Congratulations.

Well, congratulations.

You’ve done it.

Call that a slippery slope, but the phrase doesn’t seem to mean anything anymore. I’m sure you’ll come for the rest of us next. So congratulations.

I was you, once, operating on “pure principle.” I dirtied my eighteen year-old hands with a single issue vote in Texas — on this issue, in fact, my last holdout after a bit of decent human empathy had long changed my heart on all the rest.

I get your principle, I really do.

I believed it wholeheartedly — a unique existence, the lesser of two evils, to let it exist and occupy, take and take and take, no matter what it took from another. Existence first, literally anything and everything that comes with it second. A blatant, blinded, holier-than-thou disregard for what a life really is, holistically, and for what actually makes it worth living.

Existence per se — the one and only thing. Nothing else mattered, no matter how painful or unfair. One person’s breathing before another’s autonomy, when the former can’t even breathe on its own yet and is nowhere near autonomous. (And there — I said it: “person.” Honestly, our side would do well to use language like that, and to just be honest about why we still believe what we believe. It was euthanasia, after all, and seeing completely meaningless lives cruelly extended that changed me on this particular issue in the end.)

‘Life for life’s sake’ is a naive principle that few can luxuriate in. At any rate, you’ve given anyone who doesn’t look or love or think like you a world that isn’t worth coming out to see.

So congratulations.

With no regard for nuance, your pure principle — at best (if you make rape and incest exceptions, you don’t actually believe in the sanctity of each and every unique existence on pure principle, and I have no use for you, despite not even being pro-life anymore in the first place) — your ‘principle’ isn’t without far-reaching consequence.

So congratulations.

Your ‘principle’ is lives changed, lives interrupted, lives ruined, and lives ended anyway, completely ruining the point. That would have been me, in fact, had I fallen pregnant in my twenties, consumed by abject horror and dysphoria beyond every plane of existence in your wildest imagination. You would have saved no one, because I would have killed us both.

All selfishness aside, and without even managing to get into the stories of the living and breathing women (hell, women and little girls) you’re impacting — well — -

Congratulations.

You’ve saved nothing and nobody, at very best because you didn’t think this through.

At worst, well, as much as I hate the thought —

…You really do just hate us all, don’t you?