I will tell you what I know of the way silence grows roots inside of a person, until all that is left is a brutal, crushing vacancy where a voice ought to be.
I was 17 when I was raped by a classmate. He was someone I knew, someone I trusted, but in the end, none of that mattered. I would not find out until eight months later that I was pregnant as a result of the assault. My daughter, Zoe, would grow inside of me with a fatal congenital birth defect that took away her ability to think, or emote, or connect to the world in all the fundamental ways that make a life worth living.
I was forced to give birth to the child of this rape, always connected in some way to the man who took so much from me. I lived in Alabama, which this week welcomed a draconian new abortion law, but the state’s politicians have never borne any ethical compunctions about controlling women and subverting their agency.
To them, we are collateral in a game of politics, and the suffering they inflict matters very little ― if at all ― to them. They have no interest in perspective or stories like my own, but I must speak ― or else the woman behind me might not. Read more
