Ashley Judd just celebrated her first Mother's Day without her beloved mom, country legend Naomi Judd. Naomi died on April 30 after a long battle with depression. Now Ashley is honoring her mom in the best way she knows how — by speaking the truth about who her mother was and what she had to fight against.
The activist and actress just penned an essay about women's rights, motherhood, and women's right to choose when they will become mothers for USA Today. The piece is emotional and paints a bleak picture of how women all across the globe are so often treated.
Naomi Judd's life ended tragically on April 30 when she took her own life after a long battle with mental illness. The very next day, the singer's daughters spoke before a crowd at the Country Music Hall of Fame, where Wynonna Judd accepted an award on her and her mother's behalf. Ashley told fans she was sorry that their mother couldn't "hold on" for even another day.
It's clearly been a deeply emotional time for the family, but now Ashley is hoping to share her mother's truths. In her powerful essay, she writes that she is filled with "incandescent rage" because her mother was "stolen" from her. She writes that her mother's mental health battles were due to "a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl. Because she was a girl."
Ashley shares that, through all of her struggles, her mother was an amazing parent, but she had so much to overcome, and that simply wasn't right or fair. However, it made her a fighter.
"She showed my sister and me the power of having a voice and using it, and there has been no greater lesson," she writes. "But motherhood happened to her without her consent. She experienced an unintended pregnancy at age 17, and that led her down a road familiar to so many adolescent mothers, including poverty and gender-based violence."
She continues, "Forgive me if my grief isn’t tidy. When I think about my mother, I am awash in the painful specifics. It’s a little easier, this Mother’s Day, to think about mothers in the collective, to wonder whether we value them."
Ashley doesn't just write from pure emotion in her powerful piece. She points to hard facts about how many women lose their lives unnecessarily during pregnancy and birth, which is around 800 every day.
"In 2018, I traveled to South Sudan with UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, and I sat with women whose bodies were mangled from childbirth," she shares. "They suffered obstetric fistula, a devastating injury that causes pain and incontinence but is easily preventable and treatable."
But, as Ashley points out, it's not just in developing countries that these injustices against women happen. The US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, and those numbers multiply if the mother is a woman of color. She points out that women are forced to go back to work before their bodies are even recovered from birth, too, due to a lack of federally mandated maternity leave.
Ashley, who has chosen not to be a mother, writes of abuse and many other ways in which women are denied their human rights in our society — and globally. She feels that women are routinely stripped of their rights, even their right to choose whether they will become mothers.
"Motherhood should always be a choice," she writes. "Does that sound radical to you? Does that sound like I wish my sister and I hadn’t been born? If that’s what you think, I will gladly direct my incandescent rage at you."
Ashley ends her essay by speaking to her mother's strength. "My mama was a legend," she shares. "She was an artist and a storyteller, but she had to fight like hell to overcome the hand she was dealt, to earn her place in history. She shouldn’t have had to fight that hard to share her gifts with the world."
She also implored others to honor their mothers, and all women, by fighting for their rights. "Honor her by demanding a world where motherhood, everywhere, is safe, healthy – and chosen."
