We have now entered Fund-A-Thon season in abortion world, the magical 11-week period during which abortion funds all over the country try everything they can think of to get people to donate so we can keep doing what we love to do—fund abortions! In our recent board call to brainstorm ideas for fun ways to get money, we were encouraged to “find our why”—figure out the reason(s) we care so much about the work we do, so we can communicate that passion to our would-be donors and, hopefully, inspire them to give. Meditating on my own why got me thinking about my mom, and how she helped shaped my views.

My mom loved to say that she never left the house during the 60s. Specifically, she meant the last part: the civil unrest and the Summer of Love and her oldest brother fighting in Vietnam while her youngest ones were trying to grow weed in the back yard of their house in northeast Ohio (with minimal success). She hated everything about that time—the music, the fashion, the chaos, the relentless machine of war that took so many of the boys she went to high school with and never gave them back. She would’ve been 26 in 1969, working as a legal secretary in downtown Cleveland, soon to meet the (married) man who would become my father, and she was not the sort of person who was ever going to hold a sign at a protest or stick a flower in the barrel of a gun. The very idea gave her vertigo.

This is almost certainly what drew me to activism.

My protesting career got off to a bumpy start, owing to the fact that I was on the wrong side of the issue in question. I’d gone with my best friend and her mother to the 1980s version of what we know today as the March for Life—a rally on Cleveland’s Public Square commemorating all the murdered babies whose unbaptized souls were, in those days, still presumably consigned to a sad eternity in limbo (I believe it was Pope John Paul II who released them a few years later with his decree that, unlike dogs, all fetuses go to heaven). Up to that point, I’d had no opinion on abortion whatsoever; I only went because my best friend was going, and she only went because her mother was making her. I don’t remember much about the experience other than being clustered for warmth around the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument while the frigid January wind blew in from the lake, and being handed a microphone and a “poem,” which I was asked to read for the assembled crowd. All I retained from that bit of literature was its format—it was typed in the shape of a fetus in profile—and its all-caps final line, TODAY MY MOTHER KILLED ME. I recently googled it and discovered there are numerous versions of this slop on the internet—you can look for yourself if you’re curious, I’m not linking to it—and while it is appalling from a literary perspective, it is somewhat instructive as a piece of propaganda. Its title is—unsurprisingly—Diary of an Unborn Child (spoiler alert, she would’ve been a blonde, blue-eyed girl with a weird fixation on hair), and its goal is, obviously, to humanize the unborn child while shaming the woman who doesn’t want to be its mother. Forty years later, the anti-abortion movement has updated its technology, if not its approach, by creating an AI-generated”Baby Olivia” video which uses a baldly manipulated developmental timeline to tug at viewers’ heartstrings and mislead them about abortion. Legislators in several states (including my home state of Ohio) are working to make the video mandatory viewing in public schools. If you’re reading this in Ohio, make sure to vote no on that measure in November.

Thankfully, my indoctrination was thwarted the minute I got home by my mother, who surely had a few choice (read: profane) words for my best friend’s mother when she found out where I’d been. I can still picture the scene: she sat me down in one of the bouncy Breuer cesca cane chairs of our little kitchen with its six-inch black-and-white TV on the table and its orange-and-gold foil wallpaper (my bedroom was papered in grasscloth; the entire condo, an atrocity of 1970s interior design) to explain why, in our family, we support a woman’s right to choose. She told me the story of my most beloved family member, who’d been carjacked at knifepoint years before, and sought an abortion when she found herself pregnant afterward. She told me about other family members who’d had, or paid for, abortions because their lives would have been upended by a pregnancy or a child. This may have been the point at which I began to realize that, though she was sending me to Catholic school, she didn’t actually have a lot of patience with Catholicism. It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned of all the bullshit she’d had to put up with from our pastor, Father Viall (yes, that’s his real name, and he really was), for being divorced, and for having had me baptized in (horrors!) my father’s Presbyterian church.

Interesting side note: years later, I learned that the kidnapping and assault were not actually what led my relative to seek an abortion. She had it because she already had multiple children, closely spaced, with an abusive husband she couldn’t leave, and another child was more than she could bear. This detail speaks to the truth that a lot of people support the right to seek an abortion if the reason is good enough. My mom seemed to believe that becoming pregnant after a rape was a good enough reason, but simply feeling like an additional child might break you was not. The more I learn about abortion, the more I see this perspective in our public conversations about it, and even in my own attitudes: abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” as Bill Clinton loved to say. That abortion should be a last resort, a thing you do once because you’re desperate, but only when you’re really, really desperate, and never more than once is a perspective many of us have adopted in this country, even though it’s not based in history or reality. It’s a perspective we need to let go of, because this is how extremist lawmakers end up passing abortion bans that claim to allow “exceptions” for the good enough reasons—rape, incest, the life of the mother. But those exceptions are meaningless, impossible to enact in real life, and ultimately they just enable legislators to pass terrible laws that voters would otherwise reject. I believe there is no bad reason to have an abortion. If you are pregnant and don’t want to be, that is good enough.

I joined the board of Blue Ridge Abortion Fund a little over a year ago, but I started volunteering on the intake line a few months ago. I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me, to return the calls of people seeking abortions and tell them we’ve got them covered. I’ve had callers cry from gratitude; I’ve had callers ask “How do I get your job?!” To hear the surprise in their voices when they tell me how much they need and I can say back to them, “OK, that’s no problem! What else can we help you with?” is one of precious few antidotes to the continuously unfolding nightmare that is the news. One caller was taken aback when I offered to CashApp some money for aftercare supplies—period pads, pain reliever, a heating pad—it seemed to surprise her that we would be thinking not just about paying for her abortion, but also about making sure was comfortable and cared for. At a time when it seems like every vulnerable person on the planet is under threat (and if you don’t already know it, that’s all of us), being able to tell people you can give them what they need—not just money, but compassion, support, resources, hope—is priceless. So that’s my why, and I would encourage you to find yours, and then go do something about it. Over the next 11 weeks you are likely to hear me ask you more than once for money; if you have any to spare, I hope you’ll share it. If you have time to spare, I hope you’ll find an organization that needs you and share it there. Until we are able to build a new society that centers the real human needs of all people, rather than the craven capitalistic needs of a despicable few, it will be on each of us to take care of one another. But I promise you, it’s worth it.