I have written about my passion for women’s health and pregnancy in this blog before. For a decade I was an active La Leche League Leader. And during that time I had the privilege of knowing a wide variety of women from different backgrounds and beliefs. As a La Leche League Leader I witnessed the complexity behind women's health. I hugged a Catholic woman who with the permission of her priest aborted a non-viable siamese twin fetus at the start of her third trimester. The loss hurt her to the core and she felt like she had given birth to a monster. I comforted a father who told me how he and his wife had to go to an abortion clinic because the fetus his wife was carrying had died at the start of the second trimester. It was the wife’s first pregnancy and seeing protesters and then sitting with teens who were getting abortions just made her pain that much worse. She was mourning and I remember thinking it was insane she could not have the procedure done in the privacy of her OB/GYN office. I had a mom of twins confess to me about her selective abortion. Another mom had brought the subject up and expressed her pro-life beliefs not knowing that the woman sitting next to her had reduced her pregnancy from three implanted fetuses to two. Another woman told me she used a surrogate for her second pregnancy because she almost bled out and died after giving birth to her first. And then a grandmother I know had to rush to the hospital because her daughter was going into surgery so they could find the source of her bleeding after she gave birth to her second. I witnessed postpartum depression and felt powerless to help the mother and child who were suffering. I saw a small sickly baby who had been exposed to chemotherapy for cancer that was detected in the mom early on in pregnancy. Doctors had advised the couple to get an abortion. They chose not to. I will always wonder if that baby suffered or survived. I watched as a teen mom grew into a woman after giving birth to her son who was deaf. She went on to learn sign language, and become a mentor to other teen moms. And these are just a smattering of the stories I and other women have witnessed. Pregnancy is messy. And all the moms I mentioned here are white and middle-upper class. So they all have privilege. I can’t imagine what any of these scenarios would be like for a young woman living in a state where abortion is illegal. And I am lucky that rape and incest are not part of my collective stories.
