reversible.

The older I get the more passionate I become about retaining control over my body and allowing other women the same opportunity to do so. This is why I attended the Women’s March in DC in 2004. This is why I was in the Vagina Monologues in college and that experience inspired me to direct a production for 3 years while in law school. This is why I work with victims of domestic violence. To help them regain power and control over themselves.

I gave birth to my first son at 21, then the second one at 24, and the third one at 25. Some older woman once told me that my feelings about abortion, about Choice, would change once I held my first child. When I got pregnant with my first child I was in my last year of college, I had just applied to law schools, my boyfriend at the time had two children, was in the middle of a messy divorce and lived across the country. We discussed it and having a child didn't make any sense, it wasn't logical. I sat in the lobby of Planned Parenthood waiting to be called back and decided at that moment that I was going to have that baby. I walked out and my son has been changing my life ever since that moment. Since the birth of my first son I've only fought harder, believed stronger and wanted better. I directed and acted in 2 productions of the Vagina Monologues while pregnant with two different children! I try and teach my children about the control they have over their own bodies. As they age I try and show them respect over their choices by asking them for kisses or hugs, not by taking them.

Choice to me is not just about abortion. It's about all the choices. It’s about the choice to be able to conceive children at all. The choice to keep my body intact and not have a government tell me when I should or should not be allowed to carry a child or not carry a child. For marginalized women in this country the issue of choice is not as simple as the right to abortion because this government practiced involuntary hysterectomies on so many of our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, elders, and Tia’s.

A woman’s right to choose goes both ways. Is the right to choose to continue a pregnancy but it is also the right to choose to get pregnant in the first place. I will fight for a woman’s right to choose until the day that I die. I will fight for every woman I’ve loved who’s been abused by a man and had to make the hardest decision she’s ever had to, choosing to continue with a pregnancy and the abusive relationship or not. I will fight for every girl who has been raped or molested and wound up pregnant and has to choose between keeping that baby or living that trauma over again every single day. I will fight for my Tia's and the choices they never got.