Lately we have heard the message that our daughters have fewer rights than we did. That’s a jarringly frightening notion as many women like me were not empowered to make decisions about our own bodies coming out of a deeply evangelical controlling culture of purity and shame.
The reproductive freedom law may have been in the books, yet our eyes were deliberately shielded by invisible handmaid-like bonnets intended to make us likeable reproductive wives and mothers. Back then, I had little knowledge of abortion and believed what I was taught, that it was a sin.
Nonetheless, I stubbornly married the man I wanted to. I wrote and designed my own wedding ceremony thanks to a pastor who encouraged my freedom and calling for ministry. Later I went to seminary and gradually came to learn how God calls all people, of all gender identities and sexualities. I’m grateful for my education, formal and informal. Returning for a doctorate cemented the desire of discovery for my theology to grow and change, and my church had no capacity to contain it. No bonnet in which to cover my eyes.
Julia Goldie Day
Now I’m 46. My childbearing years are over. Nevertheless, I’m not finished raising children, with two still in public schools. Through my own experience of losing pregnancies, bearing children and raising children to adulthood, I have come to believe God trusts people who can become pregnant to make our own choices with our own bodies.
Abortion must be a right. It is lifesaving health care. Government should have no say over a person’s bodily autonomy. I believe this deep down in the depths of my mother soul. As a Baptist, my soul freedom is mine own only, it is not up to me or anyone else to make decisions about your body or health care. Your choices are between you and God and your health providers.
Furthermore, I have seen the pain of mental illness as a mother and as a pastor.
I have watched school systems struggle with accommodating children with mental health needs firsthand. Schools do not have the funds, the training or the framework in which to accommodate the vast needs of their students. School administrators want parents or pastors to meet these needs or call the problems students experience behaviors, when typically, the behaviors communicate a cry for help. Often these cries for help go unanswered.
As we refuse to listen to these cries, or feed all children free breakfast and lunch, provide trauma-informed care and social-emotional growth opportunities, we fail our children.
The pandemic has only increased the evidence that these issues are widespread and growing. Our children are struggling.
“Huge amounts of our taxpayer funds are being used for school security upgrades while largely ignoring the need to … provide for the basic needs of children.”
Huge amounts of our taxpayer funds are being used for school security upgrades while largely ignoring the need to increase teacher pay, provide mental health services and provide for the basic needs of children, as we watch class sizes grow and quality teachers retire or leave the profession.
Posting the Ten Commandments in each classroom in some states did nothing but add to the toxicity, anxiety and confusion we have created with culture wars.
Not one child has received a gender change surgery while at school as the former president has begun to repeat in his political speeches and on the debate stage.
And the ever loosening of gun control as mass shootings continue should bring us to our knees as we grieve dead children and their teachers.
Safety plans and armed officers will not save us if the trigger is pulled by a student, as in the recent mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga. In fact, new safety issues just enacted by the school kept the body count very low but did not prevent the incident and the four deaths.
Four deaths are too many.
Beloveds, I’m deathly afraid.
I’m afraid for my children and your children to be gunned down at school (or even at church).
I’m afraid for the mental health of my children and others.
I’m afraid of the intersection of these two dysfunctions of our culture: children and teenagers are afraid of being gunned down at school. I know they are afraid, in fact. When the rumor goes around our high school of a threat (and it does) my teenager has our permission to use their best judgment to decide to leave if needed without alerting the school. I don’t care if they get in trouble as long as they come home unharmed.
“How is it freedom if I’m afraid to send my children to public school because of others’ rights to carry automatic weapons?”
How is it freedom if I’m afraid to send my children to public school because of others’ rights to carry automatic weapons? How is that justice?
That’s pro-death, if you ask me. More dead children. More dead teachers and staff. More mental health issues for children, parents and teachers. Which leads to more death.
I’m angry that my children may not be able to choose when to have a family or when to get lifesaving care when experiencing a miscarriage. More anxiety, more fear of bleeding to death. More mental health issues. Again, more death.
After this most recent school shooting, vice presidential candidate JD Vance said schools “are a soft target” and school mass shootings are “a fact of life.” Liz Cheney describes Vance and his running mate as “misogynist pigs” in her recent statement while revealing her father, former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, will be voting for current Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president in November.
A scene from season 5 of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale comes to mind as I continue to grieve the loss of life in yet another mass school shooting. We are shown a close up of Serena Joy’s anguished tear-ridden face as she argues with Commander Waterford.
“Don’t you want to be with your baby? Where’s the maternal instinct?”
“I don’t want to live in the same house with my child’s kidnappers,” she replies.
“Do you have an irony deficiency?”
Serena replies, “I don’t give a damn. I’m not a handmaiden.”
You see, she started the religious cult with a patriarchal hierarchal framework with her husband. It was her idea. She worked to overthrow the government of the United States of America and replace it with her ideals. She helped her husband rape handmaidens so she could take the resulting child because she was barren, or so she thought. When, years later, she gave birth to a baby and he was taken from her, she could not understand why it was happening to her.
“It should not take a fictional future to wake us up.”
It should not take a fictional future to wake us up to the lies and deception of those who obfuscate with thoughts and prayers, refusing to speak about reasonable gun control. Nor should we allow them to focus their words solely on mental health without any action or without also including movement on gun control and red flag laws that protect women and children.
We already are overpopulating the overheating earth as a species yet men like Vance and Trump must promote their “misogynist pig” policies to greedily clutch at power, eager to lay waste to an earth our children and grandchildren must recultivate, recreate into a more justly moral place of diversity.
Let us not make it even more difficult for them. It is the work of parents, grandparents and all people of faith to work for life-giving hopeful justice as we look toward the future.
“Gun reform is reproductive justice,” Alyssa Aldape shared on social media following this most recent loss of life. I could not state it any more clearly. I feel this is true deep in my bones.
Vote, for your life depends on it.
Vote to protect the lives of others.
God have mercy on us all.
Julia Goldie Day is an ordained minister within the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and lives in Memphis, Tenn. She is a painter and proud mother to Jasper, Barak and Jillian. Learn more at her website or follow her on socials @JuliaGoldieDay.