My Body Was Taken, My Choice Was Not

There are moments in a woman’s life when the public conversation becomes unbearably small.

Too loud, too certain, too ideological, too detached from flesh and fear and memory to hold the actual reality women live through. Reproductive rights is one of those conversations. So many people discuss it as if they are debating philosophy. As if women are abstractions. As if the body is a concept instead of a place where trauma can live for years.

But when a pregnancy follows sexual assault, the conversation is not abstract. It is immediate. It is intimate. It is devastating.

When I was 19, I was sexually assaulted. That sentence still carries its own weather. It changes the atmosphere around it. There is no way to make it elegant. There is no wording that removes the violence. It happened. It altered me. And before I could fully comprehend what had been done to me, I found out I was pregnant.

I want to tell the truth about that experience in a way the public rarely allows women to tell it.

I did not feel blessed.

I did not feel inspired by possibility.

I did not feel morally elevated by suffering.

I felt horrified.

I felt like the violation had moved inside the future. I felt trapped in a reality I never chose. I felt disconnected from my own body, and then newly aware of it in the most painful way. Every day carried the knowledge that the assault was not simply a past event. It had become an ongoing condition. Something inside me now required another decision, and all of it was happening in the shadow of violence.

There are people who will read a sentence like that through politics first. They will move quickly to principle, to doctrine, to ideology, to the rhetoric they have inherited from religion, party, family, or culture. But what I need people to understand is that for women living this reality, those voices can sound very far away from the actual emotional terrain.

The emotional terrain looks like panic.

It looks like staring at the ceiling unable to process your life.

It looks like trying to imagine the months ahead when you cannot even stabilize the day you are in.

It looks like wondering whether your body will ever feel like yours again.

It looks like being expected to make a decision while traumatized, grieving, afraid, and profoundly alone.

And if we are going to talk honestly about a woman’s right to choose, then we need to talk honestly about this.

A woman’s right to choose is not only about politics. It is about dignity. Sanity. Survival. Bodily autonomy. It is about whether she gets to decide what happens next when something unspeakable has already happened. It is about whether the law, the culture, the church, the state, or the strangers with opinions get to complete the theft of her agency by forcing continuation of what violence started.

I chose not to have that child.

I chose not to carry a constant physical reminder of my assault. I chose not to tether the rest of my life to that violence in that way. I chose what I needed in order to survive.

And I am not interested in softening the truth of that for people who only know how to engage women’s pain from a safe ideological distance.

This was not an easy decision. It was not made in emotional comfort. It was not a moment of detachment. It was a moment of raw reckoning. It was me facing the brutal question that so many women are forced to face in silence: what can I live with after this?

That is the question people should sit with before they ever presume to judge a woman’s choice.

Can I live with this?

Can I carry this?

Can I remain inside a body that feels hijacked and ask it to continue this pregnancy?

Can I heal while being required to relive?

Can I build a future while carrying a past I did not choose in the most intimate possible way?

For me, the answer was no.

And saying no was the first time after the assault that something felt like mine again.

That matters.

People often misunderstand bodily autonomy as a slogan. But bodily autonomy is deeply practical. It means no one else wakes up in your nervous system. No one else inhabits your triggers. No one else carries your memories in their muscles. No one else lives with the consequences of your trauma from the inside out. So no one else gets to claim moral superiority while assigning you a burden they themselves will never have to bear.

The right to choose is especially vital in cases of sexual assault because assault is, at its core, a stripping of consent. It is an act in which another person overrides your will. To then force a woman to continue a pregnancy resulting from that act is, to me, another expression of the same logic: your body is not yours, and your wishes are secondary to other people’s beliefs.

I reject that.

I reject the idea that a woman’s suffering becomes holy simply because others are more comfortable with her endurance than with her autonomy. I reject the idea that resilience must always look like carrying the heaviest possible burden. I reject the notion that women owe the world martyrdom in order to be considered moral.

Sometimes survival is the moral act.

Sometimes choosing yourself after violence is the moral act.

Sometimes refusing further violation is the moral act.

Sometimes reclaiming your future in the face of trauma is the moral act.

This is why my own experience shaped my view of reproductive rights so profoundly. Before that, perhaps I could have engaged the conversation in broader terms. After that, it became intensely personal. I understood with absolute clarity that choice is not a luxury. For many women, it is the only remaining place where agency can be restored.

And I know I am not alone in that.

There are women all over this country carrying stories they do not tell because they know how quickly the world reduces them to argument. There are survivors who made choices in private and have had to live with other people’s assumptions in silence. There are women who continued pregnancies they did not want and carry that ache. There are women who ended pregnancies and carry complicated grief alongside relief. There are women who were denied choices altogether. There are women who live in states where the law would now force them deeper into trauma. There are women who will never say publicly why their beliefs about bodily autonomy are not theoretical.

But I am saying it.

I believe a woman has the right to choose what happens with her body because I know what it is to have that right taken. I know what it is to feel your own physical existence become a site of violence and consequence. I know what it is to need one decision to belong entirely to you.

That is not political theater for me.

That is memory.

And when I hear people argue that women should simply endure, simply carry, simply submit to a system that does not know their pain, I think of the arrogance of that demand. How easy it is to prescribe suffering for someone else. How comfortable people become with women’s pain when they do not have to inhabit it themselves.

The conversation around reproductive rights often tries to flatten women into symbols: the victim, the mother, the sinner, the strong one, the selfish one, the brave one, the cautionary tale. But women are not symbols. We are human beings making impossible decisions in imperfect conditions, often under enormous emotional, spiritual, practical, and physical duress.

That humanity has to come first.

Not ideology.

Not performance.

Not public opinion.

Humanity.

Compassion that begins there will sound different. It will ask fewer accusatory questions. It will assume less. It will stop treating women’s trauma as material for abstraction. It will become more interested in listening than legislating from emotional distance. It will understand that support is not agreement on every point. Sometimes support is simply the humility to admit that you do not get to own another woman’s body, history, or threshold for survival.

I do not share this because I need strangers to validate my choice. I share it because there are women who need to hear someone tell the truth plainly. There are survivors who still wonder whether their need to reclaim their bodies was selfish. There are women who have been made to feel ashamed for choosing survival over forced remembrance. There are readers who may never have said the full story aloud and need to know that another woman understands the impossible terrain.

I do.

And if that is you, then hear me:

What happened to you was not your fault.

The weight you carried was real.

The decision you faced was real.

Your body is yours.

Your life is yours.

Your future is yours.

Some choices are forged in pain so deep that no outsider can fully evaluate them with integrity. They can only be respected.

Mine was one of those choices.

And taking it back was the beginning of learning that after violence, survival can still sound like a woman saying: this part is mine.