Wake Up, America

• Emily Wu, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2022

Dear America,
Let me tell you a story. A tale you should know, if you’d only hear it. A spiel of power, pride, and the feminism at its roots.
It began long ago, but this chapter could rewrite our futures.
This page starts with SB2—forcing Texan women carrying fetuses older than six weeks to either bring babies into a starved world, have potentially life-threatening abortions performed, or travel upwards of ten hours for something that should be basic healthcare.
On the 3 of May, 2022, a draft from the US Supreme Court was leaked, in favour of overturning Roe v. Wade. If the ruling is abolished, 26 states will ban something that has been a constitutional right since 1973. It will end safe abortion. And it’s not only America who will be affected. It’ll be a stone, dropping into the heart of the world. The wave will drown everything in its path, until lives come crashing down. If you can take away a woman’s right to her body, how much else can you seize? How many ambitions will you crush, how many dreams will you shatter?
Maybe I’m just one voice, but I join in with the choir, and the chorus will rise again. This song will become an echo, playing on repeat. Staying quiet won’t keep me safe. Naivety won’t be my shield, and silence won’t protect me.
So I want you to know that when you save one fetus, you doom a sixteen year-old to suffer an abusive partner to protect the child who’s now caught in the divide.
I want you to know that when you rescue one fetus, you sentence a girl to carry her rapist’s baby to term.
I want you to know that when you salvage one fetus, you choose the life of a cluster of cells without thought or feeling over a living, breathing, woman. A woman who has friends, a family, ambitions, and hopes and a future.
Perhaps you will save countless fetuses, but you’ll never know how many lives you will lose.
If you cared about the children, you would do something about the 400,000 estimated to be in foster care in the United States alone. You would seek to amend the 49 deaths caused by school shootings in the USA in just 2021. What if they’re LGBTQ+, have BIPOC heritage, are born into poverty or with a physical impairment? What if they’re in these sidelined communities you never cared about—until they were in the belly of a woman seeking an abortion?
If you cared about your women, you
would
do
better.
You don’t care about us. You care about control. To make sure communities on the edge of society stay marginalised.
This isn’t a fairy story. It’s your wake-up call. This alarm will ring true, this broken melody will play, and you will hear these voices. Your slumber costs more than money; it pays in lives. How will you write this chapter?
Dear America—the story doesn't end here.