They cheered on the floor of the Senate while Lady Liberty, she must have been shedding a tear. She’s standing there holding that torch to welcome the tired, the poor, the outcast, and right behind her on the shores of New York, they’re stripping little girls of the right to live.

Sure, those girls are still sitting cozy in the womb but tell me, if we’re fighting for women to be respected, to be given a voice, to be seen as equal in the eyes of all, whats the difference between five minutes before she breathes air and five years after? Or even fifty?

A woman, no, a person, they don’t magically get some sort of status if they’ve lived long enough, done enough or made enough of a difference. Otherwise, how many of us would be disqualified today?

No, girl, if we can’t celebrate you in the womb AND fight to support you when you’re outside walking heavy through hard choices of adulthood, then we haven’t really made any progress. If we have to ask a woman to kill her babe in order to thrive, to make her pick between her life and that of another, then we haven’t yet figured out how to really be FOR women.

A woman doesn’t need for you to solve her pregnancy. She needs you to right the injustices that make that baby seems like a burden instead of a promise.

A woman doesn’t need more ways to sacrifice her children on the altar of independence. She needs you to step into her circumstances and inject hope and help for the long haul. To become the community that carries and loves and serves extravagantly so that she and her children can flourish.

A woman doesn’t need our judgement or our shaming for past choices. She needs our humble acknowledgement that we too have stumbled and failed and then watched life still miraculously rise from the ashes.

A woman needs for us to champion her value, her strength, her possibilities from the moment she is marked by her DNA, as well as through all the moments after when she’ll learn to walk out her unique expression of those few chromosomes.

This is supposed to be the Year of the Woman. But it shouldn’t just be for the blessed few that make it out of the womb alive. And it shouldn’t just be for the ones who can afford a baby, who can land a job that embraces pregnancy or who are fortunate enough to have a tribe to walk amongst.

Let us work and fight and love to be the land where the torch of Liberty shines bright and strong for everyone.

Because a persons a person no matter how small.