This month we celebrated my daughter’s second birthday. She is so smart, capable, curious, generous, sweet, full of energy and joy! Every day I am amazed by her. I am the proudest mom and she is the most wonderful child I could have ever hoped to have and this is the most fabulous adventure we’re on together.
I want to honor her birthday by celebrating not just how wonderful I think she is, but by celebrating all the generations that came before us — all the parents that loved and worked and sacrificed to bring us this lucky and beautiful life, full of choices they didn’t have.
Dear M, for your birthday, I wish for you the right to live your own life exactly how you want.
Nothing has radicalized me as a feminist more than being a mother by choice. Parenting is all-consuming, body and mind and soul. It’s a decision that changes everything about my participation in life. It is total insanity to me that anyone would wish this journey on someone who wasn’t completely ready and willing.
Beyond the obvious facts of pregnancy and childbirth, the decision to breastfeed has also profoundly changed and shaped me and my experience of life these past two years. I’m bottomlessly grateful for the supportive partners, the flexible remote job, and the luck of my own genetics that have allowed me to breastfeed successfully and mostly enjoyably (though not without a huge amount of effort, time, and sacrifice) for two years. Today, as I read through the headlines and come to grips with the enormity of the horror that is our national infant formula shortage, the failure of our system to prioritize and provide what we actually need and to adequately fund the regulatory agencies on which the lives of American babies depend, I can barely catch my breath. (Some links below.)
It’s hard to describe to someone who doesn’t know, how enormously painful it is to relive deeply personal struggles with fertility and miscarriage every time the criminalization of reproductive health care is in the news. Right now, every headline hurts. Every social media feed is filled to overflowing with screams and whimpers of pain and anger. So many of us are hurting, out loud, and even more of us are hurting quietly. I have to assume that many more of us are not posting much online because we’re too tired.
I don’t believe that we should have to bare our souls and share our intimate pain in order to be heard, to be taken seriously. But it never fails: our human rights are threatened and an unfathomably vast chorus of women take to the internet, holding up every trauma imaginable, as though we could somehow tell the right story to change the minds of those who don’t believe we deserve equal human rights.
This has been going on for as long as I’ve been alive and I am tired and I know you are tired, too. This letter is long and scattered; it is a document of the pain and fatigue I feel and I don’t know how to make it less so and I thank you for reading.
A few months ago, I wrote a quick essay about abortion. I’m too tired to write it again, but I am sharing it here, lightly edited. If you have read it or don’t want to read painful reflections about miscarriage, then skip to the bottom for some interesting links from my reading pile and a few bright spots.
IKM
From the journal: Dec 2021
This morning when she woke up, my daughter gave a big stretch and a yawn, watching me as I raised the shades in her room and let the sunshine in. She sat up and kissed all her stuffed bunnies good morning (“mwah!”) and made them hop around the crib. Then she raised up her arms for me, eyes wide and shining, and said, “Mama! Mama up!”
Life does not ever get better. At least, inside my home, life does not get any better. It is full of love, sweetness, discovery, and wonder. I think often about how lucky I am. How many dreams I have achieved, how much I have to be grateful for. On this day exactly 7 years ago, I said goodbye to New York and took a flight to my new home in San Francisco. I changed addresses, routines, careers, and priorities—radically. And 7 years later I can say it worked out; it was the right choice; I am happy where I’ve landed. I can see the forest, and the path. Sometimes I lie in my bed at night thinking I am the luckiest person alive.
Outside the bubble of my home, however, life for American women grinds on and for many, seems worse and worse.
Amy Coney Barrett asks, "Why don't the safe haven laws take care of that problem?" The “problem” being that forced pregnancy and forced births prevent people with uteri from participating equally in public life.
If a person who had never been pregnant, never given birth, said such a thing, I might be mad, and call them ignorant. But for someone with a uterus, someone who has been pregnant and given birth, to say such a thing—I know she is not ignorant. She is worse. She is beyond deeply disingenuous; the only word that comes to mind is “sadistic.”
I didn’t think anything could radicalize me further on the issue of the human right to bodily autonomy. It always seemed grotesque and horrific that anyone could make and enforce laws about what anyone could do with their bodies. Who consenting adults can be intimate with; whether women can prevent or terminate pregnancies. Forced pregnancy is slavery. Full stop.
I didn’t think that I could still be so emotionally affected by this issue, having protested myself hoarse about it when I was younger and full of energy and anger at the world and all the injustices women face in it. But now that I have been through the act of sustaining a life with my own body, I find that I am taking an unwanted swim through cold new depths of horror, places which I had previously not visited, had never known existed.
There is no bottom to this pit, the amount of hatred and disregard that a significant swathe of Americans have for women.
In the past 4 years, I lost so much time, so much of my life. Probably, most of my casual friends and acquaintances did not notice, because I just quietly dropped out of view. I don’t post a lot about my personal life on social media. During those years, I was busy working hard, trying to move up in my career, and I deeply wanted and yearned for a baby. I got pregnant, and miscarried. I had a "missed miscarriage", which means that the fetus dies, but the tissue remains behind. It may or may not pass on its own in a timely manner. I needed a procedure to remove the tissue, what was left of my very much wanted and longed-for baby, to help my body heal, and to get on with healing my heart, too. When they talk about banning abortions, this is among the procedures that would be banned. It is called a "dilation and curettage" and it is the same. It is safe, quick, simple, and reliable, and can help either end an unwanted pregnancy, or help a woman get through a miscarriage without risk of infection.
I was incredibly lucky. I had a kind, caring medical team, a supportive female doctor, a good job with good health insurance, a clean and modern clinic, access to pain medication, and a loving partner to comfort me, hold my hand, and drive me home.
It was still awful, traumatic, and painful, and I cried the whole time.
Not too long after that, I got pregnant again, and miscarried again. Each pregnancy was different. I felt different, my symptoms were different. I needed the same abortion procedure, also known as a D&C. This one was not as painful, physically, perhaps because I was so emotionally deadened and numb at the time. Both miscarriages seemed random, with no warning, no reason given; it just didn’t work out. Both were a shock and intensely sad. I felt sodden by failure and disappointment. The emotional, mental burden of caring for myself, my body, in the before and during and after, each time, was huge and heavy. I am still sad about them.
And then! I got pregnant a third time. I was cautious, afraid to have too many expectations. The happiness and uncomplicated excitement of the first time had transmuted into something new, a sort of half-dread, half-hope. But the third time in my life was a charm. The fetus grew into a baby. She was strong and healthy and right on schedule. She squirmed and kicked and I felt that joy and excitement come back.
However, the entirety of that pregnancy passed for me as though I wore heavy chains. My body was a torture chamber. I suffered near constant nausea. I subsisted on bits of cheese and crackers and popsicles. I vomited almost every day. I suffered from extreme sensitivity to light, sounds, smells. I could barely handle a ride in a car or bus up and down the steep hills of San Francisco without retching. I endured migraines that sent me into hiding from bright lights or social gatherings. To say that I was not able to equally participate in public life would be an understatement. I worked from home a lot to hide my “condition” and nearly quit my dream job; I considered going on medical leave—and how lucky I was, to have this as something to consider.
It’s not like that for every woman—I know, of course. And I wouldn’t change anything that brought me here and brought my daughter to me. She is the greatest, most overwhelming joy of my life and I would absolutely do it all again. But knowing what I do now, that each baby born is a year of intense physical, emotional, and mental sacrifice on either side of that birth—even for a healthy, relatively “uncomplicated” birth, one that is afforded all the best care and every privilege, like mine was—well. I would never, ever wish this experience on anyone who did not 100% want it and go to it willingly and joyfully.
One forced pregnancy is too many. One forced birth is too many. One unwilling mother is too many. And you know what else? One unwanted child is too many. Children should be wanted. They deserve to be wanted, and loved.
I can’t imagine my daughter ever having to go through any of this if she didn’t want to. That’s not the world I want to give her.
I remember being a teenager and having someone say to me that one day I might rethink my “pro-choice” rhetoric because if I ever had a baby of my own, I might value life more. Yet, it is because I value life so much that I am so emphatically, deeply, radically opposed to any restrictions that might stand between a pregnant person and their personal medical decisions.
Local abortion funds are where I suggest you give if you want to to something right now to support the networks and activists on the ground that have been preparing for this moment and know what to do.
Side quests
Motherhood as a mode of rebellion. Abbott Laboratories, the center of the current horrific baby formula shortage, refused to repair dilapidated production plants FOR YEARS yet had billions for stock buybacks; previously released untested infant formula into the market; more horrors. Women are people, not things, and forcing a woman to give birth against her will is morally equivalent to rape. On choosing to be child-free. One good thing: Groundbreaking new research finally gives parents some real , scientific, verifiable, testable information about why infants die of SIDS.
Creative juice
Artist and creator of intricate, handmade papercut visions (who happens to be my lovely friend) Bianca Levan is having a show at an.ä.log gallery in San Francisco. If you’re local, you owe it to yourself to see the work in person, up close.
Danii Pollehn is an illustrator and pattern designer from Germany whose work celebrates the female form and expands empathy with “otherness” through diverse narratives. I had the pleasure of working with her through Adobe Stock and her new commissioned work is unique and refreshing.