"No One Should Judge You for Your Abortion" Cake Topper

(This is as close, after seven rounds of attempt, Wix's beta AI image creator could get to recreating this cake image. WTF is wrong with AI's interpretation of letters and words? 😒)

As many of us do, or at least the ones with time on our hands, stress to assuage, or procrastination to elongate, I was one day thumbing through stories of friends on Instagram. 🤳 Cute dogs, epic destinations, exercise maneuvers...all were among the images I scrolled. And then, there it was. I had to tap the left side of the screen to return to the previous image and then hold down my thumb to properly assess my mind's double-take. 👎

In a lovely scrawling script of blue icing atop a beautiful hand-iced white cake glittering with pink and purple sprinkles were the words:

This cake was clearly presented to evoke an in-your-face saccharine connotation. Either:

"I'm so good with you terminating the life of your unborn human that I'm putting the message on a sweet cake to broadcast on social. 😉🩵"

Or:

"Anyone who judges you—not me, obviously, because I'm an ally—for terminating the life of your unborn human is wrong, and I want everyone on my friends' list to see so it's known that I think abortion is so fine I'm going to cover it in sugar, literally. 🤗🩷"

Definitive statements always pique my interest. (There's one now! 😅) The neurons in my brain immediately fire, creating synapses that lead to the raising of my right eyebrow—I can lift each individually, but the right is involuntary for me in this state and way cooler looking than the lone left—the slight flaring of my nostrils, and the curl of the left side of my upper lip.

(See above for visual re-enactment. 🤨)

Before I press on, allow me to brief you on my relationship with the poster of this message.

The individual who shared this Story is a woman I went to high school with, a girl I was close to during those four years of adolescent awkwardness and post-pubescent expansion. We weren't close friends who hung out at the mall every weekend or had regular sleepovers or even double-dated at homecoming, but we always acknowledged one another in class and in the hallways, we shared on sensitive topics—mainly boys, sports, and scholastics—and supported one another when mean girls tried to get under our skin. We had each other's back and I considered her a friend, a good friend. 🫶

As the years following graduation increased, we kept in touch on Facebook, commenting on one another's posts from time to time and sending messages to check in and to offer encouragement if we saw the other was expressing discouragement.

To summarize, before I responded to the message in blue icing image—because I had to respond, and not just because of my personal stance on the topic, but specifically because of my relationship with this particular individual and our history—I reflected on where I felt we stood with one another. 💭

We'd discussed other contentious topics before and always exchanged respectful comments, even when we would disagree. We knew each other, both in person and over time. We were friends. I could be honest with my response and I could expect an honest reply.

(Right?) 🤔

I felt that was an accurate determination, and I was eager to know her truthful response, truly. Here is what I said:

Okay, I knew before I tapped "Send" that this was a bomb of a response. I knew it was going to send some shockwaves, despite our relationship, because, who could post something so ardent, so aggressively definitive on such a sensitive topic to not expect such an explosive return? 💣

I wasn't making up what I said earlier. I very much wanted to know what her response would be to my statement, and not because I hoped to see an emotional reaction, but because one of the center points of our high school bonding and continued correspondence over the years was our shared belief in God, our Christian faith. ✝️ I knew this woman well enough to know she believed in Judgement Day, and that ending the life of an unborn human being was wrong.

While I wanted to sharply challenge her stake-like declaration (obviously, and I probably went over the top), I honestly wanted to understand how she could reconcile such a belief and simultaneously abide our shared values. Isn't that, in great part, what friends are for, to help us make sense of our world-view and how we represent and portray and hold true to our own beliefs and perceptions (accountability)?

Her response:

I explained that my goal wasn't to offend, but to strike a point so bold she'd have to question the icing statement's validity, because it clearly did not align with the values I knew we both shared.

She eventually admitted dissonance, but maintained her affirmation of support to such women, citing that, "Not everyone believes in God." 🤷‍♀️

We communicated several times since that interaction, but we haven't returned to our former position of warmth and friendliness and it simply makes me sad. 😔

The purpose of this blog post was not to explore the arguments against or for abortion. The purpose of this writing is to dissect how a relationship between two people who considered themselves close enough to be friends could come to this.

Maybe my approach was too fierce, interpreted as hostile, combative. Perhaps my words overtly conveyed the distinctness of our positions and this newfound difference, a severe one, made her pull away. Possibly, her faith has changed. Alternatively, we may not have been as close as I myself perceived.

I'm not certain the precise reason for our falling out, but it's nagged at my thoughts since. I want to write that I don't think less of this person, but if I'm keeping it real, and that's the purpose of me putting my thoughts out here in this format, I do. And it's not because I've stopped caring about her as a person. I still feel a desire to connect with her, to support her, to learn from her, but the cognitive dissonance caused by her posting is so strong it's eroded my respect for her. How can you drop a blanket statement that goes against your deepest personal convictions? What does that say about your character? Should there be separate realms for how we engage the world and how we engage ourself? (I'm not sure that even makes sense...) I thought being true to yourself means being true to others?

What is TRUTH?

This experience has provided an excellent learning curve for my life. She and I remain Facebook friends, though that's it for the time being, just floating pictures above names. I should work on changing that. Maybe that's really why I felt so compelled to write this. If I really desire her friendship and understanding what happened between us and how we can move on in a connected way, even and especially with competing beliefs, that's what I should do...right? I mean, how does one grow without resistance? How can we truly grasp the world without reaching out to those who don't share our beliefs?

🤔