Trigger Warning: pregnancy loss
--------------------------------------------------------------------------I believe I'm going to remember last week as the week of miscarriages. Really, though, it was just the two.
The first was good news, the second not so much. The two together provided a stark reminder that the emotions surrounding pregnancy loss are completely relative.
The first happened to a woman who had contacted Spectrum. She had become pregnant accidentally and had scheduled an abortion procedure around 5 or 6 weeks LMP. Having been raised what she called "Uber-Catholic," having an abortion was, to her, the killing of a human being. But she had no choice. You hear this scenario played out pretty often when you work with people experiencing pregnancy loss. Intellectually, the embryo is just that: an embryo. But when you're supporting a person who has been raised in a certain faith or ideology, there's always this deep-seeded idea that they will be killing a human being. What the general public needs to know is that, most times, they will still have the abortion. No amount of belief that the embryo is human, no amount of guilt or shame they feel from their childhood upbringing, and no state-mandated scare tactics can sway them from that choice. They will terminate the pregnancy. The difference is, they will have more emotional trouble dealing with it. That's where I come in.
I spent a number of hours speaking on the phone with this woman over the course of a week. She came to trust me as a truly non-judgmental ear that didn't shame her for choosing abortion but also wouldn't correct her when she said "baby" or "kill." She became fixated on the idea that she would feel better about the whole situation if she experienced a spontaneous abortion (the medical term for miscarriage) instead of having it induced. I don't know whether or not she did something to herself to self-terminate (she mentioned having read the parsley + vitamin C "trick" on the internet), but regardless, she did indeed end up having a miscarriage. The news came from her voice with absolute joy. She truly felt like the Universe, God, or what have you worked with her to bring about the event, and in the end she was able to have the kind of pregnancy loss she could not only deal with, but be happy about.
The second miscarriage of last week happened, sadly, to one of my birth clients. She was 18 weeks pregnant, and without sharing too much of her personal information here, I can tell you that this event was earth-shattering for her and her family. After hearing the news, I spent the better part of the next couple of days in a kind of withdrawn daze. The pain she must have been experiencing was unimaginable to me. After all, 18 weeks is pretty far along: you've become attached to the idea of having a baby. You may have even thought up some names, or even started to buy clothes. You've already told everyone that you're pregnant. As if the loss itself isn't enough to deal with, the fetus and other products of conception are not likely to pass on their own, meaning you'll possibly need a D&C and/or labor induction. Your pregnancy - once this enigmatic idea of a baby - actually looks like a baby at this point... a very small baby, but a baby nonetheless. Worse still, losing a pregnancy after 16 weeks means your milk is likely to come in once your progesterone levels drop. In other words, full breasts and empty arms. It's really more than I care to imagine.
I have heard (mostly young) pro-choice folks scoff at the notion of having a memorial for a miscarried embryo or fetus. Hell, I might have done it myself in my teen years; after all, if a fetus is not a baby, then you didn't lose a baby. But listen to enough people who have lost wanted pregnancies - whether to miscarriage, stillbirth, anomaly, etc - and your opinions mature astronomically. They are no longer as black-and-white as they were when you were a red-faced college freshman shouting at antichoice protestors in front of your local Planned Parenthood, and while you remain as staunchly pro-choice as ever, the entire idea of pregnancy loss is tangled up in a billion shades of gray.
That's really why "the abortion war" is so damn polarizing. Social issues are best understood and dealt with when they can be easily boiled down to a black-and-white dichotomy. But really, no social issue whatsoever can be simplified to that end. We try, but we fail, and in our wake we do a grave disservice to those most affected by that issue.
The antichoice camp is able to rally huge amounts of support simply because their side really does take the black-and-white approach: their arguments are one-liners and emotion-grabbing images, and they make great headlines. The prochoice movement fails by merely trying to echo these tactics. Our arguments are full of holes when restricted to the same style of one-liners and headlines, easily refuted when we don't get into the complexities of pregnancy and women's lives. Our messages will not be received if we merely keep screaming them louder and louder, and we will not ever attain true reproductive justice until we begin to acknowledge that all pregnancy outcomes - birth, abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth - mean nothing without the context that surrounds them.
Just look at my two clients... one had a miscarriage, and it was wonderful. The other had a miscarriage, and it was the worst thing possible.
1 comment:
I never thought it was odd to have a memorial for a wanted miscarried pregnancy. I've known some women who have had memorials for pregnancies they elected to terminate. I don't think any one has the right to scoff at anyone's choice or how they choose to handle the emotions they have surrounding the loss.
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