Children Are Not Abstractions - And Neither Are Mothers
Why becoming a parent made me pro-choice
Welcome to the Trauma-Informed Take, where we talk about mental health, patriarchy, parenting, and religion / religious trauma! Today’s post is kind of heavy but I hope also provokes some thoughts. You know I love to hear those thoughts in the comments. If you read this and think someone else might enjoy it, will you forward it to them or share it on the socials?
The first thing I want to say is that I believe children deserve our best. Every child deserves a safe and loving home, to be treated with respect and compassion, and to be guided to maturity by a village that cares about them.
The second thing is that mothers, or anyone who can become pregnant, also deserve our best. From good prenatal and postnatal care to paid maternity leave to effective birth control for males and females. And they deserve agency and dignity in their lives, including in their reproductive decisions.
The third is that our lives, and our world, are made of competing interests. Yes, there are two interests at play in the issue of abortion. But I also believe that the one who has sentience, awareness of their own existence, ability to make conscious choices, and a fully established life must be weighted heavier when considering whose interest is of most importance.
With all that said, let’s begin.
When I was a young pro-lifer, devoutly defending the rights of the unborn as my religion (and political beliefs) told me I should, I had no idea what it took to be pregnant and birth a child. Much less devote the next 18-plus years of your life to raising them. Abortion is murder! I believed. “Just do your nine!” (I’m referencing the SNL skit, which you should definitely see if you haven’t yet!). Adopt the baby out if you don’t want it. Can’t be that hard, right?!
My thinking turned much less black-and-white as I went through my 20s and simultaneously deconstructed the faith of my youth. And I’m embarrassed to admit that I finally gained perspective on late-term abortions in 2016 during a Trump-Clinton presidential debate. Hillary pointed out that late-term abortions don’t occur because a woman spontaneously and cruelly decided to terminate a pregnancy, but because something has gone terribly wrong. The mother would be devastated by such a decision. *Forehead smack* Whoa.
Of course, late-term abortions have been used as a talking point by the Right to make everyone gasp in horror at how inhumane the Dems are, so I can sympathize with where I was coming from for so long. If all abortions can be represented by an caricature of a casually-decided abortion of a fully formed baby, it’s obvious what the “right” belief is.
As I inched closer to having a planned pregnancy, I began to realize the gravity of what I was going to do. I thought about how much my life would change, and whether I felt ready for it. And once I became pregnant, something shifted inside me. It’s perhaps hard to explain, and I know not all women feel this way – but I know many do.
Pregnancy takes over your body in a profound way. I felt myself as the carrier something distinctly separate from me but also completely dependent on me. I had what they call “easy” pregnancies. But no pregnancy is really easy, right? I experienced the morning sickness, exhaustion, pelvic pain. I made it look easy, I’m sure, but appearances don’t tell the whole story. My body had suddenly become foreign to me in ways that felt unnerving.
Even with my wanted, planned pregnancy, I still found myself thinking: Am I living this life?
And sometimes, if I’m being honest, I still feel that way. Is this my life? Am I living the right life? Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile the “me” pre-kids, the “me” that I’d always known myself as, with this person I am now who has two kids and calls herself “Momma.” Is that me? Was that my body that bore and birthed those children? Is this my body that cares for them now, day after day?
I want to be a mom. I want to have these kids. But I’m not going to pretend it’s easy and that there’s not times I wonder what my alternate-universe life would have been.
Because of the way I hold that tension, that ambivalence, myself – and experience it in my own body – I feel strongly that no mother, no person bearing a uterus, should be coerced into a completely life-altering trajectory.
I remember the afternoon when the Dobbs decision officially dropped, I was home alone with my infant son. I was enraged. And then I realized I was also afraid. I felt trapped. Like a caged wild animal, there was a desperation to escape, even if it meant chewing my own leg off.
My son, a rainbow baby, is planned and wanted. But in that moment, my social-political reality felt like it was crashing in on me, erasing the time-space continuum, and my chosen, wanted baby was also a coerced, forced-birth baby.
It’s not his fault. He didn’t choose to be born. We chose to have him. But every child deserves to have a narrative that they exist because they were wanted – even if unplanned – even if through ambivalence – and that the parent was able to make a free-will choice to say yes.
Many people hold a view of women as being natural mothers who lean hard into parenting once baby arrives. I think I’m a good mom. But I also don’t feel I fit the stereotype of the sweet, nurturing female who takes to motherhood like white on rice, who becomes consumed by her identity of raising those precious babies, #blessed. I think if more of us are honest about that, we create space for recognizing women as complex beings and moral agents that need autonomy over their own lives.
And of course, successful pregnancies end in births, births that now mean years of direct caring for another human. Yes, we can adopt out, but I touch more on the traumas and realities around that (including that most women keep their babies) in this article.
I knew there was going to be an enormous amount of work poured into parenting. Obviously, I was right, but I couldn’t viscerally understand it till I was in it.
Amanda Montei, writer of the Mad Moms Substack newsletter, provided words to the feelings I have been trying to articulate around this topic. She writes about a movie she watched where the choice to keep an unplanned baby was framed as obvious, and the end result of the woman’s life was essentially not a lot different than if she’d never had the baby.
Parenthood is not a form of labor here, but a mark of identity linked to a short few months in a woman’s life when sleep and hormones are disrupted and after which everything pretty much goes back to the way it was, except there is a cute child around doing cute things...But the idea that no matter how unplanned or initially unwelcome a pregnancy may be, the pregnant person will ultimately become the same person they would have been— the idea that pregnancy does not transform the body, or one’s economic condition, or one’s prospects for work, or one’s health, or one’s life, AT ALL—well, that all falls pretty flat in an era in which lawmakers and politicians believe that rape is preferable to abortion and healed by unwanted pregnancy.
Back in my young pro-life days I think I figured that’s what it would be like. A lot of care for the first 5 years until they go to school, then you just go back to work and everything goes back to how it was before, right?!
Ha. Ha.
Parenting is no joke. It’s a great job and it’s also the hardest job, because it never stops and it changes your whole identity. It can be boring, and too busy, and messy, and thankless, and it’s all too easy to lose yourself in the unending whirlwind.
It’s a little too on the nose that at the same time our reproductive rights were stripped away, we had a formula shortage, housing prices and college tuition are through the roof, childcare waitlists are a mile long, and politicians couldn’t even be bothered to renew the child tax credit of 2020–21. I’m quite uninterested in your pro-life stance, thank you very much.
But beyond our socio-political life, I believe coercion leads to suffering, that dangerous things happen when people feel trapped, that abortion is healthcare, and that every child deserves to exist because someone wanted them to.
This is a heavy topic, and I invite you to join me in the comments! It’s a safe and caring space (which I will enforce, don’t worry). Would love to hear your thoughts and feelings. Have you had your mind changed on abortion, or the “choice” question in general? How have you been impacted by the Dobbs decision this summer? What thoughts and feelings are you left with at the end of this article? Meet you in the comments!
Christine, thank you for sharing your experience of motherhood so openly. Your writing gave me an understanding of the overwhelming effects of pregnancy and motherhood on body, mind and life that no one who has never born a child can ever know except through the kind of candid and difficult sharing you gave us in your article. Non-pregnant partners can certainly feel the weight of parental responsibility, but clearly that is not the same as going through all the unfamiliar changes in one’s physical and emotional being that you describe so well. Thank you for that gift.
"I believe coercion leads to suffering, that dangerous things happen when people feel trapped, that abortion is healthcare, and that every child deserves to exist because someone wanted them to." Brava! YES.