That we might survive

For much of my life, my body has not felt like my own. So this week, when American women’s bodily autonomy has not yet been taken (and it is critical to remember not yet) but lies on the precipice of very soon being taken from us, I have this sense that I cannot remain quiet any longer. 

On the one hand, I don’t really believe anything will come from yet another woman shouting into what feels like an echoing abyss that I, too, want my body to be my own. And yet on the other, I do believe in the power of story and of community and of a chorus of people saying the truths we have long been afraid to say out loud, if not to change the course of seismic legal shifts that have been both quietly and, really, quite loudly, in motion for years, then at least to encourage our own sense of freedom within us as we fight. 

And, I want to make this personal. I have pushed against the notion that it must be personal for others to care, that it is seemingly only when framed as your mothers, your daughters, your sisters, that people can even marginally begin to feel for that which does not physically affect them. But equally, when we speak of abortion and other, interlinked manifestations of gender-based oppression, we often speak of distant, detached tropes that give us the option of distancing and detaching ourselves from the feeling of an unintended or life-threatening pregnancy, the process of choosing to end or continue with that pregnancy, and the ability to act upon that self-determined choice, even when we are those in support of that choice. We use rights-based arguments and speak of autonomy in abstract terms and vaguely refer to being pro-choice but not pro the choice someone might actually choose and we don’t always intentionally draw near to what it feels like, within the roots of your humanity and sense of worth, for control of your body, of your life, to be taken from you. Because that’s what this is. 

When I learned of the leaked Supreme Court draft which outlines what we all feared was coming for the reproductive rights of those with uteruses in the United States, I thought of what I’ve frequently thought of for the last four months: the morning, in January, when, alone in a hospital in London, I realised that I more than likely had miscarried a very early pregnancy, so early that it will never be known with full certainty, so early that I only ever knew about it when it was already ending itself. It was a pregnancy that, as a result of intentionally chosen medical contraception in place, was incredibly unlikely to occur but seems to have occurred nonetheless. It was a pregnancy that, had it not naturally ended within weeks of its beginning, would have likely progressed to a very dangerous and unviable state that could have put me at great physical risk and required intentional termination to keep me alive. It was a pregnancy that I, and the other person involved in its occurrence, did not want, for which we each were in no way ready, and which would have entirely, and I believe negatively, altered both our lives and wellbeing. So it was a pregnancy that, had it not ended naturally, I would have chosen to not continue. 

I have long been a vocal supporter of the right for those with uteruses to access all care they need for their bodies, including abortion. I believe that we have full right to exercise our sexual autonomy with reproductive freedom, such that we should be able to utilise all healthcare options available to have sexual lives while preventing or mitigating pregnancy or birth until we determine we are ready and would like for our bodies to do so. I have long assumed that if I ever were to find that I had become pregnant without intention to do so that I would abort it. But I have always wondered how the moment it occurred would feel in reality. 

Logically I knew that for every person, it is a different experience and that for every person there is a different relationship to the occurrence of pregnancy and the circumstances surrounding its need to end and their exercise of their right to do so, but it is hard to appreciate the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of those dynamics until one is in it. Ours was an exceptionally intimate experience, most of the details of which I will fiercely guard as only mine and that of the other person involved to know and hold and cherish. Because for me, the experience of learning I was pregnant after it had already ended, despite all efforts to utilise all healthcare that is safely accessible to me to prevent its occurrence, was challenging and sad and confusing and heavy to carry. And also, all throughout, I was clearly, calmly, and absolutely sure about my decision to seek an abortion had the pregnancy not naturally concluded itself. 

Because the thing is, for me, it was also an experience of great empowerment and freedom and confidence. Because the thing is, I have long seen my body as some separate entity from myself, undeserving of the protection and care that I was prepared to exercise for myself through abortion and which I and the other involved wrapped around me as I lived through what occurred on its own. Because the thing is, for many years previous, I would never have felt the sureness to say with utmost clarity: I am a human worthy of the freedom to engage in sexual experience on my own terms and worthy of the freedom to utilise healthcare that allows me to experience that intimacy and joy for myself without a pregnancy occurring or continuing before I decide that that, too, is what I want and what will be best for my health and wellbeing. Because the thing is, many years previous to this, a man, whose face I never saw and whom I will never meet again, decided my body was his to forcibly claim for his own desires, and for years after I shrunk and hid from ever being in my body long enough to even acknowledge what he had done, let alone to grant myself the chance to be fully present to the ways my body can experience and provide pleasure and fulfilment when I choose it. Because the thing is, these things are inextricably linked: the man who raped me and the Supreme Court that is writing away my ability to access safe abortion, they are both taking my body from me, taking my life from me. They are saying the same thing: you are not worthy of agency over your self. They are saying: you are less than, and we want to feel more than, and therefore your body is ours to control, with no intention of supporting my life through the consequences of that forced control. They are saying: let us use your body for our own benefit without complaint, but when you prioritise your own life first, by acting independently for your own benefit and desire, by not letting yourself experience physical or financial harm, by refusing to bear the product of our violence, we will punish you to keep you as ours, your body a public domain, your life only worthy if it is in sacrifice. 

I have long considered but never had the courage to tell the story of what was done to me many years ago, beyond some very, very few most dear individuals. I’ve drafted the words several times but always fell short at the conclusion, could never fully wrap my head around why and for what purpose I kept feeling the urge to say it all out loud. And to be honest, I thought I would likely never tell the story of what happened just a few months ago. There are many who are most close to me to whom these stories will come as a great surprise and may cause distress or confusion or hurt at the realisation that I lived them without their knowledge. Please know that it is not for lack of care that I never told you, but instead just the opposite. My telling these stories in this way can, I hope, be seen in celebration of my making a choice for me. I hope you’ll understand, and I hope you’ll trust me when I say that I am not only okay, but I am well.  

So it is not without great fear and hesitation that I put these stories to paper. But after this week I just knew: it is time. 

My miscarriage arrived after several months where, for the first time since I was raped, I finally was beginning to feel in full harmony with my body and to experience joy and safety and sense of self in making fully autonomous decisions about it and its relationship to others. Because until I had the experience of learning that a biological process I had actively taken steps to avoid was occurring within my body as I also watched my body actively terminate that process, knowing with such steadiness that it was a pregnancy I would have ended, I had never fully felt with confidence that it is entirely okay for me to choose to engage in sexual relationship and to choose to mitigate its consequent occurrences, that I am allowed and worthy to exercise autonomy over my own body and self in both of those ways. Navigating the complexity of that experience was truly the first time that I felt and acted with such a level of fierce love for my body and for myself. 

And until I lived that, I could not fully appreciate the significance of this right to abort and the weight of its being taken away. I thought I did – conceptually I knew it, could give every fact and talking point about forced pregnancies trapping women and children in cycles of poverty, increasing violence against women, causing immense mental and physical harm, inhibiting self-defined success and improvement, and reducing freedom and independence, and I never wavered in my support of it. But I didn’t really understand and certainly couldn’t fully feel it. Because while it is a healthcare decision involving one’s body, it was not a decision about my body as separate from me. It was a decision for me – not just ‘my body, my choice’, but me, a worthy and full human living a life, so my choice. Because we are not just bodies, and that’s the point.

Coming from Indiana, where, even as Roe v. Wade has yet to be overturned, abortion is already made difficult and traumatic to access and will likely soon be made criminal, most critically for those who do not hold the racial and economic power that I do, I feel the incredible weight of what my experience would have entailed and meant had I not been in London, where I am privileged to have free and safe and non-discriminatory access to all essential healthcare, including abortion. Even had I not been in London, within the American racial and class-based caste system I am less likely to be first to be targeted and policed under violent bills criminalising abortion or miscarriage or to be most catastrophically impacted by an end to legalised abortion. Every step of my experience, from thorough sexual education to affordable and effective contraception to respectful gynelogical care to safe abortion to social safety nets, is inequitably and unjustly granted to me and not to all. That meant that mine was truly a free and desired choice, which under different circumstances and constraints is not the reality for all who become pregnant and require abortion care. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, much of my experience will still be possible for me while it is ripped from those for whom a birth forced upon them against their will would be much more dire. And that fills me with sadness and rage. It also grants me the option of staying silent, or of reposting a few colourful instagram posts and then walking away when the fight gets real because it is easier for me, a white cisgendered woman, to sidle up to the white supremacist patriarchy so I can say thank you for the option to still access much of that power over my experience while women of colour, queer and trans folks, disabled women, poor women, and all other structurally marginalised people with uteruses suffer and, quite possibly, die. 

I can only begin to let myself feel and articulate the immense pain I would have experienced had I learned I was pregnant, at a time when I was finally reclaiming myself from the hands of men who felt it their right to rob me of my wholeness – enough to not only make my own active choices about what I wanted with my body but also enough to know with certainty what I did not want with my body and to be prepared to assert that desire – and to instead be forced to remain pregnant. It meant so much to me to be able to live that experience in a context where I not only felt I was in full ownership of my body but had the ability to act on that ownership. My body should have never been taken from me those years ago. Now, the overturning of Roe v. Wade feels like it is being taken from me again. And so it is with a new depth of grief and anger that I feel the utter cruelty of forcing those with uteruses to give birth against their will, capability, best interest, or desire.

I do not intend to make an argument for abortion only in instances of rape or to argue that sexual and bodily autonomy are only important or valid to those who have had that autonomy forcibly violated. In fact the opposite. Just as no one should ever have their body taken from them through sexual and gender-based violence, they should also never have their bodies taken from them with laws removing their ability to live freely through the pursuit of safe abortion, for whatever reason and under whatever context and whatever their choice. We are worthy of our bodies, our lives, being our own, full stop. 

When I try to feel what it would have been had I needed an abortion and that been inaccessible to me, let alone the possibility that I might have been investigated for felony because I miscarried, I want to contract and hide from the world again, just as I did after the same system of gender-based oppression allowed a man to rape me. But I am so tired of men, and the systems of power that benefit them, pushing us out of our bodies and taking us from ourselves. And so rather than hide any longer I am saying it all out loud, because to truly be in the fight requires I put something on the line for all of us, rather than remain in safe comfort for me. 

The same system of oppression that encouraged, allowed, and forgives a man to rape me is the same system that is trying to make it impossible for me to have accessed an abortion when I needed and wanted one, for me to be free enough to seek sexual relationship and to take actions to also live my life without pregnancy or without pregnancy-related harm. Through my miscarriage and the resulting decisions it put me face to face with, I got to exercise agency over my life despite the one very explicit instance and all the other constant daily attempts of men to take that from me. And I am not satisfied with that only existing for me. I want that freedom for all of us — not just for those with uteruses seeking abortion, but also for Black men whose bodies are taken by a police state, indigenous women whose bodies are violated and disappeared, Black women who lose their lives through inadequate maternal health care for their bodies, migrant families whose bodies are separated and caged, trans folks whose truest bodies are made illegal, poor folks whose bodies are exploited — because this is all connected, all part of the same system of supremacy, all an effort to control and keep down. 

Years ago a man nearly destroyed me and yet I came back and managed to reclaim joy and wholeness in union with my body and its chosen relationships to others. And when a pregnancy still happened to occur despite my very considered actions, though not a requisite for worthiness of the right to live your body as you choose, I moved with the utmost love as I let myself be certain that I would have asked for my body to release what it ended up releasing on its own. 

For me and the other person involved ours was no flippant or painless experience, nor was it tortured in indecision or disagreement. It was both sad and simple, emotional and ultimately peaceful, not a relief but also not at all a regret. I am a different — not wounded, but better —person because of it. It did not fit into any simple trope and or follow a clean-cut narrative. But these are the messy and uncomfortable and made-to-feel-shameful stories that can no longer go untold. 

So easily, those years ago, I could have been a woman in need of an abortion as a result of rape. So easily, just months ago, I could have been a woman in need of an abortion to end a pregnancy that otherwise would end my life. And so easily, had I not naturally miscarried successfully, I could have been a woman in need of an abortion for the straightforward and equally valid reason that remaining pregnant was the wrong and undesired thing for me. Because at the centre of all these possibilities, all these hidden stories, is this truth: we are worthy of being our own. And I refuse to let that simple fact of our humanity be stolen from us any more. 

I walked out of that experience knowing that I had magic within me to live through my work in children’s end of life care and that had I remained pregnant I would not have been able to give that to the world. I feel exceptionally grateful for the ability and opportunity to continue on that path with fullness of self, and for the other person involved to be able to continue living his magic for the world, too. And I won’t let the power and pride I feel for arriving at that choice for myself, that lived expression of saying ‘I am mine, I am my own,’ be taken from me anymore by staying silent. And that’s what they’re afraid of, isn’t it — that we might survive, and decide to live for ourselves.