MODERN CHURCH NEWSLETTERS HOW TO

My pastor would parade me before my church of thousands and call me a harlot, a modern-day Hester Prynne. I reversed my arthritis with a vegan diet.I'm on a raw food diet, my health has never been better.I would be expelled from Christian school and would not be allowed to complete my education.

I did not have to imagine the consequences of my potential teenage pregnancy. I forbade boys to put anything-fingers, accessories, sex organs-into my vagina. If I had sex, I was certain my birth control would fail and I would get pregnant. But had I been given birth control as a teen, I would not have trusted it. My mother insisted that birth control pills aborted babies, a common refrain on the far-right. I bumbled into my teens, clueless about how babies happened until a random encounter with a bookstore copy of The Joy of Sex Illustrated enlightened me. When I got my period at the age of ten, I didn't know it was part of the baby-making cycle.

MODERN CHURCH NEWSLETTERS HOW TO

When I hit puberty, I attended mandatory girls-only chapel services, where I was lectured on how to avoid tempting men and boys with my body. In elementary school, I was forced to watch blood-soaked anti-abortion films. I heard variations on this refrain starting in Christian school kindergarten. If God gave me a pregnancy, even if I was raped at 11 or 12 years old, who was I to choose to terminate God's holy gift? Motherhood was not an option or a choice it was my duty to bear as many children as my 'Good Christian husband' demanded. In the far-right church of my youth, I was indoctrinated to believe I had one God-given duty: My female duty to reproduce. Andra Watkins is a bestselling author who lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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