tw: mention of miscarriage/pregnancy loss, suicidal ideation
I’d actually been meaning to write this for a couple weeks now, but hadn’t mustered up the activation energy and then finally tweeted a short thread with some thoughts.
The Supreme Court decision is now official, and I still wonder: what do we actually gain from telling our abortion stories? I know it’s still important to let others know they’re not alone in their experience and most people know someone who’s had one.
Every time rights get rolled back, though, there’s always several people who describe desperately wanted pregnancies where they found out late that something went wrong, an incompatibility with life and had to make the difficult decision to minimize their child’s suffering and start the grieving process. Those are HEAVY stories, and to be forced to relive that decision and reflect back on the horror if they hadn’t had access to abortion care (miscarriages have the same coding as abortion if remains need to be removed) every time restrictions are proposed is cruelty. Which is kind of the point, and I feel like I’m screaming into a void every time, beating the same drums over and over and over again. I don’t know how to explain further that you should care about other people.
In the introduction to Dr. Meera Shah’s You’re The Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion, she notes that telling our stories is powerful, but at the same time we shouldn't have to, especially when it makes us a potential target for the anti-abortion crowd. And yet, we're the voice missing from the discussion most often. A lot of words are put into the mouths of the unborn (or preborn, I guess is the trendier term even though both are factually incorrect), and because the decisions around a pregnancy are so personal, they’re often NOT shared.
For myself, my actual abortion experience wasn’t traumatic. It was personal interactions leading up to it and afterwards that were more harmful. I don’t know that I necessarily owe anyone specifics, but at the same time I almost feel like I need to because circumstances then would play differently under today’s laws a decade later (the specific in this case is that Idaho copied the spirit of Texas’s law and allows family members of either parent to sue). While I don’t need to relitigate the past, I can’t help but be reminded of how many people simply don’t want me to exist. It’s weirdly the one thing that pulled me back from the brink of suicidal ideation- living my life to spite those who’d rather I sacrifice myself for a hypothetical human being, for either the flesh and blood trafficked away to an adoptive couple or for the bitter young mother I’m afraid I would’ve been (if I hadn’t ended my life).
Abortion and reproductive choice cannot and should not be taboo topics and it could be worth it if we share our stories to people when they need to hear it. But it’s really hard to measure that impact, and sometimes it feels like opening yourself up to leak into the void.