Ashley Judd wrote a moving essay in honor of her late mother Naomi Judd ahead of her first Mother's Day without her.

In the piece for USA Today, the actress used her mom's recent death as a way to discuss the importance of being able to choose to be a mother and Roe v. Wade following the Supreme Court's leaked draft opinion that suggests the ruling could be overturned in the very near future. “This Sunday is abruptly, shockingly, my first Mother's Day without my mama,” Judd began. “She died just hours before her peers at the Country Music Hall of Fame could demonstrate to her how much they esteem her. She died just days before my sister and I could show her again how much we love and honor her.”

She continued, “It wasn't supposed to be this way. I was supposed to visit her on Sunday, to give her a box of old-fashioned candy, our family tradition. We were supposed to have sweet delight in each others' easy presence. Instead, I am unmoored. But my heart is not empty. It is replete with gratitude for what she left behind. Her nurture and tenderness, her music and memory.” But the actress went on to say that her heart is also filled with “incandescent rage” because Naomi “was stolen from me by the disease of mental illness, by the wounds she carried from a lifetime of injustices that started when she was a girl.”

Judd explained that her mother was not a mother by choice, but a 17-year old-who became pregnant by accident, which “led her down a road familiar to so many adolescent mothers, including poverty and gender-based violence.” She cited statistics from the World Health Organization that approximate that over 800 women died every day in 2017 from preventable causes related to pregnancy, and also shared her own experience of traveling to South Sudan where she met women “whose bodies were mangled from childbirth.” The actress also highlighted the United States own maternal death rates, which is one of the highest in the developed world, raising the question, “Do we value them?” She asked, “How much could we, as a society, possibly value motherhood when it is assumed to be an inevitability? When we accept as normal that women and girls will drop out of school and the workforce because they are expected to take on the unpaid labor of child care? When we fail to protect girls from poverty and violence?”

Judd concluded, “My mama was a legend. 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. This Mother’s Day, I choose to honor my mama for the person she was, a mother and so much more. And I ask you to honor your own mother, if you are lucky enough to have her. Honor her for more than her labor and sacrifice. Honor her for her talents and dreams. Honor her by demanding a world where motherhood, everywhere, is safe, healthy – and chosen.”