Atlanta I’m going to miss you. I’ve been visiting your AmericasMart wholesale market for 15 years!  I’ve loved your Southern hospitality and your Southern food. I will miss eating at Pitty Pat’s Porch and having a burger from your world famous Varsity drive-in restaurant the last night of every market. It was such a treat.

But I have to break that tradition and go somewhere else next January. It was a very difficult decision to make but I have decided to go to the Vegas Market instead. You see, I just can’t financially support the decisions the politicians in your state have made. Your leaders voted to take away a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and I find that intolerable. Your leaders want to take away women’s right to make decisions about her pregnancy. Your leaders want to force women to give birth against their will.

I’m going to share something very private with you. I’ve had four miscarriages. I really wanted a child but wasn’t able to have one. Each miscarriage was physically and emotionally wrenching. I’ve tried to imagine the added horror of being dragged to court to prove that these miscarriages were natural and not self-induced and I just can’t. That’s the path we are headed down, and I’ve read that this is already happening in certain states.  Women are being criminally investigated when they miscarry. This might possibly start happening in your state. Soon. And I can’t live with that.

I don’t live in Georgia so I can’t vote there. I am not close enough to march or go to protests. But what I can do is vote with my money. The 3-4 thousand I spend in Atlanta every January may seem like a drop in the bucket, but if enough of us stop spending in Georgia perhaps it will make a difference.

When a woman needs an abortion, she will get one, legal or not. It’s been happening for thousands of years. I’ll be damned if I will sit back and let women be forced to drink bleach or throw themselves down stairs or use wire coat hangers on themselves. I’m going to do what I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Goodbye Atlanta. I’ll be back when women in your state are treated with respect and compassion. When babies and children are given as much attention and concern by politicians as is given now to the abortion issue. When your children are nourished and cherished by your leaders as much as a 6-week-old cluster of cells in a uterus. When your politicians finally get their priorities straight.