By the time I learned I was carrying my son, now eight years-old, I had had two miscarriages, and my husband and I had a lot of emotions riding on this latest pregnancy. Still, I was in my late thirties, and planned to undergo that battery of tests around the third month for possible birth defects. During a casual conversation on the street with a neighbor, an evangelical Christian, I mentioned my mild anxiety over the impending doctor’s visit, and she was quick to tell me that in her own four pregnancies, she always skipped that step because they would have had each child no matter what. As I struggled to find a way to change the subject, there was a rather long moment of silence, which morphed into a fraught moment of reproach. I could see in her eyes I was a potential murderer, and most reasonable people would avoid being thought of like that.
Except for the blogger, Penelope Trunk, who incited a storm of controversy when she tweeted:
I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.
In a follow-up blog post, Penelope wrote, “70 people unfollowed me, and people actually came to my blog and wrote complaints about the twitter on random, unrelated posts.” Here are a couple of the comments she received:
I think it’s disgusting that you don’t see that your miscarried pregnancy and previous aborted pregnancies were a life. With a heartbeat. That you chose to end.
All you can blog about is abortion, rather disgusting. I day dream about what my daughter is doing, smiling, giggling, cooing or whatever, waiting for daddy, while I am stuck away at work trying to make a living for my family and all you blog about is killing your unexpecting child.
Others criticized her for being callous, for having “a flippant attitude about a serious personal issue.” One young commenter, Gina V., wrote: I thought the post was really self-centered and did not offer much of value to the reader. As a young working female I read this post and was left wondering what it was that I should be taking away from it.”
Well, a flippant attitude about a difficult situation like cancer is often considered brave, so why shouldn’t Penelope be flippant about her own possibly traumatic experience? And what Gina should have taken away from the post is the fact that not all people consider pregnancy sacred.
When I was growing up, a first-generation Chinese-American in the suburbs of New Jersey, I occasionally heard at the dinner table mentions of this young Chinese person or that young person, who had worked so hard and traveled so far to be able to leave China to study in the United States, taking care of an accidental pregnancy through abortion. In college, I accompanied a close friend when she went for her second abortion. She was Chinese-American as well, and going through with the pregnancy was out of the question — her very traditional and strict family would likely have resorted to violence and ended up tossing her into the street. In my world, abortion did not engender soul-searching and worries about the sanctity of life – it was a practical response to an unfortunate situation that could catastrophically alter a person’s life. In the abortion wars, I have been bewildered by a discussion premised on religious views I have no connection with. I, and millions of women like me, both Christian and non-Christian, have been shamed into silence when, by our own religious codes, we have nothing to be ashamed of.
While women’s health advocates have been waging a fierce and public fight to defend a woman’s legal right to have abortion, they have been less energetic, perhaps even neglectful, in protecting everyday women from moral intimidation – the fear of being judged or attacked for abortion views which lead women to keep their thoughts and personal experiences to themselves. In the face of crusading and virulent language (and sometimes violence) against abortion, we have no common rational defense, instead accepting the rancor around us and dealing with our own personal situations on our own, in isolation. We don’t have a common language and sense of solidarity and support to be able to say, "Well, this is what happened to me and how I’m choosing to deal with it," or even "I don’t think there’s anything wrong with abortion." The result of years of this silence left a vacuum, into which anti-abortion forces injected the possibility of immorality or shame in the public dialog, where before none had existed.
Penelope’s tweet and blog post are dramatic and important demonstrations of an absolute refusal to be intimidated into silence, and to be "wrong." May Penelope’s brave stance be the wedge for new and frank conversations about abortion, so that what is perceived as “immorality” and “callousness” now can be in the future be accepted as just another recounting of a common woman’s dilemma, and her choice of actions respected as stemming from her own personal beliefs, which are guaranteed as basic Constitutional rights. In the great diversity of this country, there are many many people who do not think abortion is unconsionable or shameful. It’s long past time to make that common viewpoint abundantly clear.
