I should say at the outset that this pregnancy-related post is quite a solemn one (don’t worry, I’m fine!), and even though it is firmly grounded in my own experience may act as a trigger for some readers.
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This is a tale of two pregnancies.
During my first pregnancy, I began to bleed at seven weeks. As I’m sure you can imagine it was a startling and unexpected sight. Given that I was still in my first trimester, I worried that I might be about to miscarry and quickly made an appointment with the nearest GP that I could find. After a check-up, he seemed fairly relaxed that my fears were not about to be realised, but sent me for a scan just to be on the safe side. I felt calmer, but was eager to see what was going on in my otherwise-much-as-usual abdomen.
I don’t think that I really expected to see much at this scan. After all, the scans where you can discern faces and legs and hands come later, at 12 and then 20 weeks. I guess I thought the radiologist would have a quick look and reassure me that everything was just fine (well, fingers crossed anyway).
After consuming practically my own body weight in water in the hour before my appointment, I propped myself up on the bed and gel was smeared across my tummy. Using my inflated bladder as a guide, the radiologist soon found what he was looking for. There, magnified several times, was a small shadowy circle: that, he said, is the remainder of the egg sac, the proof we sought that my pregnancy was still viable. Phew!
But there was something else there too. Something I had not expected to see.
It was like a tiny flickering light, a candle buffeted by a draft.
As we looked at it, the radiologist turned on the sound. Clear, regular thuds turned the flickering candle into a sure sign of life: a heartbeat. Along the bottom of the screen, we could see the jagged lines graphically representing that heartbeat. This fetal heartbeat, much faster than ours, pushed the lines close together, into steep, high peaks, and deep, narrow valleys.
I watched, speechless, unexpectedly moved by this testament to a life that was still going strong, despite what I feared. Whatever the reason for my bleeding, it was clear that the foetus and I were still in this together.
Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about this moment. It got me thinking about, of all things given my very recent fears, abortion. I was and am firmly pro-choice, believing that it is a woman’s right to control her own fertility. But my experience at the seven-week scan had given me a different perspective. I didn’t agree with pro-life advocates, but I could understand better where they were coming from. It was hard to deny the life-force of that tiny but steady beating heart, that palpable assurance that ‘yes, I’m still here.’
It reminded me of the anti-abortion sign parked by the side of the road of State Highway 2, which infuriated me every time I drove past it: ‘abortion stops a beating heart.’ Designed to guilt-trip, it now seemed like they might have a point.
I’m not the only expectant pro-choice mother who has been given pause by an early scan. In Misconceptions, Naomi Wolf wrote of her reaction to her three-month scan:
As I saw that hand and foot, something irrational happened: a lifetime’s orientation toward maternal rights over fetal rights lurched out of kilter. Some voice from the most primitive core of my brain - the voice of the species? - said: You must protect that little hand at all costs; no harm can come to it or its owner. That little hand, that small human signature, is more important now than you are. The message was unambivalent. (Misconceptions, chapter 5)
While I did not share many of Wolf’s sentiments - ‘voice of the species?’, ‘more important now than you are’? Jeez, Naomi! - I related to her altered perception. And how it led her to question her basic notions of identity and politics. She comments further:
I was still passionately pro-choice. But I was beginning to wonder if a pregnant woman was an implicit challenge to the autonomous ‘individual’ upon which basic Western notions of law, of rights, even of selfhood were based. There are two people inside me now, I thought. Everything is different. Pregnancy, it seemed required a different kind of philosophy; even a better pro-choice language. (Misconceptions, chapter 5, extracted here)
In a previous article in New Republic, Wolf opined that the pro-choice movement had "developed a lexicon of dehumanization" and urged feminists to accept abortion as a form of homicide and defend the procedure within the ambiguity of this moral conundrum. She continues, "Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die." Wolf concluded by speculating that in a world of "real gender equality," passionate feminists "might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead."
I don’t think she’s on the right track here, but Wolf does have a point. Trans-historically, cross-culturally, and among other animal species, reproductive control - whether through abortion or, more troublingly, infanticide - is the dark other side of the story of women’s ability to bring forth life.
My own reflections on this topic didn’t end with my first pregnancy, however.
In this, my second pregnancy, I also had a seven-week scan. This one was simply ordered as a ‘dating scan’ to establish an estimated due date, rather than to confirm the viability of the pregnancy. Again, I sloshed into the radiologist’s room, had the gel put on my tummy, and looked expectantly at the monitor. This time my fear was not that I might have lost the baby, but that there might be more than one heartbeat in there.
Again, we saw the shadowy egg-sac - just the one, thank goodness - appear on the screen. Again, we saw the candle-flame flickering. Again, we saw the jagged heart-rate and heard the quick rhythmical beat.
This time, however, my emotional response to the scan was quite different.
This time, I was more matter-of-fact, less surprised: ‘There it is’, I thought to myself, as if I had just found a lost set of car-keys. I watched the monitor and was only surprised by the fact that I was not really surprised. What had changed since my previous first scan and this one?
In a word, experience.
While I still remembered my sense of wonder from the first scan, I was also somewhat older and wiser about what it takes to bear and raise a child. I remembered feeling sick as a dog during my previous first trimester. I remembered nearly dying after giving birth, and the long process of recovery from that. I remembered the sleep deprivation, near-constant breast-feeding, isolation, and marginalisation that counter-balanced the marvel of a new baby and the joy of her every movement. I remembered that there are emotional, financial and social costs in having a baby, just as there are incalculable gains.
More importantly, I knew that I had wanted my first baby and I wanted this one. But I also knew that not every woman who finds herself pregnant does (for whatever reason that may be). I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly with pregnant Guardian columnist Tanya Gold, who recently wrote: “Pregnancy has made me more pro-choice, not less; an unwanted pregnancy, I now know for certain, is too much to ask, here or anywhere.” Similarly, journalist Caitlin Moran powerfully narrates her own experience of abortion, after already suffering a miscarriage and giving birth to two children, in How to Be A Woman. Her conclusion? That women know best about what’s best for them.
But, as my reaction to my first scan attests, this is a complex area.
While I remain pro-choice, I cannot un-remember the flickering light of life I first saw approximately three years ago. Nor can I ignore the fact that, for some groups of women, the right to have children is threatened by things I am extremely unlikely to experience, such as forced sterilisation (see examples here and here). Nor that some groups of women are stereotyped as ‘bludging breeders’ and are on the receiving end of social censure for having or wanting to have children. But in every circumstance, when it comes to fertility, women are often positioned as less than human, their right to control their own fertility - be it having children or deciding not to have them - is seen as a matter for others to determine.
Knowing now what I was yet to learn then, I am more convinced than ever that it is the state’s responsibility to provide women with access to legal and safe abortion, not only in cases of rape, incest, threat to the mother’s life, or for medical reasons, but also in cases where a potential mother does not want to carry a child to term for whatever reason that may be. Anything less would be, ironically, to infantilise women, to treat them as if the state - and, by that, let’s face it, I really mean patriarchal ideology - knew better than women themselves about what is best for them.
This is not an abstract or settled issue, either.
Just this week, Texas senator Wendy Davis filibustered for 11 hours to stall proposed legislation that would have limited Texan women’s right to exercise control over their own fertility. The proposals she took a stand against called for abortions to be banned after 20 weeks, clinics to upgrade their facilities to be classed as surgical centres and doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. They would have forced 37 of the state's 42 clinics to close, making it very difficult for women in rural areas to obtain an abortion if they needed one.
Since her actions, and those of her supporters, succeeded in over-turning the vote, Davis has been attacked by male politicians for being a teenage mother of a teenage mother, someone who should know better than anyone what the value of a life is.
Given that Davis was a divorced single mother, working two jobs to support her family, and living in a trailer park by the age of 19, I think she, far better than her male critics, probably does know what the value of a life is and what it takes to make and raise one. She did not choose to end her own pregnancy, but she knows enough to know that not all women would make the same choice she did.
