It’s heart wrenching to me that in this day and age, the human rights eloquence of a woman’s right to choose still isn’t fully embraced by the very gender it serves.

The right to choose is so fundamentally simple in its respect of each person’s ability to protect and live within their personal and religious beliefs, that I cannot get my mind around how anyone could argue against it as a solution that gives evenly to both sides.

Women only stand to gain with a Pro-Choice platform. But with the likelihood of two or three seats on the Supreme Court becoming available during this next administration, the Roe v Wade ruling we take for granted might become even more at risk of the incremental legal erosion that’s worn it down over the last eight years.

In my 20 years as a therapist, I haven’t seen one woman who used abortion as birth control. But I have seen many, many lives crippled by dreadful parenting, on all socioeconomic levels.

From the foster care child routinely stripped naked, beaten and hung upside down in a closet for not performing oral sex well enough on his foster-father, to the independently wealthy child left to be sexually abused by others and physically and emotionally abused by her parents at home, the ability to parent isn’t something that’s inherent in parenting.

In the most dire situations, becoming a parent doesn’t magically create functioning, mental health, or love where there was no capacity for those qualities to begin with. And even in situations when this crossroad is reached by women and men who are far healthier, every child still deserves to come into the world to parents who are ready to assume a life long responsibility to nurture.

When our orphanages are empty; when there’s no need for foster care; when women earn one full dollar on the male dollar; when there is no incest, rape, physical or emotional abuse; when an order of protection leads directly to appropriate arrest and sentencing; when there is no such thing as a dead beat dad,; when quality healthcare is available to all; when maternity and paternity leaves are guaranteed; when excellent childcare for working parents is easily procured; when all of our public schools are strong and safe; and when female sexuality is embraced as a component of humanity …even then women should have the right to choose. Our country could take far better care of the children it already has.

Ultimately, these aren’t only the concerns of women. These are the problems of our society because they’re issues of human and civil rights.

I can’t understand a politician who doesn’t safeguard the quality of life. It makes no difference if it’s a man or a woman. It doesn’t make sense for one woman to win if all of us lose.