Editor's Note: This article is part of a pre-election series featuring leading voices in sexual and reproductive health advocacy, showing how shared American values underpin their support for sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. Read them all here.

There are certain words that reverberate in our soul. While they mean different things in different contexts, locations and times, they serve as compass points. Some call them virtues, some values; these words represent our deepest aspirations. Freedom, justice, compassion, love, generosity - you add the one that speaks to you. Often we are attracted to the one we most lack. And for women, that lack is often freedom: the freedom to allow their bodies to speak. 

The oft quoted sentiment of Margaret Sanger cries out: "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." We love the title "Our Bodies Ourselves," for in fact the only thing we really own is our body.  I had never been more moved or better understood why I have committed my life to reproductive freedom than when I heard Bernice Johnson Reagon sing the freedom song, Oh Freedom - "and before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my grave" at a reproductive health funder's briefing.

And yet, we rarely frame reproduction in terms of this most quintessential American value vaunted by both liberals and conservatives. Only radical feminists unafraid of being called selfish dare to talk of reproductive freedom or more boldly sexual freedom. We speak of reproductive choice, reproductive health or reproductive justice.

But freedom is the word that speaks most loudly to me. Freedom is the ability peacefully to live a life of one's choosing. I continue to struggle to be the subject of my life. Free, as Marlo Thomas put it, to be me; free to find out who I am. In that search I have only my body - and the bodies of all the others I encounter - to help me learn who I am. My body speaks  to you; it tells you who I am. In a recent address on human rights, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams got it.* He said "The ultimate form of slavery would be a situation in which your body was made to carry the meanings or messages of another subject and never permitted to say in words or gestures what was instinctive for itself as the embodiment of a sense-making consciousness." He continues: "The irreducible core of human rights is the liberty to make sense as a bodily subject."

Human rights, human freedom exist in the body. The freedom to speak is a body right, the freedom not to be tortured or enslaved is a body right, freedom from hunger is a body right and the freedom to reproduce or not, along with the freedom to express ourselves sexually, is the most intimate of body rights and human rights. For women it sends a central message and carries to the world the meaning of who we are.

So let's look at what has been the hardest reproductive freedom to defend. The well educated, financially well off woman who becomes pregnant as the result of consensual mature sex and strongly believes that it is not part of who she is, of her essential identity, to be pregnant, to give birth to child or be a mother. Is she, as those who fear autonomous women say, selfish? Or is she simply and correctly insistent about the message her body will send and the preservation of her bodily integrity?  I remember my cold anger during conversations with Jim Wallis who when asked about how he saw women who had abortions could only imagine women as victims, victims of poverty, rape, marginality and who was stunned and silent when told that there are indeed many women for whom the decision to abort is a mature, healthy expression of their identity and nature and that he needed to respect those women and their decisions.

Much work needs to be done to develop the way in which we think about intimacy, the body, and bodily integrity. This work is in process with feminist ethicists, theologians and scholars making serious contributions. In the reproductive freedom movement, some are brave enough to think and talk about pleasure, a good that is separate and distinct from procreation.  It is perhaps more imperative to work on the meaning of being pregnant, of gestating and of giving birth. The philosopher Margaret Little has written about the way in which gestation is depicted. It is as if the woman as person, as voice did not exist. A passive carriage of time which belongs not to the woman but to nature.  Little asks:  "What is at stake in asking a woman to continue a pregnancy?" The physical risks we ask women to take are well known and especially urgent in the developing world where half a million women a year die of pregnancy related conditions. In these cases we have asked women to give up their very right to life.

But for every woman, the act of pregnancy is extraordinarily intimate and perhaps not in a positive way. We ask a woman, as Little says "to allow another living creature to live on and off [her] body for nine months." And I would add to live after birth with the reality of being a mother, whether she wanted to or not and whether she kept or gave the child away. These are deep intrusions on one's freedom and identity. It is imperative to enable others to understand that this is precisely the form of slavery Rowan Williams described as "a situation in which your body was made to carry the meanings or messages of another subject." In this case the other subject is someone who believes that the essential message of a woman's body is the acceptance of a pregnancy at all costs.

Freedom is allowing each woman's body to speak. It is demanding that other bodies listen to what she is saying. Each of us who has committed ourselves to sexual and reproductive freedom has committed ourselves to that goal. Let us not be timid in making our case.

*I do not want to misrepresent Archbishop Williams' views. The most interesting part of his address is the fact that he so brilliantly described the embodiment of human rights and its violations while insisting that it had no applicability to pregnancy. It is a clear indicator of how much work needs to be done.