I was forced to obey men’s demands in my harrowing miscarriage. That isn’t ‘pro-life’
As the Supreme Court’s draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaks, I would like to share my story. It painfully highlights the ignorance, inconsistency and unintended consequences of anti-abortion laws.
It’s 2009. I’m in a Catholic hospital, in labor with my first child at 21 weeks. They tell me the labor cannot be stopped. My baby will be born preterm and die this day.
My contractions are painful, but not progressing. The nurse quietly explains that the hospital cannot offer me Pitocin, a drug regularly used to help women deliver healthy babies, to speed things up. I later understand that the hospital’s Catholic policy considers this an abortion.
Instead, the staff offers an epidural, an invasive and terrifying procedure, for pain relief. I first resist out of fear but hours later, exhausted, I surrender. They insert a needle into my spinal cord to numb my body so the baby can arrive slowly — as God intends.
I am in labor for 12 hours, monitored but unassisted, at increased risk of infection. My son enters the world, breathing. Then, the cold punchline from the same nurse: No lifesaving measures can be performed, because a 21-week fetus is “incompatible with life.”
You see, even religious policy relied on basic science in the end: He couldn’t be saved, neither inside the womb nor outside. The outcome of a late-term miscarriage before viability is a medical certainty. Accordingly, hospital staff made zero effort to stop labor or save the baby. Their only effort was to deny me choice in how those tragic hours unfolded.
This is what we mean by reproductive freedom. That decision should have been left to me and my doctor, not dictated by celibate men claiming to interpret the word of God for me. I was denied better care because of emotion without logic.
My story is truly mild. I know women who were forced to carry dead babies to term because it offended political sensibilities to let a doctor deliver a baby with no heartbeat before 40 weeks. There are worse stories. But mine is personal and deeply revealing to me.
History is replete with reasons why I am pro-choice. The radical right is staging a multi-pronged assault on liberalism to criminalize abortion, restrict access to birth control and convince women they are subservient and belong in the home. But I’ll never support going back to a time when women are forced to have sex anytime their husbands demand, with no options to prevent unwanted pregnancies, literally unable to claim ownership over their own bodies. Never.
My reasons are personal. After losing my son, I had three more pregnancies. Each one required medical intervention to sew my cervix closed to avoid early labor. It’s as terrible as it sounds and we narrowly escaped double catastrophe with my last. In the end, I delivered four babies. Pregnancy was scary and hard on my body, and I don’t want to do it again. My husband wanted a daughter but fully supports my choice. Others aren’t so lucky.
Speaking of daughters, I think about the daughters being raped by fathers, uncles and brothers. The trafficking victims being passed around by evil men. The radical right loudly invokes them to tug at heartstrings, then turns a cold cheek to the 11-year old impregnated by her dad, forcing more unwanted trauma on her body.
It isn’t pro-life to deny choice to mothers in labor. It isn’t pro-life to force children to birth children. It isn’t pro-life to advocate for victims as a gimmick for votes, then whitewash reality by saying the product of incestuous rape is God’s miracle.
It is misogyny.
Pray for America.