I Was an Unplanned Pregnancy in a Time Before Roe vs. Wade — It Literally Killed My Parents
#complextraumadoc
The rollback of reproductive rights across the country is a catastrophe on a scale that cannot be overstated. As a psychologist, I see these conditions as the perfect soil for the growth of mass trauma. More women will unnecessarily suffer and die; more children will grow up without adequate emotional and financial support; and more girls will be forced to navigate a world that already devalues their needs and experiences.
Even as a person who owes his existence to forced-birth laws, I still believe these rollbacks signify a collective cruelty being inflicted by a fanatical religious minority.
As outlined in my upcoming book Daddy, I seek to untangle the traumatic framework whereby my father killed my mother and committed suicide. At the time I was conceived in the mid-1960s, my mother was working as my father’s secretary. She was twenty-three years his junior. They were both married to other people. She had one child, and he had four. Was their affair stupid? Self-indulgent? Immoral? By any measure, yes. But if we are being honest, that is very often the case when sex is involved. That doesn’t mean that I think they bore no responsibility for my mother’s accidental pregnancy. It does mean that they were not empowered through safe access to abortion to make a crucial decision that dictated much of the rest of their lives — and mine.
Though my parents loved me, they should have never gotten married. He was abusive and controlling. He effectively abandoned his first family after his divorce. He had been abused and neglected as a child. He managed to survive D-Day and over a year in combat during WWII. He returned to a country that routinely swept traumatic experiences under the rug. PTSD would not be identified for another thirty-five years. It would take even longer for effective treatment protocols to be established. For her part, my mother was raised in a world that assumed male supremacy and her own subservience to others’ wishes.
Human Rights Protections Help to Decrease Individual and Collective Trauma
Though we have made great advances in human rights over the last century, the story of humanity continues to be inextricably linked to systems designed to value people based on superficial characteristics. Living in the US shields many of us from the worst of these abuses and exploitations, so watching rights be rolled back is a chilling experience for those who do not adhere to a very specific set of Christian values. For those already outside this tent, the effects can be highly destabilizing, triggering flashbacks to abuse suffered at the hands of bullies, friends, family, police, government officials, or the legal system as a whole. And if anyone was in need of reminding, the reversal of Roe vs. Wade reaffirms the fragile nature of the rights of marginalized and oppressed people across the board.
Women rightly fear the loss of control over their bodies, sexual abuse or exploitation, coercion, living in a gender-biased culture recalling a series of events where they were treated unfairly, their voice drowned out or minimized by peers and authority figures because of their gender. Hard-won protections like abortion are crucial because they help decrease the infliction and perpetration of trauma. Simply throwing up your hands and telling people they need to be responsible for every aspect of their sexual activities and reproductive systems is a gross oversimplification of the problem of unwanted pregnancies. It creates a situation where pregnant women — just like my mother — are forced to give birth to and raise a child she is unable to accommodate. When a woman has the presence of mind to decide that she isn’t up to life’s greatest challenge — giving birth to and nurturing a new life for many decades to come — then we need to listen.
If decisions to terminate a pregnancy are unheeded, we are actively creating conditions that guarantee increased levels of abuse and neglect for the legions of unwanted children who will be born as a result. More children will be subject to a life of poverty — not only in the financial sense — but in the sense of a poverty of love, attention, and caring. These dynamics will assert pressure on a downward societal cycle causing more traumatic societal ills.
If the mother chooses to put her child up for adoption the vulnerable infant is, in all likelihood, cast into a world where they are deprived of crucial emotional bonding necessary for healthy psychological development. Our foster-care system is already overburdened and rife with abuse and neglect. Adding tens of thousands of more children to this system will only increase individual and collective trauma.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful that I’ve been given a shot at life because of the unavailability of safe abortions at the time. I’ve tried to make the most of my life, but that wasn’t always the case. Living through the trauma of my parents’ tragic deaths resulted in a lot of self-destructive behavior. If I’d had a child during that time I would have undoubtedly inflicted terrible psychological scars on innocent life. It is also unlikely that I would have had the time, space, and resources to recover. In many respects, I was given a choice that my parents didn’t have. I give myself high marks for breaking the cycle of abuse and trauma in my family, but I got lucky. Sadly, that luck has just run out for many people across the country — and I fear it’s about to get much worse.
What do you think? Were you an unplanned pregnancy? Are you worried about the decisions that will be handed down by the Supreme Court during the upcoming term?
