The Traumas of Living in a Possible Post-Roe Era

Increasing empathy, nuance, and asking hard questions with no good answers

I’m breaking from my normally scheduled posts because sometimes the news is so big it demands we not ignore it. I’ve felt down the last couple of days, ever since learning about the Supreme Court’s likely plan to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Casey vs. Planned Parenthood. I can’t get it out of my head, and I often process my feelings through writing. I invite you on this newsletter journey if you’d like to process with me.

I give you this preamble because I understand if you feel tapped out by the anger, the political noise, the divisions that we see reflected yet again on our social media and news sources. If you need to skip this newsletter, I get it (and new readers, I promise this is not my usual tone – don't jump ship just yet!). You don’t have to agree with me on the politics of abortion rights, but I hope you can join me in the quest for greater empathy for our fellow humans. 

What I want to do in this issue is do what I strive to do in every newsletter: combine a mental health perspective with some of the most challenging issues of our day, and to do so while honoring what a hard thing it is to be a parent, a mother, a woman, or anybody living on the underside of our patriarchal society.  

Everyone and their cousin has a hot take on the Roe leak, so I’ll try to spare you my political ponderings. What I have been thinking a lot about, though, are the mental health consequences of carrying an unwanted baby to term, or of being an unwanted child whose mother was forced to carry you to term. Or, a wanted child, but not sustainable in the mom’s life at that moment in time, for whatever reason. 

A remarkable amount of women choose to keep their pregnancies even when they are unplanned and will cause a great deal of hardship. I’ve had these women - or sometimes, they are just girls - in my office, and I marvel at their determination and worry about their future. People don’t take abortions lightly. Women are not going around willy-nilly having abortions because it’s the easy way out. These are difficult, often soul-wrenching decisions.

I believe is that a person’s well-being is best served by not being coerced into any particular path. That includes being free to carry and keep a pregnancy even against social pressure to terminate: I am thinking of Christian parents / pastors / highly visible people who force their young, unwed pregnant daughters to terminate pregnancies because it will make the family look bad, even if the daughter would rather keep the child.  

And it also includes not coercing a person to carry a pregnancy that may not want for a myriad of reasons: bad partner, too young, too old, health hazards, too poor, too little support. Abortion in our country is not about protecting life. If it were about preventing the termination of pregnancies, which they call protecting life, we would have birth control readily accessible for anybody who needs it (and we’d probably work a lot harder at male birth control, too). We would teach our children and teenagers age-appropriate sexual education, and it would start younger than the pearl-clutchers would like to believe is needed. We would have more robust social safety nets and a more functional healthcare system.  

I respect individuals who are pro-life and don’t think they are bad people just because we disagree on a policy issue. However, the pro-life movement as a political, policy group is something else. Other words have been written about how abortion was used to rally religious voters to Republican candidates because racism was less of a selling point. But I told you I’d try and leave political talk to a minimum, so that’s a conversation for another day.

When you listen to people’s hard, painful stories all day long like I do, you think a lot about just how difficult it is to be a human. It’s all the more difficult when you have more than your fair share of trauma to deal with. It’s traumatic to know that you were born not because your parents wanted you, but because you were conceived, and your mother had no other choice but to birth you.  

I don’t know what pro-life people think happens to the souls of the aborted fetuses, especially because so many of those folks are also religious. Do they think God condemns them to hell because they didn’t get a chance to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior? That seems absurd and definitely a god I’d stay far away from. If I believed that theology about hell, etc., I would think that the souls would get a fast track straight to heaven and get to hang out with God and skip all the hard parts here on earth. How is that not the best of all possible worlds? 

Something I might believe, without scientific evidence (because what is the science of a soul??), is that there are lots of soul-beings hanging around in another dimension or whatever, waiting for bodies to take homes in. Actually, it’s rather a lot like the Pixar movie Soul, though I didn’t get this idea from the movie (to be clear that Pixar does not create my theological imagination). If indeed a soul were to enter a fetus that then miscarries, or is aborted, or is a stillbirth, the soul would just return to soul-land and try again in a different body later! Or perhaps souls enter people at birth. I don’t know. Who really knows??

“Pro-life” supporters assume life begins at conception, but the Christian tradition is not even clear on this. Life might begin at conception, but maybe it begins when the mother can feel the “quickening” (movements) of the baby, as we believed before we had ultrasound technology. Jewish tradition holds that the baby gets its soul once the head emerges from the mother. Also, the existing life of the mother takes precedence over the not-yet-viable life of the baby. Jews read the same texts very differently from how modern Christians, not versed in Hebrew or Jewish interpretation of scripture, read them.

I had an early miscarriage between my two children. At the time, it felt devastating, but I also knew I had never “felt pregnant” in the same way I had with my firstborn. My potentiality for a child was lost, but I did not feel like life, per se, had been lost. This is not every woman’s experience with miscarriage: not at all. Many women feel intense emotional attachment and a sense of life as soon as pregnancy occurs. But I don’t think you can pinpoint when life begins. There might be plenty of conceptions (life??), but the blastocysts don’t necessarily implant, which is also a key feature of a successful pregnancy. But maybe the men making the rules don’t know all the finer points of pregnancy and birth.  

I have been writing recently about the challenges of being a parent, and especially a mother. You can have everything going right for you, and it can still be incredibly hard. I do not wish motherhood on anyone who isn’t ready for it, or at least who hasn’t had the chance to give their honest consent. 

Being a child is hard, given how little control they have in their environment and how they are so frequently at the whims of their parents. Every child deserves to have a parent(s) who has fully opted in (as best they are able) to parenting, not one who was forced by the government to give birth. Adoption is still relatively rare in unplanned pregnancies where the mother would consider abortion but did not abort. 91% of those mothers will choose to keep their children, while only 9% would relinquish. There is something deeply biological and visceral about raising one’s own children. 

I have dear, dear friends who have adopted, so trust me when I say I have nothing against adoption. But adoption also always carries its own trauma. The trauma of the child knowing its own parents could not or did not want to raise them, or were coerced in various ways to give them up. The trauma of the birthing parent, giving away a being who is part and parcel of herself. The trauma of the adoptive parents, navigating these very challenging dynamics. We cannot pretend that adoption is some kind of golden ticket to solving the “problem” of abortion. 

Abortion, however, is not the actual problem to be solved. If it were, we would have very different solutions that were more effective than making a procedure illegal that desperate women are going to engage in anyway. Making abortion illegal is very much more about disempowering women and reminding us that our rights only exist because we have risen up over time and demanded them – and that a powerful group of leaders elected by a minority of people (or instated by leaders elected by a minority of people) can do their best to strip us of those rights whenever they get the chance. 

My heart breaks at how painful life is for so many people. I am angry and frightened about where our world seems to be headed. Perhaps it does no good to raise my voice in my own newsletter, to rant quietly about the injustices that look to be imminently crashing down on us. But on the other hand, maybe I can say to you that we are not alone in this, and we must share our pain, share our strength, and keep marching forward.