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My Mom Is An Inspiration

Jill

My Mom is an Inspiration from Center for Reproductive Rights on Vimeo.

A wonderful video from the Center for Reproductive Rights. Transcript below the fold.


On Mother’s Day, we celebrate a world in which all women have choicesÉ and we’re not alone.

Students from the Urban Assembly School for Law & Justice visited the Center and shared their thoughts.

Tornelle: My Mom has talked to me about: do I want to have a child? When is the right time?

Bianca: I talk to her about HIV/AIDs and if it’s okay for me to get birth control, just in case anything happens.

Daniela: Yeah, I think my Mom’s a feminist.

Carlene: She believes that everybody has a choice, and everybody can make their own decisions.

Bianca: She had a child, her first child – my sister Rosa – when she was seventeen. So she had a lot of experience and doesn’t want me to go through the same thing.

Deborah: I think I’m pro-choice because it should — you should have that option no matter the circumstance.

Daniela: I have become pro-choice.

Ekugbe: You should have the choice to choose whether or not you’re ready for a baby.

Ashley: My mother has spoken to me about being pro-choice.

Deborah: I’m going to thank my Mother on this Mother’s Day for keeping an open mind.

Bianca: She’s definitely an inspiration.

Ashley: I want to thank my Mom for everything.

Tornelle: Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!

The Center for Reproductive Rights thanks moms everywhere for raising a generation that cares about choice.

Share this message with someone you care about today.

http://reproductiverights.org

7 thoughts on My Mom Is An Inspiration

  1. This is wonderful. My mom is avidly pro-choice, even though she’s pretty sure she’d never have one. Her mother, my grandma, needed an abortion for a fetus that had died inside her and was poisoning her, but it was pre-Roe so she had to search everywhere and beg the doctors to help her. Her mother, my great grandmother, died when my grandma was two of an abortion induced with knitting needles- leaving three small babies behind.

    Just about every woman’s life has been touched by abortion, directly or indirectly, and I just can’t understand how people who have seen how it helped their loved ones would deny that right to other women.

  2. I think this is one of the things that excites me the most about being a mom. I grew up in a very anti-feminist, anti-choice household and the effects of the messages I was given as a child lasted well into adulthood. In fact, I still struggle with a lot of them. I have my own daughter now and because I became a feminist by the time she was about three, I get the chance to raise her the way I wish I could have been and I am actually really excited about raising her to be passionate about women’s rights, choice, equality and justice.

  3. I absolutely hate this video and refused to post it at my site. Please tell me how talking about abortion is a celebration of motherhood. Enough! I think it is insidious that you have Black women, who BTW have had to fight to have their motherhood legitimized doing this and calling it a mothers day message. I am staunchly pro choice but when are feminists going to get around to talking about motherhood in radical ways. The other side of the choice is Motherhood and yet all we hear about is abortion. I get that for White women of class privilege this is not a worry because the world will rejoice to see their babies but the same is not true for WOC.

  4. …well, okay, but abortion isn’t even mentioned by name in the video. To me, it’s about a more holistic idea of choice — that includes birth control availability and destigmatization, abortion, adoption, and motherhood. I think it’s great to celebrate choice across communities, and I love the emphasis on mothers’ responsibility to teach their daughters about sexuality and choice.

  5. I agree with Renee. I’m pro-choice as well, but definitionally Mothers’ Day is about women who, at least in one instance, made the decision to give birth to or adopt a child. It’s not about the “holistic idea of choice” although, of course, all choices are valid. Every day is, or should be, an affirmation of women’s array of reproductive options. This particular day is about one of them.

    As Renee says, it’s very dicey using only black women for a mothers’ day message focusing on options besides motherhood, such as birth control and abortion, and noting one woman’s suggesting her first child was a mistake or possibly just ill-planned. All this is reality, but why use black women as the speakers for the depressing realities? This day is about celebrating the positive of motherhood — something that, 364 days a year, is all about the harsh realities. Women of all colors who are moms or have moms who are alive to celebrate deserve to be left alone to do so.

  6. I’m pro-choice as well, but definitionally Mothers’ Day is about women who, at least in one instance, made the decision to give birth to or adopt a child.

    …that’s what the video is about. It’s a bunch of girls praising a bunch of ‘women who, at least in one instance, made the decision to give birth or adopt a child.’ Their own mothers.

    My own mother didn’t actively teach me to be pro-choice, but if she had, you can bet I’d want to thank her for it today. What better day could there be for it?

  7. The video isn’t, in fact, about them celebrating their moms. It’s clear from what they say that they do admire their moms, but the focus is their celebrating their moms’ openness to abortion as a choice. It’s an odd focus given the point Renee made above — which you didn’t address.

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