Shame on Karoline Leavitt.

Shame on her as a mother. Shame on her as a woman. Shame on her as a human being—someone who has cradled a child in her arms, who knows the trembling fragility of small bodies, the trust in wide, searching eyes. And yet she wakes up each morning and chooses, deliberately, to lie for a man who has hurt women and girls, who has mocked their pain, who has built his empire on cruelty and dares the world to look away.

She shields him, not out of ignorance, but out of calculation, out of allegiance, out of something colder than indifference. She knows. She knows what hands can do, what words can wound, what silence can destroy. And still, she stands beside him, mouth tight, eyes hard, betraying not just strangers, but every mother, every daughter, every child who ever looked to an adult for safety. The stench of her complicity is suffocating. The sound of her silence is a scream.

Just days ago, she announced that she's pregnant with her second child. A baby girl.

And ever since I heard that, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.

The thought keeps looping, tightening, pressing. How does a woman carry a baby girl into this world -- feel her growing, feel her shift under her ribs, imagine her face and her softness and her future -- and still wake up every morning prepared to lie for a man like this? How do you hold that contradiction in your body and not break?

I'm not asking this as a pundit or a partisan or someone playing politics from a distance. I'm asking it as a mother, from the place in my body where protection settled and never left. From the instinct that snaps you awake in the dark just to make sure your child is still breathing, that hums quietly under everything you do. Once that instinct takes hold, it rearranges you. It makes lying feel wrong in your bones. It makes pretending impossible. It won't let you look away, even when looking hurts.

And that's why I can't look at her without disgust.

. . .