How I Learned & Unlearned to Shame My Mother for Her Unplanned Pregnancy
“I was a mistake anyway.”
The words hung in the air, weightier and more treacherous than they’d sounded in my head. There’s nothing so terrifying as seeing your mother break down in tears, except maybe seeing your mother break down in tears and knowing that it’s your fault.
I was 13 years old when I learned that my mom was shocked to find herself pregnant with me in her sophomore year of college. I was 14 when I connected the dots and realized she was five months along on her wedding day in July 1989. It wasn’t long before I started to wield this information as a weapon in my adolescent quest to assert my independence.
I hated seeing my mom cry with every fiber of my being, but reminding her that I was the result of an unplanned pregnancy was undeniably effective at conjuring up a useful dose of guilt. We came from generations of Catholics after all — guilt was practically a form of currency in our family. I could win any argument between my mom and me with a single cutting line, and I took advantage until she got eventually got fed up and put me in my place.
Somehow my mom and I weathered those dark days (okay, years) and have emerged on the other side. It’s sunnier over here, in small part thanks to my liberal college education and in large part thanks to my mother’s grace and unconditional love. It wasn’t until I studied feminism in college that I realized how I’d been inadvertently shaming her for years. I repented, she forgave me, and we moved on. These days, I ask her more personal questions about her life and she opens up, delighted that I’m interested in her as a fellow human being and not just “mom.”
She is currently attending Luzerne County Community College, pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in nursing. I’m beyond proud of her. Her hilarious tales of generational clashes with her millennial classmates have turned many bad days around for me. Her text messages detailing the recommended intake and sources of folic acid for women of child-bearing age are a welcome replacement for my scary forays into the rabbit hole of WedMD. Hearing her nerd out about the latest pharmacology research and best practices in bedside manner has given me a new appreciation for her intellect and compassion.
So things are mostly good, but I can’t shake one nagging question.
Particularly on her tough days, when her mind isn’t moving as quickly as she wants it to or her body won’t let her stay up late studying, I wonder: Would my mom be struggling through school right now if she had access to contraception over 27 years ago?
To be sure, there is power in struggle and no single right path to follow in life. But I had to know if my mom would do things differently if given the chance.
Earlier this week, I called her on a whim at 10:30pm. I felt a twinge of guilt picturing her asleep in her bed with her phone next to her, poised to spring into action if my sisters or I needed her. The guilt snowballed with each ring (while I’m no longer Catholic, the guilt has stuck around). When she answered in a perky voice just as I was about to hang up, I took it as a sign. I dove right in, explaining that I was wondering about her experience with family planning. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation…
Me: As a teenager dating dad, what did you know about contraception?
Mom: Growing up, my parents never talked about sex or relationships. It was strange. I guess they assumed that we knew, or should have known. But it was always about crisis management after the fact, when it was too late.
I was dating your dad for years and we spent so much time together. He was around all the time. I think it was pretty clear that we were in love and serious about each other. I don’t know how they didn’t see that. Even though we were young, they should have had a conversation with us about birth control.
They could have said “That’s great that you found someone that you love, but do you understand the implications of having unprotected sex?” They never told me about contraception. If they talked to me I feel that I would have been really receptive.
Me: I recognize that this is an awkward question for the fruit of this turn of events to be asking you, but do you think that if you knew about and could access birth control you would have finished college and waited to have a family?
Mom: Absolutely. I had so many dreams, and none of them included working the night shift at Dunkin’ Donuts, stocking shelves at Walmart, or disconnecting the phone to avoid repeated calls from debt collectors. I don’t regret anything because you and your sisters are my everything, but if my parents talked with me about it and I could have gone to a doctor to get my questions answered and get on the pill, my life probably would have turned out completely differently.
By the time I hung up the phone, my long-standing question mark was gone and the laptop screen in front of me was blurry.
I’ve been thinking a lot about contraception this past week, as the second convening of the FP2020 Summit galvanized over $2.5 billion worth of commitments, including $375 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to meet the family planning needs of women around the world. Melinda Gates has talked about how she’s used birth control for years: “My family, my career, my life as I know it are all the direct result of contraceptives. And now, I realize how lucky that makes me.”
Thanks to my own relative privilege, I’ve been on birth control for nearly four years, working on my career and my marriage without excessive worry that an unplanned pregnancy will throw me off track. But it hasn’t been all roses and sunshine. Researching my options, battling with insurance companies over their billing antics, pleading with my OBGYN for timely refills, and enduring paternalistic comments from male pharmacists is practically a full time side hustle. Navigating complicated health systems is hard and exhausting work. And I know so many women in the United States and around the world are much worse off, dealing with harsher barriers to the medicines and devices that can empower them to direct their lives.
In my job at Global Health Corps, I have the opportunity to support the efforts of young family planning advocates working on the African continent. One of them recently penned an op-ed on taboos around sex and family planning in Uganda. Talking about her experience growing up, she said: “[My mom] never talked to me about sex. When I was about 9, I used to eavesdrop on my older siblings — who were about 10 years older than me — when they talked about sex. What was sex, exactly? Why was it something they spoke about in hushed tones?”
The parallels across generations and oceans are unnerving. In the United States and around the world, contraception is still taboo. An abundance of evidence that family planning is a cost-effective intervention that saves and improves lives has emerged over the past few decades, but the topic continues to be stigmatized and politicized.
I’m not the first to ask, and I certainly won’t be the last: Imagine if men could get pregnant? As my mom likes to say, “Fuhgeddaboutit.” Surely we would have figured out how to deliver contraception to the ends of the Earth long ago. The roots of lack of access— namely gender inequity and patriarchy — run very deep, and our task as advocates is to chip away at the hard ground around them day by day.
Brittany Cesarini is the External Communications Associate at Global Health Corps, a leadership development organization building the next generation of health equity leaders in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, the US, and Zambia. Follow Brittany on Twitter @bkcesarini.
