Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Salon writer's pro-choice ideology makes it difficult for her to explain her miscarriage grief


Salon has a piece by JJ Keith in which she discusses her 3 miscarriages and her feelings about those miscarriages and abortion (she's pro-choice).  I find it odd that someone who claims to grieve her miscarriages would label unborn children the way she does (my emphasis).
I still haven't had an abortion unless you count my last miscarriage, which stubbornly refused to go on its own and thus at 10 weeks the heartless lump of cells had to be evicted by my OB-GYN with some sort of vaginal suppository that acted by mechanisms I don't understand. It's probably more accurate to say that I never chose to have an abortion, but the one I had to have was messy, both emotionally and otherwise, albeit not indicative of most abortions. Once I finally did give birth to a real live baby, I was surprised to learn that pushing out a fully formed human is only marginally more painful than ejecting a clump of cells the size of a pencil eraser......
She continues and goes on to claim that her unborn children didn't die.
However, even the most ardently anti-choice people I know do not mourn those three miscarriages as if I had lost three children. Having a stillborn baby is different from a miscarriage. Losing a child is different still. Hidden in our collective intuitive response to miscarriage is the reason why choosing to terminate a pregnancy is different from killing a baby: People can’t be OxyCleaned out of your underwear.
Deaths are important events, marked by ceremony and reverence, but what happened inside my body was not death. Whatever I lost is mourned only by me because only I knew them. They lived, however briefly, in me and nowhere else. Even my husband never got to know them, though they were ostensibly half him. They are my own losses, personal but not private. I am not obligated to mourn them, though I do despite not knowing how to do it.
They lived in you but they didn't die when they..... died? 

It's interesting to me how years of accepting pro-choice mumbo-jumbo regarding what the unborn are makes it extremely difficult for some people to accept and deal with reality.  JJ Keith struggles to mourn her children because her pro-choice ideology has dehumanized them so thoroughly. 

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