The Sanctity of Motherhood

To my Mother:

When I think back on the earliest days of my childhood, they feel almost idyllic; as much so as anyone’s young childhood deserves to be. In these memories it is forever the warmth of a lovely New York springtime, unless it is winter and I am playing in the snow or it is summer and we are going to the beach or it is autumn and I am jumping in the fallen leaves. I do know our lives were not perfect then; my father, and your husband, was in graduate school at NYU while also working full time, which assured he didn’t get to spend much time with us. I remember that being hard on me and presumably it was on you too, but from that we were able to create an especially close relationship.

We went around the City together, visiting museums and parks and creating my earliest memories in a city that was then in those middle stages of gentrification, begun but not completed; an era destined to not last. I went to pre-k when I got a little older, and although I can remember feeling anxious to leave you when you hugged me goodbye at the start of the school day, I learned to enjoy that time as well. I would go to school and in the afternoons we would meet up again to do whatever we desired, or at least that’s how I remember it.

That idyllic, untroubled world of my memories was broken, quite suddenly, when you needed to be rushed to the hospital that day when I was four. There is a lot that I don’t remember about that day, but I can recall enough for the experience to have left a lasting impact. What I do remember has stuck quite vividly in my mind.

I remember suddenly needing to get into the battered, tan 1997 Toyota Corolla we had then to drive through Brooklyn traffic, to the now defunct Long Island College Hospital—the same hospital I was born in. I’m not sure if I had been there other times, or perhaps I only knew subconsciously, but I remember feeling like I knew where we were going, that it was somehow familiar.

  I didn’t know why we were rushing to this almost familiar place, but I had the sense it was something somber. My father, usually one to laugh and make jokes, was being completely serious. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, and it doesn’t feel good to admit, but I remember thinking to myself in that car ride, for just a split second, that I hoped my father would be the one going to the hospital instead of you. But that was the reality of how I felt then, so much closer to you than him. I may have hoped, but I knew it wasn’t true. Even in that moment at four years old I remember understanding enough of what was going on to know what would happen and that in that moment I was just trying to make myself feel better.

There’s also a lot that I can’t know myself about that day, but can only trust that you remember, and that I listened to you enough to know. I can’t know that you tried to call your mother, my grandmother, at the Maine restaurant she then owned with your stepfather, only to be told by a waitress that she had just left and was driving home. By the time she arrived at her house, you were already in surgery.

I remember you told me once that, while surrounded by the chaos of the hospital, you kept thinking that you were going to die. I can’t know exactly how close you were to dying that day, but I don’t think you were far from it.

I can’t know that upon the doctor finding out that you were suffering a cornual ectopic pregnancy, dozens of medical students were called in to witness the exceeding rarity of your particular complication, to see for themselves that the fetus you had been carrying had planted in a corner of your uterus, unlike most ectopic pregnancies where it plants in the fallopian tubes. I’d like to think that it is not lost on me what an exceeding tragedy it is that that fetus was mere inches from viability, but yet far enough to easily cause deadly ruptures and bleeding if it was not removed—but I know I’ll never really understand. When I google the condition, the National Library of Medicine tells me that it is “the most hazardous of ectopic pregnancies,” something I did not know until now.

I had never spent a night apart from you before that, and then I had to suddenly, out of an emergency that I could not understand as a four year old. I don’t remember how I really felt at all that night, but I distinctly remember waking up next to my father the next morning, after not getting much sleep in that first night away from you.

The experience of that day greatly affected me then and continues to now, and likely will my entire life, but exactly how it affects me has changed over time. I don’t remember when I learned what an ectopic pregnancy was, or when I began to think about abortion rights issues in the context of that medical problem you had, or any medical problem that can arise from pregnancies far more easily than anyone would wish to be true. All I know is that at some point, as I grew up and became more aware of different political issues, the memories I had of that day made me feel extremely pro-choice in the abortion debate that is ever present in America, almost certainly more so than anything you could have chosen to do to try to instill those values in me. I don’t think I generally hold very strong views on most issues, at least compared to many people my age, but on abortion rights there is no question for me.

Anti-abortion activists, on the less extreme end, sometimes talk of the joy that pregnancy and childbirth can bring. I have no doubt that this is true for many, I know you yourself love your children and get great joy from motherhood. Perhaps it is just because I have not had children of my own, but when I hear those arguments I have to also think of the horror and pain that can be caused by pregnancy, how I personally know that, even in our modern era of western medicine, a normal pregnancy can still very easily turn deadly. And when those activists, on the more extreme end, talk of banning abortion in all circumstances and with no exceptions, meaning any removal of a fetus from a woman’s body, all I can do is wonder how they would feel if their mothers experienced anything similar to what you did.

  I do believe in a god, as I know you do too. But I can’t possibly believe that god would not want an innocent person, an innocent mother, to live, should they be able to through a simple medical procedure. Any pregnancy, even those that are unwanted, and any problem that can come with it, even death, are just “god’s will,” according to many who are anti-abortion on religious grounds. But wasn’t the invention of modern medicine, of hospitals, of safe abortion itself also god’s will? Why wouldn’t it be god’s will that the doctors saved you that day?

That you have also had two miscarriages during your life, one of which was during my lifetime, two years after your ectopic pregnancy, only strengthen my feelings on the issue. Many who are anti-abortion seem to either not know or not care that the problems that can arise from pregnancy are as much a woman’s choice as any health problem that anyone has is, which is to say not at all. And therefore, in my mind, any abortion should only need as much justification as any medical procedure that betters anyone’s wellbeing, which is to say none at all. There is an inherent justification in itself.

I remember I asked you once if you were upset that you were only ever able to have two children. “No,” you answered, you always wanted to have two children. “I got a boy and a girl, I’m happy with that.” That was your goal all along, just two children. You were a grown woman, married, with a child, who was just trying to have a second child to fulfill that goal; you just had extraordinarily bad luck along the way. Five pregnancies, two children. I don’t know how someone could think that such luck was something to be punished.

Before writing this, I talked to you on the phone about my intention to write about this experience and how it made me feel so strongly pro-choice. It made me oddly nervous to ask you about it; I felt like I needed permission to write about it, as if it wasn’t a part of my life experiences too. “I was in my thirties, and I didn’t know that was something that could happen,” you said to me of your experience then, after I had told you that I had been feeling an odd sense of shame around the subject, like it somehow wasn’t appropriate to write about. “It’s good for you to write about it, more people need to know. I was an educated adult, and I didn’t know.” Had you not had such dire complications from your pregnancy that day, I doubt that I, especially as someone who cannot get pregnant, would fully understand the risks that can arise from pregnancy either, just like you hadn’t yourself until it was too late.

Your simple statement not only made me think differently about writing of that experience, but it led me to begin to consider why exactly I had felt so ashamed to write about this subject. Maybe, despite my personal views, society’s ideas of reproductive healthcare had affected me more than I had ever thought. I doubt that I would have felt so reluctant to write a similar essay had you had to go to the hospital for a broken leg or asthma or any other kind of health problem, but something about it being related to reproductive health made me feel like I had to hold back from just relaying my own lived experience, that by virtue of it being reproductive health it couldn’t be appropriate to address in writing.

On that phone call, when I talked to you about writing this essay, you apologized to me for the experience, said that you were sorry it happened. I truly wish you weren’t sorry; I am sorry that you’re sorry. The truth is just that bad, unfortunate things do happen, it is no one’s fault and nothing to apologize for. Medical problems happen, pregnancies fail; I don’t see the sense in applying concepts of morality to those experiences. At least not in any way other than compassion and empathy, instead of hatred and virulence, for those involved.