“This moment is nothing short of a national emergency. But these days it also feels incredibly personal,” Bush wrote of Roe’s overturn. Within the essay, the One Tree Hill alum recalled how a 20-year-old Hughes and his ex-girlfriend decided on an abortion, noting that if not for that decision, Hughes may “never have come into my life, nor me into his.” The essay clarified that it was not Bush’s experience “but his.” Bush explained that she met Hughes a decade ago on a beach in Nicaragua on New Year’s. At the time, she said they were just “nerd friends” and remained “platonic pals,” but when they crossed paths again in 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak, she recalled having an “aha moment” and realizing the love of her life was right in front of her this whole time. But she notes that she “could have missed him, if it were not for the abortion he and a former partner had,” adding that because of the “access to an abortion in the past, he and I have a future.” “Because a young couple in their 20s had access to reproductive care, the two of us are now actively planning a family,” she revealed. According to Bush, when Hughes and his ex-girlfriend had an abortion, he was working as a public school teacher barely scraping by with a $37,000 a year salary. They weren’t together when he got the call that she was pregnant. “When he heard the news, he knew it would dramatically change the trajectory of his life, and hers too. But—he told me—it wasn’t his body, and he had to listen to what she wanted,” Bush explained. “He said that he asked questions and tried to understand her experience, but he also didn’t feel it was his place to offer an opinion. Instead, he offered support, explaining that he would be there with her regardless.” “He didn’t want to be the man pressuring a woman to have an abortion, for financial reasons or otherwise. He said he’d known men who’d done that, and that watching them exert that kind of control was disturbing,” she revealed. “Any number of hard and distressing things might have happened to them because one unplanned thing once did. But they were able to choose, together. And because of choice, they were each able to move on. Gently past each other, and their season together, to pursue the futures of their dreams,” she wrote. Bush and Hughes tied the knot in Hughes’ home state of Oklahoma just a few weeks ago, a state that is one of the 13 that enacted plans to “unequivocally ban abortion” upon Roe’s fall. Bush underscored that many people, not just women and those who are pregnant, benefit from access to reproductive care. “It is not even just the people—both partners in a couple—who have abortions that benefit from them. And I use the word benefit intentionally,” adding, “Because while we all know that abortion can come with a myriad of emotions—relief, sadness, happiness, grief, trauma, exhaustion, power, freedom, safety, and more—the fundamental right to choose your future, and not have the government choose for you, is a benefit of Roe that more than 25 million women have just lost.” “The long-term benefits of bodily autonomy and privacy—and the ability of being able to plan and choose our families—has been stripped away from us. From our partners too. So many of us may have benefited from now stripped access to abortion care, whether we know it or not.” She concluded by emphasizing that “autonomy gives us” the power to “determine our present, in every moment,” in addition to the “boundless potential of our futures.” You can read the essay in full right here. Next, check out this Parade.com exclusive interview with Sophia Bush herself!
