Before we get started, I have something I need to say.

I've been writing, rewriting, and deleting what I'm about to share,

and it's not because I'm ashamed.

It's because this society believes there is a side to take over whether women and black and brown people should have agency over our bodies.

And as an American journalist, there's this imagined neutral space I'm supposed to sit in,

even though the rules to this profession were created by men, white men, based on what and whom they deemed important.

Think about that for a moment,

the erasure that needs to happen for a black woman like me

to sit in that neutral space.

I had an abortion when I was 22,

six months from college graduation and $20,000 in student loan debt,

paying for an education my family could not afford.

I made the mistake of getting pregnant,

a mistake I'd been told my entire life not to make.

That other thing my family could not bear or afford, another single mother with a long list of dreams deferred.

If I'm really still I can feel myself back in Columbia, Missouri at that abortion

clinic on that table minutes away from what felt like a shackle being removed.

I was so broke during that time.

I considered all those barbaric things I'd read about women doing

before Roe versus Wade,

throwing myself down the stairs, punching myself in the stomach,

taking a bunch of pills. Some people who loved me scraped up enough money to help me pay.

...