The revival of the utterly useless abortion debate brought a lot of arrant stupidity out of people.
“Why is everybody acting like it’s impossible to avoid unwanted pregnancy? Just use birth control! Getting pregnant is hard even without birth control, let alone with it.”
Honey, you are low-fertility and you are so out of touch with your own body that you don’t understand that you are not the norm. I’m also low-fertility but I’m lucid enough to be aware of it.
“Abortion is no big deal. I had five and don’t even remember them.”
Sweetie, you are as out of touch as the low-fertility chick. You have more in common than you two think. When you get pregnant, your entire body begins to transform to prepare for the enormous work of bringing a child into the world. If you interrupt this process, that’s a huge trauma to your body. You are denying your trauma in service of a narrative. This doesn’t mean the abortion wasn’t the right decision for you but nature doesn’t care about your decisions or narratives.
Instead of judging each other, try to see your female body as the miracle of creation and not a machine you happen to live in.
I saw a friend today who is about to give birth. Her belly is so big, it’s hard to tell if the baby is inside or outside. “It’s your birthday tomorrow!” I said. “Happy upcoming birthday!”
“Is it,” she said indifferently. “I don’t know what day it is. All I can think about is my baby.”
This woman has a serious health condition that makes pregnancy and birth very complicated. She and her husband also have a shared genetic defect that makes the likelihood of delivering a viable baby very low. For her, the baby wasn’t real until the genetic tests came back at 12 weeks and showed she was free of the genetic curse. My friend was going to abort if the tests came back bad. She was absolutely desperate for this child, and to protect her psyche from shattering she didn’t let the baby be a baby in her mind until she knew it was going to be fine. So anybody who says that it’s the same baby at 4 weeks as at 40 weeks is being a jerk. There’s an enormous effort of the female body that goes into the time period between 4 weeks and 40. Discounting that effort is stupid. And if you are a woman, it’s really really counterproductive.
Is a miscarriage at 4 weeks the same tragedy as a stillbirth at 40? Obviously not. It doesn’t mean there isn’t immense suffering with an early miscarriage but there’s really no comparison. Tomorrow is going to be 8 years since the day when my son’s heart stopped at over 39 weeks of gestation, so I unfortunately have every reason to know this. I never aborted but judging a woman who had to make that tragic decision is just low.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment