Listen, this isn't just about having a baby. It's about everything that comes with it—and everything that's coming for us. 

I'm Aisha. My husband Marcus and I have been trying for over a year, but the world keeps changing the rules on us. We want a child—but we also want stability. A home. A future that feels like it's finally ours. The kind our ancestors dreamed of but never got to build, because someone was always rewriting the laws to keep them running. 

But first, we had to run.  

We were living in Birmingham, Alabama. Marcus taught high school, I worked city planning. We had roots. Church family. A down payment saved for a house with a front porch and room for kids to play. But with my body not cooperating, we decided to use that money for fertility treatments. 

Then Alabama passed the fetal personhood law. 

Any embryos we might create would be legal children. Storage accidents could mean criminal charges. Clinics shut down. 

You think this is just about reproductive rights? Look deeper. This is about who gets to engineer the future. Who gets to decide which bodies are allowed to transform, which families are permitted to exist. They turned our embryos into hostages and our wombs into crime scenes. 

"We can't have a family here anymore," I told Marcus, holding the clinic's letter. Services discontinued indefinitely. 

Indefinitely. That's the word they use when they erase your tomorrow. 

So we packed everything and drove north to Chicago. Left behind jobs, community, church, savings decimated by moving costs. Left behind the life we'd built to chase the dream of building another. 

Now we're starting over on the South Side. The fight feels different here. More urgent. Because I know what it's like to watch lawmakers strip away your right to become a parent. I know what it means when your biology becomes their battleground. 

Marcus grounds me with his quiet faith. "Maybe God's leading us somewhere better," he says. 

This fertility journey isn't just about shots and ultrasounds. It's about reclaiming what they tried to take from us. Some days, I feel more machine than woman. Other days, I understand that the machine and the woman were never separate to begin with—we just never had to name it before. 

And the cost? We're rebuilding from scratch while betting everything on a dream that might not come true. We're refugees from our own country, migrants in the landscape of our own bodies. 

This isn't just my fight. It's ours. For a child. For a home. For the right to build the future we deserve without having to flee our homeland to do it. 

You think this story is about us? Think bigger. Count the families crossing state lines with coolers full of frozen hope. We're the beginning of something, not the end. 

You with me?