FOREWORD
Written by the founder and president of Di Angelo Publications (DAP) Sequoia Schmidt
The musky scent of smoke and pheromones lingered on Adam’s leather jacket. I pulled my head back from his shoulder as he brushed the hair from my eyes and, in the cramped music room of a performing arts high school on the outskirts of Sydney, at that exact moment, I knew I was in love. My inconsistent past had molded me to be walled—but at fifteen and full of fire—those walls burned down fast for Adam Wilson.
Blurred weeks turned to months—and Adam became a sense of familiarity in an otherwise unstable world. I had moved to Australia alone—spats of foster care mixed with loving but absentee parents resulted in my emancipation in the New Zealand court system. After being granted the opportunity of a scholarship at the Australian International Performing Arts High School. I moved to Sydney, where I would study hard, work nights at KFC, and begin to make a path for myself in the world.
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It wasn’t until after Adam and I split that I found out I was pregnant. Heartbroken by the recent break up, I struggled with whether or not I would tell him. So I wrote it on a note—those three little words no teenage boy ever wants to read— and it was passed in confidence from Sarah, to Katie, then Marie and finally to Adam.
Before I knew it, the principal of our small school of artists asked me to join him in his office. Due to the fact that I had no parents or legal guardians in the country, an office worker from the school had volunteered along with the principal to take me to the doctor to determine if I was, in fact, pregnant.
The lack of period for a few months, in addition to a positive blood test, indicated that I was most likely eleven weeks pregnant.
I didn’t want to get an abortion—no one ever does. However, I was not ready to bring a child into this world. I had no stability in my life; my pillar of stability had crumbled with Adam, and I was starting to act out in ways that scared those around me, including the principal of the school I was attending.
The stark white room, numbing sting of a bright light, and aftermath of emptiness is still burned into my mind.
Since then, I firmly support and believe in the legalization of abortion up to twenty two weeks. Primarily, this support hinges on freedom of choice… a female’s right to autonomy over her own body and her choice of whether or not she wants to bring a child into this world.
Like many, I first came across the video of Paxton Smith’s
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speech while scrolling through social media. Although my publishing firm’s headquarters still reside in Houston, I had been away from Texas for some time and did not realize the extent to which abortion rights were under attack. From the moment the video of Paxton’s powerful words ended, the message lingered in my mind. I pondered what my life might be like if I, at fifteen years old, had been living in Texas when I became pregnant. Under these new laws and having been well past the six weeks mark, my abortion would not have been legal. I contemplated where I would be now, with a fifteen-yearold child to care for, if that child did not wind up in foster care due to my negligence—a vicious cycle of my own upbringing. As my mind began to warp into a spiral of circumstances and decision, it all came back to the point of choice.
I contacted Paxton, as well as many of my colleagues and friends who I knew felt strongly about women’s reproductive rights. Together, they share their raw and poignant stories to create this anthology. As the owner of a small publishing firm, I am a strong believer in free independent press, and I knew that this was an opportunity to publish something powerful about another type of freedom - the freedom of choice. For, without that freedom of choice, my life would have taken me in another direction, a direction that would have most likely not included the creation of this publishing firm and, as a result, this book.
9 Foreword
ONE
paxton smith
Introduction
When I was seven years old, I was the definition of sexist. I used every ounce of my power to be seen as anything but a girl. I played rugby with my front yard neighbors, wore “boys’” clothes, and played on the local boys’ basketball team, even though I had to play with boys a year younger than me to participate. I viewed girls as weak. I was mean to the girls in my class and consistently excluded them, all the while refusing to acknowledge that I, myself, was one of them.
I look back on my seven-year-old self and wonder why I was like that. There’s a popular idea that kids start off as blank slates, clean minds ready to be molded into something unique and special. Any time a child feels hate for someone because of their demographic, then surely that must be taught. I don’t think anyone ever said to me, aside from my second-grade heartthrob crush, that women were
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innately inferior, but I believed that to be true with every ounce of my being.
Perhaps my belief stemmed from the fact that every time I play-wrestled with my front door neighbor, his mother would exclaim at him to take it easy on me because I was a girl. I was a frequent winner of the wrestling matches, so why was she trying to protect me and not her son?
Perhaps my belief came out of the fact that physical appearance was such a big deal to my mother. She spent hours in her bathroom every day fussing with her hair, putting on makeup to lounge in the house, and painting her nails. She talked endlessly about her nails and how beautifully red they were. She tried to make me look as pretty as her with fancy clothes. They were never what I wanted to wear, but it didn’t matter to her. It was the cuteness of my clothes that determined how others viewed me, not the content of my actions or character—choosing my own outfits and risking harsh judgment wasn’t an option in her eyes.
Perhaps my belief felt true because every time a teacher needed help moving something, they asked specifically for a big strong boy to help them. In the prepubescent state of a five- or six-year-old, my competence in chair-carrying was the same as any big strong boy in my grade, so how come the teacher didn’t ask for help from some big strong girl?
Maybe it was the difference in Christmas toys my brother and I received from distant family. I received clothing while
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he received Legos—something to build and be innovative with. Maybe it was because the biggest insult my peers could ever come up with was comparing someone to a girl. Maybe it was because everyone assumed that I liked being called cute, that I liked sparkly things, that I needed to be protected all the time, while my male counterparts faced no such treatment.
In every part of life, seemingly harmless stereotypes were created and used to separate the boys from the girls. The key differentiators between the genders, however, were levels of competence and quality of appearance. Looking back now, maybe I wasn’t sexist, but instead, I was antieverything associated with being a girl.
At a young age, I decided that if I could distance myself as much as possible from being a woman, then the world wouldn’t treat me like one. I didn’t want people to see me as weak, incompetent, or unable to handle myself, so I decided to “be” a boy in all the ways I thought possible. I acted like one, dressed like one, and only hung out with boys. As puberty hit, however, I could no longer avoid being treated like a girl. My body developed and my outward appearance changed. The world began to see me as a woman; I begrudgingly began to see myself as one, too. I had to acknowledge that the treatment I faced as a child would become my reality. It wasn’t a pretty prospect.
After so much time spent pushing away my identity and managing to be treated like a young man by my peers and
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their parents, puberty and the transition to a new school was the first time in a long time that I experienced the microaggressions that came from being a woman. They were fresh in my mind and reinvigorated my anger with womanhood. However, this time my anger wasn’t directed at women; my anger was directed at the people who treated women with the same lack of respect normally given to a rambling five-year-old.
My genitals don’t make me any less competent or human, but for some reason, societal behavior does not always reflect that. Maybe that perceived drop-off in the capabilities of women is why women’s voices are the ones often left out, ignored in the world of politics, and ignored in the argument for basic human rights. Maybe it is these sexist structures that are cemented into the minds of children as they grow up, that influence adults into seeing a woman as needy, incapable of large decision-making, or untrustworthy when it comes to handling themselves. There were only a couple of weeks left until school was over for the summer and I would graduate high school. I was biding my time in government class as the teacher droned on in a long-winded spiel. Most of the students were distracted, fiddling around with laptops, books, phones, anything under the sun. My attention, like theirs, was slipping. Then he mentioned abortion. I looked up from my desk and listened intently.
“I want you guys to look at these bills on Google
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Classroom and write down whether you agree with them or not, and whether you would change anything about them.”
The teacher had a habit of reading the assignment out loud for the class and essentially doing the work for us, so I continued to listen as he explained the bills.
“The Heartbeat Act is being passed with the intention of stopping abortions after a detectable heartbeat is found, which can be as early as six weeks. Although, there is some scientific evidence to say that it’s not an actual heartbeat, it’s just an electrical pulse from the mother…” With vague disinterest, I began to work on the assignment. I don’t think it had quite hit me in that moment that this bill was real and was being proposed to be put into law.
During my time in high school, abortion had been protected under the Constitution for almost fifty years. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court had ruled that abortion was legal, although restrictions could be passed once the fetus was viable; at that point, it would be up to the states to decide whether or not to ban abortions (with exceptions to protect the life or health of the woman).
Within the ten years before Roe v. Wade, a number of other laws were passed and cases won, guaranteeing women basic rights that men already had. They were finally free from pay discrimination and employment opportunity discrimination, were allowed to use/access contraceptives (regardless of marital status), and were granted equal access to educational and athletic public resources.
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When this wave of rights became accessible to women, many people were deeply disturbed. There was worry that if women could access the same opportunities as men, then the groundwork of society would be uprooted. No one would have children, and if they did, the children wouldn’t be cared for because women would be working. Houses would grow dirty, meals would remain uncooked, and the decision-makers of the time (men) would become distressed and unable to carry out their crucial roles in society. It’s easy to see now how heavily flawed that logic is, but at the time, equality was something many people dreaded. Given the great lengths to which society has come since then, it was hard for me to believe that a law was now being proposed that would take women back to those dark days of inequality. It felt dystopian; it couldn’t be possible. How was it possible that in America, land of the free, a person’s right to decide whether or not to have a child could be taken away from them? Having a child is a life-changing decision, so how was it possible that that decision could be taken out of the hands of millions of Americans? The bill violates the most basic principles of what America claims to stand for: freedom and equality. It took nothing more than common sense to know that that bill would not be signed into law.
About a week later, my government teacher mentioned in passing that the bill had, in fact, been signed into law. There was almost no reaction to the news. The room had
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its usual low hum, except for a girl making a loud remark across the room.
“Ugh, why?”
If my thoughts could be summed up into a concise and “school appropriate” statement, that might be it.
I went home that day and did my own research on the bill. I read article after article, watched the video of Abbott signing the bill—observably staged in a room full of almost entirely white men—and sat in silence on my bed.
A day or two later, I left class to go sit in the relatively quiet band hall and work on an upcoming psychology essay. I racked my brain as I tried to type out the essay, but no words came to my mind that fit the context of the assignment. Instead, on repeat, my brain played out its thoughts on the bill.
I was going to college soon. For the first time, I would have total freedom—or I was supposed to. If every precaution failed, if every birth control failed, if I got raped and was faced with an unplanned pregnancy, then my freedom would be stripped from me. I would be forced to have a child at the will of a stranger regardless of whether I wanted to, regardless of whether I could handle it, regardless of the way it would affect the rest of my life…the rest of my future. The future that I had worked tirelessly toward. The future that I would be the one to live. I was terrified—furious. I felt subhuman. My government that had promised to protect my rights was instead taking them
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out of my hands, leaving my opinion about having kids as relevant as a show dog’s.
I sat in silence, wondering what an eighteen-year-old high school student, someone who, until a few months ago, wasn’t even allowed to sign their own field trip note, could do about a situation like this. And then it hit me.
I had known for quite some time that I would be valedictorian. My dad and others had told me that my valedictorian speech at graduation would follow me for the rest of my life; it would be what people remembered me by. As fantastical as I thought their claims were, they reassured me of the impact any words I shared that day might have. Using their line of reasoning, if I had the opportunity to talk about anything on that stage that might be remembered forever, then the only thing I wanted to talk about was the burked reality of my home’s pending abortion ban.
I opened a Google Doc and a projectile stream of word vomit flooded the screen as I began recording my thoughts. It was during that process that the majority of my speech was laid out in front of me. In fragmented little bits, my thoughts sat on the doc, and I knew deep down that those words would be the speech I gave.
A couple of days later, the deadline to send in my valedictorian speech for school approval arrived. I had two options: I could send in my speech centering around the abortion bill, or I could send in the speech I had originally intended to give at graduation. I worried that if I sent in
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the speech about the bill, it would not get approved. I had heard stories before about the school district cutting off valedictorians’ microphones for going off script; if I gave the address they’d said “No” to, they would immediately know to cut my microphone. I couldn’t take that chance. I needed to say as much as I could in the time they would let me speak.
To do that, I needed to take them by surprise, so I pulled up my original valedictorian speech that I had spent the past two weeks writing. It talked about content and media. It was lengthy. In fact, I had so much to talk about in that speech that after weeks of putting it together, I still could not come up with an ending. Nevertheless, if I wanted to give my speech about the Heartbeat Act, the content speech would have to be the one sent in for approval. I looked at the page, knowing I couldn’t turn it in unfinished, so I spat out the most cliché ending possible and tacked it onto the end, figuring most valedictory addresses are cliché anyway. Then I clicked the “send” button.
I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. I kept my speech a secret, even from my friends. While it wasn’t likely, it was possible that if I told them what I was planning, the news might spread like the news of a crush does—one person’s secret that becomes everyone’s.
I was fully aware of how controversial my words would be. I lived in Texas. I knew that in giving the speech, I would be burning bridges with people who I considered friends, mentors even. I worried about the hate mail I might receive,
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the revocation of scholarships I had worked tirelessly to get. At one point, I wondered: was graduation really the time and place for something like that? If I decided to make the speech, then, on an incredibly important day for graduates and their families, everyone would be forced to listen to me talk about something they may not agree with… Would I really be doing the right thing?
A thought kept screaming at me in contrast to that: How can I be expected to ignore the fact that my control over my future is being taken from me on a day meant to celebrate my movement into a free future? My human rights are under attack; why should I be silent about that for the comfort of others? The removal of rights is ugly and gut-wrenching. If I upset someone that day, then the only thing they’d be upset about was my plea for equality, to be treated as a human.
I needed to reach the people who my speech would upset. I needed to reach the people who didn’t care about my reproductive rights. I needed to reach the people who didn’t think I deserved to have them. I needed them to feel my pain, my hurt, my fear, my anger. I needed them to know how I felt, because even if I changed no one’s mind, my pain would sit on their hearts forever. If nothing changed, at least I’d be heard by the people who’d never listened. They could no longer sit comfortably knowing what had been taken from me. Every risk, every personal loss from giving the speech would be worth it.
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