My dear sweet daughter,
I am so sorry.
I am heartbroken we live in a world where people have told you you have no sense.
That you are incapable of making decisions for yourself.
That you are not smart enough to discern your own path.
I am so sorry.
Like you, I can scarcely believe people we don’t even know would tell us what to do with our bodies.
I am so sorry.
It feels like another door slammed in the face of your generation when the highest court in what used to be the Land of the Free says you don’t count.
My peers and I got complacent. We grew up in an era in the US where we were allowed to determine how many children we could have. As time elapsed, mostly male lawmakers in state after state made it harder for us to exercise choice. The vast majority of these men (and women) have no medical degree, yet they decided they knew what was best for us. I think that’s called patriarchy - look it up.
We are lucky to live in a country - New Zealand - where abortion was decriminalized two years ago. It was late in coming, small comfort in a world where injustice feasts on the ignorance of the cyberverse, metastasizing like a tumor.
You and I will hear the stories so many women are afraid to put their names to. I listened as a former colleague told me how happy she and her husband were to have conceived a second child. She was nearly five months pregnant when she learned the fetus had a fatal flaw. Doctors gave the couple an impossible choice - wait for the life inside her to die or terminate the pregnancy. They chose the latter with great sorrow. Would you have made a different choice? Would I? It is not for us to decide.
A friend got pregnant at age 19 to an abusive alcoholic. She did not want to postpone her education or sacrifice her body to carry a child. She refused to be forever tied to her ex-partner, so she ended the pregnancy. Would you have made a different choice? Would I? It is not for us to decide.
Another woman got pregnant at age 42. She had an IUD, which has a failure rate of less than one percent. She also had two young children and was divorced from their father. She told her new partner she was not going to have any more kids; she had a chronic health condition and the shop was closed. Imagine her terror when she learned her contraception had failed. Her partner did not want to become a late-in-life father. She chose abortion. Would you have made a different choice? Would I? It is not for us to decide.
You and I will seek to understand the numbers, even though we know data doesn’t drive the social discourse, emotion does.
-Nearly one in four American women will have an abortion by age 45
-60% of women seeking abortions are already mothers, and more than half of those have more than one child.
-43% of abortions occur within the first six weeks of pregnancy
-Americans are having half as many abortions as they did 30 years ago, thanks to better contraceptive use and less teenage sex
-Six in ten women are having an abortion for the first time. Less than a fifth of women have had two or more.
-About half of all abortions in clinics in the US in 2020 were medication (pill)
(Sources: Guttmacher Institute, Pew Research Center)
Many people don’t care about these figures. They will dispute or ignore them, believing each fertilized egg is sacred; likening an embryo to a fully-autonomous person. They believe with all their hearts that criminalizing abortion will save lives. We know criminalization pushes abortion to another place and makes the procedure more dangerous. It’s like a city that uses a ramshackle bus to deliver homeless people to another town, claiming to have solved a problem. Those who survived the trip are still unhoused somewhere else.
In countries where abortion is illegal, like Poland, women and their families suffer. They are denied cancer treatment and surgery for incomplete miscarriages and they die. The rate of unsafe abortions is four times higher in countries with restrictive abortion laws than in countries where abortion is legal, according to the World Health Organization. Abortion restrictions hit poor women hardest. “Let them move to another state!” some people say. Leaving friends, family and your job is exponentially harder when your bank balance perches on the knife-edge of $20 and overdrawn.
The thing is, we women have been trying to control our fertility since ancient times. Pregnancies were terminated through herbal portions, sharpened implements, the application of abdominal pressure, and other methods.
One of our ancestors died from an illegal abortion in the late 1920’s. She already had four children and had moved to a new town in Ohio where she lacked family support. Her daughter would later recall seeing her mother in a casket when she was three-and-a-half years old. “She was put in a coffin in the parlor… They used to keep someone vigil at the coffin for 24 hours and candles were burning and the thing that sticks in my mind is someone was holding A, and he was only a baby. He’s reaching out for his mother in the coffin and crying…”
Laws that prohibit abortion are a relatively recent development, according to a report in the National Library of Medicine (pubmed.gov). In the early Roman Catholic church, abortion was permitted for male fetuses in the first 40 days of pregnancy and for female fetuses in the first 80-90 days. Pope Sixtus V declared all abortion murder in 1588. Three years later, a new pope found the sanction unworkable and again allowed early abortions. Three hundred years would pass before the Catholic Church under Pius IX again declared all abortion murder. According to PubMed.gov, “...the prohibition of abortion has never been declared an infallible teaching.”
Soranus, a 2nd-century Greek physician, recommended abortion in cases involving health complications as well as emotional immaturity and provided detailed suggestions in his work Gynecology. Diuretics, herbs, enemas, fasting, and bloodletting were prescribed as safe abortion methods, although Soranus advised against the use of sharp instruments to induce miscarriage since it risked organ perforation.
An 8th-century Sanskrit text instructs women wishing to induce an abortion to sit over a pot of steam or stewed onions (now there’s an image).
The technique of massage abortion, involving pressure to the pregnant abdomen, has been practiced in Southeast Asia for centuries.
Physical means of inducing abortion, such as battery, exercise, and tightening the girdle — were reported among English women during the early modern period.
The use of candles and other objects, such as glass rods, penholders, curling irons, spoons, sticks, knives, and catheters was reported during the 19th century in the United States (sources: pubmed.gov, bionity.com).
No daughter of mine will ever squat over a pot of stewed onions. I will support you, no matter what life throws your way. If you decide to become a mother, I will whoop and cheer and hold back your long hair if morning sickness makes you puke. If you decide against motherhood, I will love you just as much. You will be no less a person for not having given birth, or for not having adopted a child. You are special to me not because of your reproductive capacity, but because of who you are. You are a worthy human and a wonderful young woman. You deserve agency over your own body. You deserve to be allowed to chart your life’s path.
Your father and I wanted you fiercely. For nine months, we tried to get pregnant. I started to wonder if we would ever succeed. Seeing those two pink lines on the pee test resulted in one of the happiest mornings of my life. Learning just over a year later that we would have your brother was another glorious day. Your dad and I knew parenthood would be tough, but we could handle it. We had a loving relationship free of violence or substance abuse. We weren’t rich, but we had enough money to feed, clothe and house you. Many couples cannot say the same. In America, mothers and fathers hang without a safety net: no paid parental leave, no paid child care, no universal access to health care and a child support default rate of around 30 percent (in 2020). People who don’t want government to help with any of those things are not pro-life, they’re pro-pregnancy. A fetus counts in the womb. Outside, he’s on his own. This fight is not about saving lives, it’s about controlling women.
You want to save vulnerable humans? Protect school children from firearm massacres.
Government shouldn’t be involved in people’s personal lives, right? For sure, it shouldn’t be involved in your uterus. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness start with our bodies.
The Great Regression involving the obliteration of reproductive rights is a fairly new phenomenon, even among the Republican party. Justice Harry Blackmun, who authored the 1973 case Roe v. Wade prohibiting many state and federal restrictions on abortion was appointed by Republican Richard Nixon. Former Republican President George H.W. Bush once supported Planned Parenthood.
What now? Anne Lamott wrote Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “...handed over the insanity codes when he announced his conviction that overturning Roe v Wade is just the beginning; he took the lid off the stew pot so we could all peek in at how the aliens think.” Lamott says we must work like hell to hold onto the Senate and House (good luck though, thanks to gerrymandering and voter suppression laws) and “remember we have a great cause, protecting the lives, health, and equality of women.”
I will be here for you until my dying breath, sweet girl. We can be the helpers our sisters need. We can listen, we can vote, we can donate. It will never feel like enough.
I am so sorry this has happened. I may be past the age of pregnancy, but I will stand with you and your generation in this fight.