When I first started hanging out with moms in the New York suburbs, I remember being surprised at the number of people who would tell me about their IVF. In vitro fertilization seemed to me a very private matter, and the fact that this was how your child was conceived (not to mention all of the poking and prodding that led up to that) was not something I thought would be shared with people you had just met. But like so many aspects of modern life, the private (for better or worse) has become public.
Indeed, there are clear benefits to some of this sharing. Last week, ABC News correspondent Amy Robach announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Only a few short months ago she had a mammogram performed on national television. Not only did this publicity stunt have life-changing implications for Robach (who is now going to have a double mastectomy to treat the cancer that was found), it also presumably encouraged many women to come out of the shadows and call to make that appointment. Katie Couric’s publicly televised colonoscopy a few years ago presumably had the same effect.
Whether it is because of fear or embarrassment or shame, these are procedures that women put off and these recent public displays (which may make some of us cringe) make these matters feel more routine, more normal and more comfortable for many others.
But the idea that talking about things publicly will make them seem routine does not always work. New York Magazine just published the stories of women who have had abortions. They are rich, poor, old, young, black, white.
Some aborted for reasons of the mother’s health, some because the baby would have suffered terribly if he or she had been born, some because of financial circumstances. The piece is subtitled: “New Laws. Old Stigmas. 26 Stories.”
Supporters of more liberal abortion laws believe that one of the reasons that we continue to impose restrictions on abortion is because of “old stigmas.” Whether it is with signs outside of abortion clinics or sermons from our religious leaders, women who seek to end their pregnancies are “stigmatized.” Women are made to feel ashamed of their decisions.
Andrea Miller, president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, was glad to see the New York Magazine article, because, she says, “I think this does start that conversation. It breaks the silence.” She worries that our culture has “perpetuated a stigma around this medical procedure that women and their families need.”
But nothing about these stories will make women just think of abortion as just a “medical procedure.” It is not just the blood and the gore and the pain. It is not the bullet proof-vests offered at the clinics or the boyfriend who wanted to have intercourse immediately afterward.
It is the fact that whether you see the fetus as a full human being or a potential one, something has been lost when a woman has an abortion.
The stories include a woman who wanted to see the ultrasound before the abortion. And the woman who wishes her boyfriend would talk about it with her, because “I don’t want our baby to think we forgot.” It is the woman who describes how “this gray golf-ball thing came out.” And she thought, “So I just flush the toilet?”
Abortion is never going to be a mammogram or a colonoscopy. Talking about it more will not make it seem more normal.
In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Ariel Levy describes a miscarriage she had when she was five months pregnant, while traveling in Mongolia.
When she called the doctor in this foreign land to explain that the baby had emerged even though she was only 19 weeks along, he said that the baby would not live.
“ ‘He’s alive now,’ I said, looking at the tiny person in my left hand. . . Before I put down my phone, I took a picture of my son. I worried that if I didn’t I would never believe he had existed. . . I had given birth, however briefly to another human being, and it seemed crucial that people understand this. Often, after I told them, I tried to get them to look at the picture of the baby on my phone.”
Levy did not have an abortion. She had a miscarriage. Either way, something was lost. Either way, it was a tragedy.