Response: "What Does Pro-Choice Mean to You?"

I found Allison Crews' essay "And So I Choose" in Listen Up to be resoundingly powerful. Her honest and intense narrative paints an excessively clear portrait of her life as a young girl committed by her mother to the anti-abortion cause juxtaposed with her own experience of pregnancy as a teen and juxtaposed yet again with her pro-choice work as an adult. The emotional toll of her childhood experiences on the front lines of the anti-abortion cause in her town so clearly haunts her for the rest of her life.
We all need a diverse array of experiences in order to shape our opinions and inform our perspectives on any issue. That said, I think exposure like that of Crews to a very fundamentalist and extreme perspective like that of her mother and her pro-life friends has the opposite effect of open-mindedness: intolerance. This intolerance eventually leads one to a moment in their lives where they are forced to choose between something that was ingrained in them at a young age, something they are supposed to consider cardinal to who they are, and something that they now care very much about.
Although Crews' experiences as a young girl shaped her and influenced her to eventually debate both the abortion and adoption of her child and, ultimately, to naturally birth her son and raise him as her own, her pregnancy was all-the-more difficult because of the extremist notions of her family. As an adult, however, it seems as though Crews has channeled the impositions of her past to capitalize on the human and civil rights of women.
She reminds her readers that women were not always afforded the rights we have now. She also reminds us that these rights are whatever we make of them. To be pro-choice, she says, "means being supportive of any reproductive choice a woman makes for herself. Women, of any age, in any social situation, have the right to bear children" (148), but women also have the right to choose not to. Crews says, "Our bodies are our own, our futures ours to mold. No one should be allowed to interfere with them. Whatever our reproductive choices, nobody can ever deny us our right to them. And this is what being pro-choice means to me" (149). Our bodies are ours to mold and do with them what we want. That is something beautiful about being a woman that is often considered as a burden.