Choice, For Better Or For Worse

Today is Blog for Choice Day, as Emily reminded us.

I used to be vociferously Pro-Choice. It gave me a kind of contrary pleasure to attend a conservative Catholic university my freshman year (I wasn’t Catholic at the time; long backstory there) and turn in a paper about a woman’s right to choose. I got a B+, to my professor’s credit (in retrospect, it was not really my best work, so a B+ was actually pretty generous). I felt superior in my knowledge. I researched all the medical stages of embryonic and fetal development.

One of my strongest points, I felt, was that at the point of many first-trimester abortions, the human embryo could have been any embryo. A fish embryo. The early developmental stages of a human embryo meant it was, physically, unable to feel pain or regret or fear. It had no personality. It wasn’t, essentially, a human being at all, I argued.

Medically speaking, I feel those arguments are probably still correct.

However, my emotional stance on some of this issue has changed. After spending years defending abortion as a medical procedure only, I had one, a couple of years after K. The procedure itself was unremarkable. The clinic was clean and quiet. No protesters were there. I was under general anesthesia. I had no discomfort or cramping afterward, and only light bleeding.

Once it was over, I slept the rest of that Saturday and went back to my (awful) life. I thought little of it except when I felt a flash of relief that I did not have to endure another unplanned pregnancy and childbirth. Another adoption, possibly, or perhaps single parenthood. I was free and clear. Unlike my first pregnancy, no one knew. I missed no work, I had no outward signs, it was as if the pregnancy had never happened.

Fast forward to 2003. I was married, we tried to start a family, we were failing and no one knew why. At that point, I was still convinced the adoption part of my life was fine, and so I fell to thinking about the pregnancy I had terminated. I experienced a rush of grief and guilt over it. I cried a lot of tears, thinking, again, that I had thrown away a chance. I grieved for that baby I had been so eager to rid my body of.

It was harder still when we lost our first pregnancy. First it was there, a tiny blip of a heartbeat, and then it just wasn’t. I endured two weeks of waiting for my body to miscarry naturally, and then I broke down so badly that my husband was actually frightened. I called the next day to schedule a D & C. All the proper precautions were taken; indeed, there was no baby, no heartbeat. Just a slowly disappearing shadow. A memory that was being taken away.

Had I scarred my body? Made it impossible for another babe to grow in there? The guilt gnawed and gnawed.

In Bean’s pregnancy, bleeding in my 9th week sent us rushing to the ER, sure of more bad news, and yet the Ultrasound tech showed us a wiggling, perfect, clearly human shape. At nine weeks, he had arms and legs. His heartbeat boomed through the doppler.

Here, mommy, here I am. Don’t worry, I’m OK! He seemed to be saying.

Of course, that is impossible, I know that. That was me, personalizing my baby, my very wanted baby, projecting. At 9 weeks, I know he was still very far from a viable baby. Consciousness, personality, preferences were not formed yet. But he was mine, he was ours, and I loved him. So I projected.

In the end, my body is fine, I endured every test, there is no evidence that abortion hurts women physically when it is done safely and correctly. As for now, however, I could never counsel a woman to have one, on a personal level. Not anymore. My Church demands that I condemn abortion altogether, yet I find myself unable to do that, as well.

I’m torn between my own reality, a changing view colored by my experiences with loss, and the reality of the rights of other individual women, to have the choice not to carry an unwanted pregnancy and to have safe abortion available to them as an option. When we say to a woman “You must have this child, and if you don’t want to be a parent then you must place it for adoption, because the fertilized egg/blastocyst/embryo within you trumps your own rights for your own body, health, and emotional well-being” we further and further dehumanize all women. Women cease to be people and become incubators. It’s sliding right down that slippery slope to The Handmaid’s Tale.

To be sure, I am uncertain on some points, and I am terrified by others. Partial-birth abortion horrifies me. Once a fetus becomes viable, even if massive intervention were needed to sustain a micro-preemie, my thoughts on choice become less certain. On the other hand, it is not my life that has ever been in danger from a high-risk pregnancy. Not my pregnancy that is assured, by medical outcome such as anencephaly , to be incompatible with life. I can only imagine the heartbreak of having to make such a decision.

When I hear of a woman choosing abortion, I am often melancholy. I wonder if she is sad, too. Some women are not; I’m not saying everyone has to be. My sadness has more to do with me than with the woman choosing, I suspect. I long to be pregnant one more time. I remember that I, too, once chose to end the pregnancy I’d been given, viewed it, fretfully, as an inconvenience for me, and now I know I may not get the chance again.

I do not wave posters of fetuses in the faces of women walking through clinic doors. I do not scream “murderer” at the doctors who perform abortions. I don’t even light candles at vigils. I simply know that for myself it is not an option anymore. I continue to feel regret at having had an abortion.
In the end, however, regardless of my sadness and conflicting feelings, I must come down on the side of a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body, including early abortion. And since I advocate for these choices, I must further say that in the case of medically diagnosed danger to the mother, late-term abortions should be a final, wrenching, but legal option.

Unplanned and even unwanted pregnancies happen every day. Abstinence unless/until one is ready to be a parent is a lofty and mostly unattainable goal. Birth control fails. And we cannot push the beliefs of our God and our Churches upon those who do not believe as we do. So yes, I am here, blogging for choice today, because I feel I do not have the right, and our government does not have the right, to tell a woman what she can do with her own body.

*If upon reading this, there are those who would like to inform me of my failure of duties as a Catholic/Christian, please…don’t. I am quite aware of the teachings of the Church and have read the Bible. I am fully cognizant of the disconnect between my feelings and what I am supposed to feel. This, like many other things, will be between God and me one day. I will humbly accept His judgment. However, I don’t have to accept anyone else’s. Disagree with this post? Your comments are welcome. Just keep it on topic and respectful, please. Thank you.