Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (86 page)

An existential depression can be felt by people who have been ges tated and born under circumstances in which they are not wanted. One woman described feeling ashamed for breathing the air and for taking up space—she had a sense of never belonging, that she was causing someone else pain simply by being here. She told me that she knew she hadn’t been wanted and had felt this as far back as she could remember. Another woman, a physician in her fifties, said that she recently had gone through an emotional healing session in which she realized that she had never felt safe in her mother’s womb—that she knew she hadn’t been wanted. She had been trying to compensate for this her whole life by studying, becoming a doctor, and having a series of relationships. But none of this ever fulfilled a need that had been within her since before she was born—the need to be well loved and desired as a child. As she recalled, “My mother’s heartbeat, so close to my own, was
not
a comfort and reassurance to me.” Though her mother is now dead, she had gone through the process of forgiving her. In tears she said to me, “Now I finally miss the mother I never had. I realize that she was doing the best she could. She never had a chance for herself.”

ABORTION

For many women, abortion is an area of “unfinished business,” and as such, it deserves a thorough discussion. If we lived in a culture that valued women’s autonomy and in which men and women practiced cooperative birth control, the abortion issue would be moot. If abortion were forced on women in the United States as it is in China today, it would hold a different meaning here than it does now.
³

According to Trudy M. Johnson, a licensed marriage and family therapist with twenty years of experience counseling women who are grieving what she calls VPT (voluntary pregnancy termination), 43 percent of women under the age of fifty-five have had voluntary pregnancy terminations. Thirty-eight percent of these are church members. That’s 55 million women.

Abortion deliberately ends one potential life. But
not
allowing an abortion potentially murders two lives. The bond between mother and child is the most intimate bond in human experience. In this most primary of human relationships, love, welcome, and receptivity should be present in abundance. Forcing a woman to bear and raise a child against her will is therefore an act of violence. It constricts and degrades the mother-child bond and sows the seeds of hatred rather than love. Can there be any worse entry into the universe than forcing a child to inhabit a body that is hostile to it? Life is too valuable to inhibit its full blossoming and potential by forcing a woman to bear it against her will. Since we know that the early lives of criminals and so cietal offenders are often filled with poverty and despair, it may even be dangerous to bring a being into the world who isn’t wanted. (In their best-selling book
Freakonomics
[William Morrow, 2005], authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner hypothesize that the reduction in crime over the past few decades can be traced to the legalization of abortion.) The specter of more and more women trapped in unwanted pregnancies looms on the horizon as women’s reproductive capacity is treated as political barter.

On some level, everyone knows this—even those who publicly would deny women the right to control their own fertility. During my residency in Boston, it was not uncommon for pregnant young Catholic women to be brought to me by their parents, who would say, “We don’t believe in abortion, but if our daughter has this child, it could ruin her life. Can you arrange something?”

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that there is no such thing as sexual freedom. I think that’s why I’ve always been uncomfortable with the phrase “abortion on demand.” Having worked in the area of women’s reproduction for years, I realize that the current abortion debate is a symptom of the much-deeper problem I described in earlier chapters: As long as women continue to misunder stand how to meet their erotic needs, as long as they continue to sacrifice their bodies for the sexual pleasure of men, we will get nowhere. And as long as abortion is seen solely as a “women’s is sue,” we’ll get nowhere.

I performed abortions for years, and I will always be a proponent of reproductive choice for women. But along the way I’ve come to see how complex the issue of abortion is, and I’ve learned that there are no easy answers.

Abortion is always a loaded topic because it forces each woman to face her deepest feelings about men’s ability to impregnate women and women’s power to either retain or reject the result of this impregnation. Abortion hits at the heart of our society’s beliefs about the role of women. Is society committed to women’s full participation in the econ omy? What is our appropriate role in the home and in society? “Abortion exemplifies political control of the personal and the physiological,” writes historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. “It thus bridges the intensely individual and the broadly political. On every level, to talk of abortion is to speak of power.”
⁴

I always felt as though I were sitting in the middle of a minefield when I performed abortions. Sometimes I got angry when I performed a fourth abortion on a woman who simply didn’t use contraception. At other times I’d perform abortions on women who really didn’t want them but felt they had no alternative. Of course, many unintended preg nancies happen in women whose method of contraception failed, even though they used it religiously.

Numerous women who have had repeated abortions have told me they later came to realize that their sexual acting-out with men was a form of self-abuse, stemming from their self-loathing and lack of self-esteem. The number of unintended pregnancies in women who have access to birth control is the result of magical thinking that sex can be divorced from its consequences. We should be resisting
any
sexual contact with men who don’t respect our souls and our innermost selves.
⁵

At this time in history, many women are rethinking their sexual programming. The first step in this process is to get clear on what that programming is. When a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy on behalf of herself and her own life, she is swimming against a five-thousand-year-old tide of conditioning, of social agendas propounded by churches and other male-dominated institutions, that say that a woman’s primary purpose is to have children and to serve her children and her husband. Allowing women to choose the course of their own lives goes very deeply against a very old grain.

Ever since the historic
Roe v. Wade
decision legalizing abortion in 1973, the number of women going against this grain has vastly increased. Hence the political and societal forces that want to “keep us in our place” have become more and more vocal—and more destructive. A century and a half of rhetoric designed to make women feel guilt and shame surrounding abortion and the choice of self-development over motherhood (at least for a time) leaves little wonder that abortion is not an easy issue for women to talk about freely. Yet if every woman who ever had an abortion, or even one-third of them, were willing to speak out about her experience—not in shame, but with honesty about where she was then, what she learned, and where she is now—this whole issue would heal a great deal faster. Trudy Johnson wrote
CPR: Choice Processing and Resolution
(Outskirts Press, 2009) to help women who have terminated their pregnancies by choice to process their grief. She points out that thirty-seven years after abortion was made legal, it’s still not okay for women to grieve about this experience without the spotlight of political or religious rhetoric. She writes, “There is no place or public venue to grieve an abortion loss in our culture. This type of grief is called disenfranchised grief. Women sit in silence out of fear of being misunderstood or further shamed. Who are these women? They are your mother, your sister, your girlfriend. Maybe even you.”

Since the first edition of
Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,
many women have written to me expressing their gratitude that I have addressed this issue. And they have written about how their willingness to tell the truth about their abortion experience has healed them. Kris Bercov, a therapist who offers abortion resolution counseling, has written a poignant booklet entitled
The Good Mother: An Abortion Parable.
⁶
When she sent me a copy, Kris wrote, “The abortion experience has tremendous potential to either wound or to heal—depending on how it is handled and interpreted. As you well know, so many women go through the experience unconsciously— leaving their bodies the challenging (and sometimes dangerous) task of communicating the women’s unresolved feelings.” That was certainly what I observed during the many years I performed abortions. Not having fully grieved a pregnancy termination can be a setup for pregnancy problems in the future.

Now, with the advent of the Internet, we finally have a way for women to end the isolation of grief and shame of abortion. (For resources and community, see Trudy Johnson’s website at
www.missingpieces.org
.)

The cultural climate of any historical era can have profound effects on the overall emotional and physical well-being of that era’s people. It is estimated that in the 1840s half of all pregnancies ended in abortion.
⁷
Currently, as women’s power is rising, so is the antiabortion rhetoric. Though no culture at any time in history has been a stranger to abortion, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s research documents that abortion be comes a political issue only when there are “significant alternations in the balance of power between women and men, and of male heads of household over their traditional dependents.”
⁸
At just such a time, these changes are reflected in laws concerning women’s right to manage their own fertility.

Healing Post-abortion Traumas

The technical aspects of the various abortion procedures are very simple and don’t usually cause women any physical problems, though it is always somewhat of a shock to the body when the process of ges tation is abruptly halted via outside intervention. All the studies done so far on the long-term health consequences of abortion, whether done by D&C or suction, have failed to show an increase in infertility or any other problems. The anti-progesterone drug mifepristone (formerly known as RU486) is even safer than D&C or suction abortions. When it is used with misoprostol, a prostaglandin, its efficacy rate is 95.5 percent, and it can be administered confidentially in a health care practitioner’s office. This drug works to block the action of progesterone and is usually used within fifty days of a woman’s last menstrual period. Medication abortions are very effective and safe—and a big step forward in women’s health. (See
www.plannedparenthood.org
.)

With decades of guilt and shame as an emotional backdrop, however, many women never adequately process the emotional aspects of abortion. Many have never even told another person that they had one. Not infrequently, a woman will tell me not to tell her husband about the abortion she had prior to their relationship because she doesn’t want him to know about her sexual history. Through the years, I’ve heard many women’s stories about illegal abortions—some of them painful, and some quite healing. Several older women, for example, have told me that they were raped by the abortionist before he performed the procedure—“just to relax you,” he would tell them. Because they were so scared and so dependent upon his services, they simply went through the humiliation and said nothing about it for decades. Another woman who had gone through an illegal abortion said that she would be forever grateful to the wonderful man who did her procedure. She felt that his gentle touch and medical skill were a godsend to the many unfortunate women such as herself, in a time when choice wasn’t available. May we never see that time again.

The physical results of a woman’s shame and regret about abortion can live on in her cell tissue for years. This is one of the reasons why, when the supposed link between abortion and breast cancer was first reported, it seemed plausible; however, a 1996 study failed to substantiate this link.
⁹
But unresolved emotional pain does become physical and can set the stage for later gynecological problems such as fibroids and pelvic pain. Remember, it is the
meaning
surrounding an event or procedure that gives it its charge and potential to harm or heal—not necessarily the procedure itself. Despite the safety of abortion, I believe that repeated abortions weaken the
hara,
or body energy center, of the female.

The most difficult abortions I ever did were for those women who had already had one or two children and had homes and resources, but who found themselves pregnant at inconvenient times. I told one of these women, whose husband didn’t want the pregnancy, that she might well find herself grieving after this abortion, since she clearly wanted the child and was having the procedure mainly to keep peace with her husband. She assured me that she had made a firm decision—that she was finished with car seats for infants and diapers and that she wanted to get on with her life. So I went ahead. Exactly one week later, this woman was back in the office crying, “Why didn’t you tell me how bad I’d feel? Why didn’t you talk me out of this pro cedure?” She decided that she wanted to get pregnant again as soon as possible, to “relieve her sense of loss.”

Time and time again, women have abortions that they don’t want because the men they are with insist upon it. Under these circumstances abortion is a self-betrayal, even a kind of self-rape. It can poison the relationship unless the issues are dealt with openly and honestly. The first step is for a woman to be totally honest with herself about how she really feels.

A patient of mine in her fifties developed continual spotting and an abnormal condition in her uterus called cystic and adenomatous hyperplasia of the endometrium, accompanied by pelvic pain. (See
chapter 5
.) This problem, she feels, was triggered by watching her daughter give birth to a girl and experiencing her husband’s unconditional sup port for this birth. This birth experience caused her to feel a great deal of anger at her husband and a sense of deep sorrow—emotions that she couldn’t understand intellectually. Later, after letting herself sit with these feelings, she realized that she still had unfinished business about an abortion she’d had years before that she hadn’t wanted. Her husband hadn’t been supportive of the pregnancy, so she had gone ahead with the abortion. Now, watching the same man fully support the birth of a grandchild, her old unprocessed grief came roaring back, to be felt and released.