I have deep respect for the women who have spoken out about their own experiences with abortion and the medical personnel who have spoken out about their patients who died from botched abortions. Ditto the women who have spoken out about rape.
But an abortion ban hurts every woman. Every one of us. Because the issue isn’t whether to allow abortion for rape victims or to save the life of the mother. The issue is every woman’s reproductive health.
In 1978 I lost a baby in early pregnancy and was surprised to learn that one in five pregnancies in the US ends naturally without resulting in a live birth. That is, they are aborted by "Mother Nature," not by "elective abortion." In fact, in addition to her other more positive activities on our planet, Mother Nature is its most frequent abortionist.
My miscarriage happened at home. I had been having menstrual-like cramps, which were mildly alarming. I was pretty sure I was pregnant, although my sense of my body had been challenged a couple weeks earlier by my OB who had refused to do an ultrasound because he said my pregnancy test was negative. (This was before you could buy a home pregnancy test at any drug store.)
I was sitting on the toilet, and there in my underwear was a little shrimp-like figure in some slightly pink mucous. Still in shock, I called to my husband, and when he came in, I showed him. We both knew what it meant.
Meanwhile, our preschooler was in the bedroom across the hall. I think she was jumping on our bed, which was allowed.
“What should I do?” I asked my husband. “Flush it,” he said. I wondered if I should save it somehow, but I just couldn’t ask him to help with the details — getting a container, figuring out how to preserve it, etc. All the while, we could hear our daughter playing in the next room.
I flushed it.
The OB, at my second and last visit to him, challenged my story, asking why I didn’t save the tissue so they could more easily determine the cause of the miscarriage. As far as he was concerned, I was lying. I changed doctors.
My family practice doctor believed me and arranged for a D&C to “clean me out.” He reported afterward that they did, indeed, find “placental material” in the tissue removed from my uterus. It was a healthy procedure, he said, which should clear the way for us to try to conceive again. My happy ending was that only a few months later we were able to conceive, and this time I carried the baby to term and a healthy birth. She celebrates her 40th birthday next month.
By now most readers are squirming at the revelation of such intimate, creepy details, if you are even reading this far. I only tell this extremely personal story because men are once again— STILL! — trying to legislate the health care that women and their babies have access to.
The D&C I had was also the primary method of abortion in the late 1970s. Suppose that someone -- anyone -- wanted to accuse me of inducing that miscarriage, or that an embryo was still present when I had that D&C? In other words, that I had had an “abortion"?
One in Five women in America deal with similar losses every year. One in Five pregnancies end “naturally,” aborted by Mother Nature. For some of us, that ratio is closer to one in three.
One of those one-in-three women was my daughter, that little kid jumping on the bed while her father and I discovered a heartbreaking loss. Decades later she went with her husband for a pregnancy exam. They were so excited to be having a baby. But when the doctor listened for a heart beat, there was none.
When I told her I was thinking of writing this diary, she wrote to me:
“After you say there was no heartbeat, please say in subsequent sentences that my baby died. Right now someone could read it as the baby being on its way out but not yet gone, but the baby was gone. I think that's important-- nothing could have saved that baby.”
I don’t think I had ever told her that she was in the next room when her father and I discovered I’d had a miscarriage, and flushed the remains to keep it quiet. So what she wrote next really grabbed me.
“The other thing that you may wish to add, because it was the most important factor in choosing surgical removal of the embryo rather than with a pill, is that I did not want to miscarry and expel that baby at home. I did not want the painful memories of that experience to be associated with the place I needed to be while I healed from the grief of the loss. Having to go through ‘nature taking it's course’ at home would have been way more psychologically traumatic.”
She and her husband and son healed, physically and emotionally. A year later, she delivered a healthy baby girl.
One in Five. One in Five pregnant women deal with the loss of a child before s/he is born. Forcing women to knowingly carry a dead baby until Mother Nature the abortionist comes along is cruel and heartless and harmful to women and their subsequent children, if any.
In between these two losses I have just described, my younger daughter was pregnant. She called to tell me she was pregnant and there were some possible complications. Could I come be with her as she had an ultrasound, because her husband had to go out of town to be with his dying mother.
The mood in the darkened room where the ultrasound was conducted was extremely anxious. If the anomalies were severe enough, we would have had to make decisions about whether she should continue the pregnancy or end it to prevent a baby being born to a brief life of suffering and pain.
I saw that darling fetus -- looked like a goldfish -- swimming inside her. I knew then that he would survive and be born and thrive. He did. It was definitely a happy ending. But if we had had no choice about whether she carried him, would we even have been allowed to have that ultrasound? What effect would our continued anxiety have had on her pregnancy and her family?
If you have read this far, thank you. Please understand why I have told you these very personal, painful stories. Conceiving, carrying and bearing a child is among a woman's most challenging and satisfying life purposes. Interfering with the medical treatment allowing healthy pregnancies and healthy births is not only an invasion of privacy. It is cruel and unusual punishment. It is not "pro-life." It is anti-woman and anti-family.
Perhaps it is time to start a “Me too” for all of us who have been visited by Mother Nature the abortionist, as well as those of us who have been helped by modern medical technology like ultrasound. The last thing we mothers and would-be mothers need is some legislative body telling us and our doctors what health care measures we can have access to.
The abortion bans in Alabama and Missouri and other states have nothing to do with “saving babies.” It is about punishing women. It is no accident that these draconian measures are being advanced less than a year after so many women have been elected to office. This is a backlash of patriarchy.
The men in power who will do anything to prevent women from being treated equally continue to use abortion as a “wedge issue” between women, as well as against women. As a mother, I can see the emotional pull of an appeal to “save the babies.” Of course, if that were really the goal, legislators have abundant ways to save babies and pregnant mothers and their families that would be more helpful than limiting their health care choices — increased access to prenatal and pediatric care, food stamps, publicly supported childcare, and living wage laws come to mind just for starters.
As someone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I understand how the dichotomy of “good girl” and “bad girl” has been used to control all of us, especially enlisting the “good girls” to punish the “bad girls” to protect our own place in the patriarchal hierarchy. This anti-abortion campaign is about controlling women’s bodies. How else can you explain a law like Alabama’s that would punish a doctor who performs an abortion with more prison time than a rapist?