Martha Bayne, who is pro-choice, describes her abortion in college and later miscarriage.
“When I got pregnant at 20, in college, the choice was clear. There was the 45 minute drive to the closest clinic… Afterward, there was pizza….
In the months that followed my abortion I flailed. I don’t remember much, but I do remember the waves of panic. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t breathe. I landed in the emergency room a few times, hyperventilating, numb, convinced I was dying, and my boyfriend was stuck with the fun task of feeding me daily doses of Xanax as I crawled along the semester finish line. After that, I dropped out of school for a while.”
As a working adult, she got pregnant again. She intended to have another abortion.
“[I] could barely take care of my cat. I could not have afforded a child, by the sheer economics of time.”
She went back and forth, trying to decide. Then she had a miscarriage.
“When I saw the first blood I felt a wash of relief, which I quickly plugged with a sandbag of denial.
Perhaps the best-known fact about miscarriage is that no one talks about it. But what they really don’t talk about, when they’re not talking about it, is how much it can hurt. In your heart, yes, and also your guts…
My roommate begged me to go to the ER. And when, hours later, after one final pelvic – splitting contraction, it slid down my cervix with a pop, a 3 inch oyster of blood and tissue and what looked like the tiniest tiny fingers. I yelped, surprised…
It plopped into the toilet and sat there till I scooped it out into an empty hummus container. I poked at it with the end of a plastic spoon. Turned it over. It was so small, this thing that loomed so large.… “
She brought the baby to her doctor, but did not give it to him and kept its existence a secret. She then buried the baby.
“I buried my 7-week-old embryo, my oyster, on the banks of the Iowa River.”
The day after the miscarriage, she was driving between Iowa city and Chicago for a talk she was giving out a book. She wrote:
“I kept having to pull off the interstate and cry. I cried for blotchy days – in the car, in bed, at the clinic where I applied (fruitlessly) for retroactive Medicaid to cover the bills the pregnancy left behind.”
Martha Bayne “Knocked over: On Biology, Magical Thinking, and Choice” Kim Wyatt, Sari Botton Get Out Of My Crotch: 21 Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health (South Lake Tahoe, California: Cherry Bomb Books, 2012) Kindle edition
This story shows that we women mourn the loss of our children. Abortion causes suffering because it’s a death, and leads the mourning, just like a miscarriage does. Even a person who is pro-choice and writes an article in a pro-abortion book called “Get Out Of My Crotch” still has a conscience.
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