Today is Blog for Choice Day and the question posed is:
Given the anti-choice gains in the states and Congress,
are you concerned about choice in 2011?
Yes. Of course I am.
But reproductive choice is not something I ever take for granted. When I look back at my life, I don't think I have ever taken choice for granted.
Perhaps that comes from my family background. The maternal half of my family are working-class, liberal Catholics. I grew up knowing that upon the birth of her 2nd child only 11 months after the birth of her first (a phenomenon also known as "Irish twins"), the family priest came to visit my great-grandmother. He apparently sat down with my Nana and told her, "We are not farm animals, we should not procreate without planning." (Yes, he did in fact say that farm animal part--she recorded it in her diary!) The priest, Nana's cousin, then handed out condoms at that point to my great-grandparents. It must have been 1923 or 1924, and a Catholic priest in Brooklyn made my great-grandparents promise they would use protection. It would be another 6 years before they welcomed their next and last child.
I grew up knowing that story.
I also knew that my grandmother (the younger Irish twin), was a social worker in New York City during World War II. My grandmother would tell me about women desperate to not be pregnant, and how she'd leave their house only to be called back later that evening to escort the poor woman to the hospital. She would talk about children who were orphaned, mothers left horribly maimed and in chronic pain for life due to the scarring. She even would reluctantly remember for me the smell of warm blood on the brownstone stairs of one woman's house.
I say "reluctantly" because my grandmother has a very upbeat and positive personality. While I view this as history I need to know, she views this as tragic and stuff she'd rather not talk much about. She doesn't like ruminating, and my depression makes me a ruminator...(or is it my ruminating makes me depressed...?)
I think most of you know that I had an abortion in 2003. It was a medical abortion. I was "lucky" enough to catch it before I was 8 weeks pregnant. It was a very unhealthy pregnancy. I am currently 37 weeks pregnant with my second child, and I can honestly say that my hips were wider at 8 weeks pregnant in 2003 than they are right now. Something wasn't right. I don't know what it was, but when I look back, it seems like my body was saying "No way, I cannot do this."
When I took the pregnancy test, I was by no means surprised to see the positive result.
But I was scared. I was terrified. WE were terrified. B was my partner at the time, and we both crawled onto the bed and cried. I cannot tell you the exact conversation, but I don't even think we discussed our options. I think we knew what our one option was.
I dislike when people--in general--ask a woman, "why did you have an abortion?" Why is this worthy of an answer? Why do you breathe? Why do you look both ways before you cross the street?
You do it to keep yourself safe and healthy and able to live a life worth living.
THAT is why I had an abortion. WE had an abortion.
We first went to my ob-gyn. I knew Dr. K didn't perform abortions, but I thought he'd be able to refer me to a safe clinic. I mean, I had never had an abortion before. I knew one day I wanted children. I didn't want to be maimed, I didn't want to be treated like shit by the staff. I wanted respect, I wanted privacy, I wanted to be treated like a loving human being.
Because in many ways, it was love that led to my abortion. A love of my life, a love and respect of the potential life inside me.
Maybe that sounds really weird. In fact, I know at least one of you is downright baffled by this. How could I love a potential life inside me that I was most certainly going to abort?
But I did. I still do love it. I learned so much about myself from the experience, I grew so much from the experience. That little embryo, that potential, taught me so much in such a short time.
Anyway...Dr. K was able to recommend a clinic. He shared in our tears--he actually shed some himself, out of sympathy, not pity, not regret about our choice. He respected our choice. Ironically, his specialty was treating infertile couples, but I think in many ways, our feelings about being too fertile mirrored the emotions of an infertile couple. We were dealt a hand we didn't want to deal with, period.
B and I went to the clinic three days later. People who think you can just schedule an abortion for that afternoon are idiots. There are TWO clinics in my town, yet I still had to wait 3 days (and that was not by state law either.)
At the clinic, they took my vitals, did an u/s to verify I was still less than 8 weeks and able to have a medical abortion, and then kicked B out of the room. A counselor came back and asked me a lot of questions. At the time, I didn't know or think about women who were coerced into abortions, so I found her questions a tad irritating. At some point, she asked, "What would you like to happen?"
"I would like to have never gotten pregnant in the first place."
She nodded and gave me hug.
When I saw the doctor, she went over everything with me, then gave me a plastic cup with a couple white pills. She watched as I swallowed them, and then she gave me a hug and told me everything would be okay.
The compassion these women--and they were all women--showed me has never and will never be forgotten.
The hardest part of the medical abortion, which occurred 48 hours later, at B's home, in the bathroom, came after I took the 2nd pills, which caused my uterus to expel the then-dead embryo. The pain, for me, ended up being equivalent to hard labour pains, something I would remember feeling before when I was labouring with my daughter in December 2006. There was one thought that kept going through my mind on July 20, 2003: I kept thinking about my great-grandmother.
In 1929, my great-grandmother (not Nana, but her inlaw), was widowed with two boys under 5. The great depression hit, and she was waitressing mostly because she could feed her boys one solid meal through her job.
And yet, in her "spare" time, she managed to "take care" of women. Some family members called her a midwife. Other's stuck to "helping" women in need. We have no idea what really happened, but everyone seems to agree that she was helping women have abortions safely during the Depression. My grandfather would later remember his mother delivering women who hadn't looked pregnant and didn't have a baby with them over the next couple of weeks. He never passed any judgment on her, he just said, "Can you imagine how scary that was?"
So, I've not stuck to the topic posed, because with these stories in my family, growing up and knowing these, I have never once taken choice as something I just "had." I've known the history, I've known that while it should be a universal human right, that no woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term and no woman should be forced to have an abortion . . . this is not guaranteed.
I am grateful for my abortion in 2003. I am grateful for the choices I do have, I am painfully aware of how at risk they are. I have also been made aware of how little reproductive rights many women in the US have when it comes to giving birth. This, too, is about choice. I choose to bring a new life into the world. It's not an easy thing to do by any means, and yet, the system makes it that much more difficult by mandating surgery and telling you that you're a horrible person for wanting one thing over another.
3 comments:
I learned about this AMAZING blog the other day and keep meaning to show it to you-
http://myabortion.tumblr.com/
some of the images you cannot see and I've emailed the creator to see how we could- maybe a subscription?
Do you feel a sort of inspiration from your amazing kin? I wasn't raised in an immediate family that was heavily religious after I was 6 years old- periodically we'd go to church for a month or two but that was it. My great grandfather has inspired me always and encouraged me to be involved in civil rights work. For him that was part of his religious practice. It was what was morally right.
Now I'm going to co-opt your blog to blog for choice.
My paternal grandmother had my father when she was 15 years old and she snuck out of the hospital to go home to check on his older brother who was staying with her parents (she was afraid her younger siblings would be cruel to him- my grandfather was in the military and away somewhere). She left the folks at the hospital a note saying she'd be back to get my father.
My father is the second of 9 children who lived to adulthood (one aunt died in her 20's from carbon monoxide poisoning at her own home). I can't help but thing that surely she experienced a miscarriage. I know that she would have rather not had all of those children.
My father's older brother never had children. I have two older sisters and when the oldest was 15 she told my parents that if they would not take her to get her on the pill she would take my sister herself. She is a HUGE advocate for reproductive rights.
When I was talking to her on her 80th birthday she asked me what method of birth control I was using. She told me that my younger cousin was taking the shot. Then she told me that another cousin was using the ring.
I told her about my niece (born of an unexpected pregnancy that was intended to end in adoption because my sister was too afraid to ask for help to pay for an abortion) who had an unplanned pregnancy and kept the baby. She's unfit to raise a child and would have had an abortion if she'd not been raised in a home where it was a stigma (he mother had guilt because the daughter she loved would, if things went as she'd have liked, would have been aborted). And where there was no talking about reproductive health. My sister was raised by her mother (we have the same father) and so we had very different upbringings and she saw less of our grandmother.
My father's sister- my aunt- married a man who was not for reproductive freedom and so they had an abstinence only household. Their daughter had three children by the age of 22 at which time she had her tubes tied. When I spoke to my grandmother that day she told me that each of the three children were expecting babies around the same time this year. One had a child already when 18 years old.
My grandmother has always been open about her regret of not having had access to birth control. She told me during our conversation that she tells all of her children (now that they are all at least in their 40s) that while she loves each of them that she'd not have had most of them if she'd had a choice. Maybe that isn't the most tactful thing to say- from her it isn't out of character. She's very hardcore about her support of reproductive health.
Whit - There is so much to say about this entry and I am afraid that if I start, I will never stop. But what I do want to comment on is how glad I am that these women at the clinic were kind to you. It seems like a horrible generalization for people to think of abortion clinics as cold and sterile where women are shuffled in and out and treated like garbage. There were two nurses in the room with me (along with the doctor) and they both were wonderfully caring, putting washcloths on my forehead and holding my hand, telling me it was ok to cry. They turned what could have been a demoralizing, humiliating experience into .. well, into something less horrible. Like your grandmothers, these women are brave and loving souls and we are all lucky to have them in the world.
Amazing post...thanks for sharing. :)
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