Re-Framing Abortion:
Sex, Power, Money, and Fear of the Sacred
Part 4
I’ve met a few mothers who say they've loved having a big family and that not only wanted but have enjoyed raising their 8 or 10 or 12 children. Motherhood is for them the profession they felt “called” to.
I’ve known other women, often the eldest girl in a large family, who were expected/required to take care of their siblings from an early age, and who resented it and felt they were robbed of childhood.
I remember one particular LatinX woman raised in a religion that views both contraception and abortion as sins. She was pregnant with her first baby and had chosen to birth at a birth center I helped found. She wasn’t conscious of not wanting to be a mother. So, both she and her husband were shocked that, once their baby was born, she found herself viscerally unable to care for and bond with it. (As I recall, she did breastfeed, knowing that it was essential for her baby’s health.) However, their baby became her husband’s child.
Fortunately, her husband was willing and able to adjust his career and move fully into the role of mothering, which is a different role than fathering, regardless of the gender of that parent.
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I remember reading a memoir of a journalist in Ireland who wrote frankly about many families she knew - including her own - where the mother was abusive to all of her children and let them know they that they hadn't been wanted. Her book created a huge storm. It should be noted that most of the fathers in these families did none of the parenting, except maybe to enforce "discipline" (i.e.physical punishment). They spent most of their off-work hours at the local pub, leaving the mothers to fend for themselves, often too little money for food and other necessities.
Of Note: Ireland, a bastion of strict Catholicism, where it used to be impossible to get contraception, much less an abortion, legalized abortion a few years back.
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I’ve had several friends tell me that their mother told them when they were quite young that having him/her in effect ended their life. These kids felt guilty for being born.And that wound remained well past middle age, even though one of such friend had become a psychotherapist in order to help others work through early trauma, such as not being wanted.
When I read philanthropist Melinda Gates’ book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, I was struck by how, in her travels through “developing” countries, listening to mothers everywhere, numbers of women had come up to her and begged her to take the baby they held in their arms. They told her they couldn’t give that baby what it needed and deserved and were desperate for their baby to have a better life, raised by a white woman in America.
These were pivotal moments in Melinda’s life that resulted in her, as a devoted Catholic who still attends Mass daily, to become an outspoken advocate for women’s need and fundamental human right to have access to birth control and to be able to choose if - and when - they want to bear and parent a child. Although Melinda didn’t mention abortion in that book, right after the Supreme Court threw out Roe, she publicly stated that the U.S. was “moving backwards”.
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Let's look at one of the outcomes of the ending of Roe: making abortion a criminal offense.
Despite being in the minority, many folks who push for abortion to be illegal also want to criminalize any women who attempts one, as well as anyone – including doctors who perform them and relatives or friends – who aids any woman in getting an abortion. Some state legislators are introducing bills to make it a punishable crime to cross state lines to get an abortion.
In addition, a proportion of these folks also want to prevent girls from getting sex education and prevent both girls and women from getting contraception. They conveniently ignore the fact it’s people they know and love who want to use contraception and people they know who are having - or have had - an abortion: friends, neighbors, co-workers, folks they sit next to in church, even close family members.
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I believe most anti-abortion folks are in denial about the collateral suffering and death their “pro-life” position results in.
For one thing, more and more Ob/Gyn physicians are leaving the practice of obstetrics. They are not willing to live in fear of losing their license to practice medicine if they perform an abortion. Some fear for their lives. As a result, many and more and more rural areas of the U.S. are left with no obstetrician to provide care.
History has shown the limiting a woman’s access to contraception will not keep her from trying to limit the number of children she has, even if it results in serious injury or death.
Making a criminal of a woman who attempts an abortion – as well as anyone who would provide her with a safe abortion - will not end abortions. It will however result in suffering, and sometimes death, for those women who do not have the money or other means to find a safe abortion and so undergo an unsafe one, performed on themselves or by someone else.
Who are these women? Most often the marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed, the poor, the poorly educated. And also women being abused by a partner. And they are predominantly women of color.
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A vocal minority of "pro-life" folks not only want to outlaw all abortion but want to prevent kids from receiving sex education in the schools and from having access to any form of contraception. With girls in the U.S. now starting to menstruate on average at age 12 and many starting much earlier - and with most of those pre-teens who become pregnant having been impregnated by older boys or men, sometimes by rape, sometimes not - the results are horrific.
Is the aim to stop young people and adults from engaging in sexual intercourse, except within marriage? Some folks believe the only purpose for sex is to have children. That has always been the stance of some orthodox religions.
Even when girls in fundamentalist religious families agree to be “betrothed” to their dads, and have a group “coming out” ceremony in which they pledge their virginity to their father until marriage, many of these girls get pregnant. Why? Raging hormones. A yearning to be loved. Confusing sex with love. The belief that a baby will love them unconditionally.
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Black and white thinking does not allow us to see the full picture or know the full "truth" of any issue. It can be the result of ignorance, or of being raised in fear and feeling powerless over one’s life. Or, when it comes to abortion, feeling guilty for having had one.
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I have a tendency to think that I know the reasons why others believe what they do and behave in ways I don't like. Judging others is easy for me. As I've grown older, it's become a spiritual practice to let go of judging others. For one thing, thinking that I know why another person believes or acts the way they do turns them into "others", people I cannot have empathy for. And holding them in that light turns them into two-dimensional beings I can hate. It also limits their ability to grow and change.
Do I still engage in judging other? Yes, of course. But I hope I don’t take myself and my beliefs quite as seriously as I used to.
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I’ve been in the field of babies and mothers for almost fifty years, advocating for societal and legislative change. I’m certainly not the only one to observe that there is no greater harm done to a child than to be unwanted and un-welcomed into life. Psychologists, teachers, and researchers have made the same observation. For that reason alone, making all forms of birth control – including abortion – safe, legal and accessible should be part of every woman’s health care... regardless of how distasteful or repugnant it may be to you or me personally.
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Let's look one of the most immediate and longterm impacts of outlawing and criminalizing abortion... the impact on the children who were not wanted, many of whom have never felt welcomed into this world.
Children who were not wanted know it. I am not referring to those who weren't wanted at conception but those not wanted throughout their womb life and, in some instances, after being born and throughout their childhood. Many a mother, discovering she is pregnant, has questioned and doubted whether she wanted this child. Most come to accept the idea of that child, and even embrace it, at some early time in the pregnancy. That baby knows that its mother has had a change of heart.
However, when that desire not to be pregnant is the dominant feeling of a woman's pregnancy and pervades the full nine plus months of that baby's life, it's a different matter.
An individual who was not wanted may be plagued by lifelong feelings of self-doubt or shame, and an underlying sense that they should never have been born.
Memories like this, which occur before brain development, are called “implicit” memories, meaning they are stored in the child’s body, as opposed to being stored in the brain.
Many still refute the notion that there is conscious awareness in the womb, but more and more scientific "evidence" is showing that, as most indigenous people have believed, consciousness pre-dates the development of the brain.
And implicit memory is today a proven fact, often coming in a dream as a result of some unexpected stimulus. To learn more about implicit memory and trauma at the start of life, I urge you to look at the work of the Association of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology [APPPAH], which can be found on the website birthpsychology.com.
Many children who were not wanted act out in aggressive, high-risk, or self-harming ways. As teens and adults they may turn to drugs, alcohol, or suicide. The longterm implications of a child not being wanted doesn’t stop there. An individual who was not wanted may become a drain on their family’s or society’s resources.
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Too few "pro-life" folks are working to create social policies which would actually support their values. Here are a few much-needed "pro-life" policies:
Paying for or reimbursing parents for childbirth and parenting classes
Granting women a subsidy for the time they are breastfeeding
Having universal, guaranteed paid maternity pay - ideally starts at the 6th month of pregnancy – to lower the mother’s level of stress, reduce birth complications, and give her time to prepare fully for the birth, the postpartum, and parenting
Having paid leave for the father/partner or whomever is the 2nd person caring for that baby, as is done in Sweden
Supporting employers to create workplace policies that allow for job-sharing, part-time work, and work from home, for new parents for the first year after birth
Creating and staffing neighborhood centers for education and support for parents and families, in order to diminish the isolation and loneliness so many parents experience
Of course, all of these policies are called “coddling” by many who believe that people who become parents should bear the full responsibility for the wellbeing of their children and expect no outside help. Yet these are often the same folks who support subsidies for many industries, oppose sex education in the schools, the availability of contraception and abortion, and don't see the hypocrisy in their stance.
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Many Americans vote only for candidates who agree with them on a single issue, abortion being the most common one. In a world where there is no such thing as an isolated issue because every issue is connected to and dependent upon other issues, single-issue voting makes no sense whatsoever. And it is dangerous.
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Why is it so hard to prevent an unwanted pregnancy?
Assuming both parties are fertile and wanting to have sex, preventing pregnancy requires that at least one of the parties thinks ahead and communicates their feelings and desires to their sexual partner.
Both parties in a consensual sexual relationship are fully responsible for a conception. Ideally, they are in agreement and together come to a decision about what form of contraception to use, and then take the necessary steps. This is hardly easy for a teen or young adult, whose hormones are raging, whose reasoning processes are still immature and - in the case of many girls - who want to be liked.
Puberty is occurring at a much younger age than ever, even to girls as younger as six! And preventing unwanted conception requires that both people understand and accept the possibility that, despite careful planning, a pregnancy might still occur.
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Whenever sex is forced or there is a power differential between the two people, such as age or education or social class, then the subject of contraception and abortion becomes even more complex.
A last note to consider: Whenever a female is fertile, the ultimate responsibility for preventing an unwanted pregnancy actually lies with the male, It is his sperm that results in conception. Without male sperm, there can be no pregnancy.
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Women have the right not to be pregnant. Yet this has never been written into law. The Supreme Court case of Roe v Wade made abortion a privacy issue, therefore guaranteed in the Constitution. However, the decision about abortion, under Roe, was placed in the hands of physicians, not women. The Court’s written majority opinion called abortion “a medical decision”, thus placing the decision to abort in the hands of an outside "authority", a doctor. That’s not much better than placing it in the hands of a legislative body or a church authority, or a mother-in-law.
I will continue this essay in Part 5