Choices

In four months time (give or take) I am going to become a mum to someone I am currently imagining to be a noisy, untidy, nosy, intelligent little boy. As I write this, I can feel him kicking and wriggling, moving around his increasingly cramped quarters as he figures out how to make his limbs move, and making the occasional startled little bounce whenever there’s a loud noise. I’ve become one of those pregnant people who walk around with one hand resting on their belly, and wear form-fitting clothes so everyone can see that this belly is round, and beautiful, and deliberate.

Pregnancy so far has been hard, and hard-earned. A year and a half of trying led to months of vomiting, fatigue, mood swings, fear, adjustment, and it’s only really been since he started kicking me that I’ve settled into accepting that this really is going to happen, that it’s not going to get snatched away from me in the cruel lottery of genetics and incompetent cervixes and just plain bad-luck-these-things-happen-you’ll-have-to-try-againness that is trying to have a family.

I’m most nervous before scans. I don’t see them as a “meet your baby” exercise, I see them like VTNZ for the soul. I don’t relax until the gel’s being wiped away and the sonographer is printing off an indistinct picture of a human-shaped thing for us to share on Facebook. They’re looking for things being wrong. For all the videos and USB sticks, they’re really about finding fault with this thing you made, so you can make some hard choices.

And what choices. Each one a choose-your-own-adventure into the deepest parts of your psyche. Trisomy indicators suggest high risk! To keep your baby and accept the possibility of a lifetime caring for a severely disabled child, turn to page 3. To abort the child you’ve been trying for for years, and deal with the nagging feeling that you’re maybe not the person you thought you were, turn to page 5.

Recognising that these choices are a poorly-matched chromosome and a sonogram away, and that you’re the one who’s going to have to make them, opens up some very raw reflection of who you are, and the kind of person you want to be. My partner and I had many long, teary conversations about what we felt we could and couldn’t cope with if those decisions had to be made, and I am grateful that, so far, they’ve remained theoretical.

A decade or so ago, I made different choices. I got pregnant a few months before I was due to start my teaching course, with someone who at the time was absolutely not suited to being a parent (I was hardly an advert for motherhood myself). I made a choice based not on hours of agonising, or consultation with a doctor about outcomes and quality of life, but because I was 21 years old and really didn’t want to be a mum. The decision was easy, the month between making an appointment and my termination was horrible, the aftereffects negligible. I had an abortion and moved on with my life.

Having had both a wanted and unwanted pregnancy, I firmly believe that to force people to carry a baby they do not want is psychological torture. Their reasons for wanting a termination might be made to a different value system to the one you have, based on experiences you don’t share, but they are no more or less valid than yours. That’s why I struggle with arguments like Sally Phillips’ about early testing for Down’s Syndrome and the fear that this is “eugenics”, or a “slippery slope”. I have nothing but love and admiration for people who will carry a baby regardless of circumstance or situation, but recognise that their choices are based on a different system to my own, and were no easier or harder to make than mine.

I hear and agree with the impassioned arguments that it is society that needs to change, that if parents were supported more then maybe their decisions would be different. But it’s not the job of pregnant people to make decisions that will impact their whole lives based on a feeling of civic duty. Arguing that testing should be restricted to prevent people from having an abortion is the same authoritarianism as forcing them to have an abortion based on those same tests.

With the exception of the odd anti-choicer online, nobody has ever suggested I was anything other than sensible and correct in my decision to have an abortion all those years ago. But why, then, is there such a discussion about the “acceptability” of choices that are harder to make? The problem with “pro-choice” is having to accept ALL choices, even ones that make you personally uncomfortable, or drive against your values. The decision to abort a baby that’s not the sex that’s wanted makes me feel a bit ill, but it’s not a choice I am making, so it’s not my judgement to have. A person aborting a baby with Down’s Syndrome may be very upsetting to someone like Sally Phillips, but it’s not her choice to make, and therefore not for her to take away. Invoking Godwin’s Law because people are making choices you would not isn’t going to change perceptions, just hurt people who may be at their most vulnerable.

The wars to change a society’s attitudes towards disabled people, young mums, female children etc. are complex and incredibly difficult. But they should not, must not, be fought by or against the people sitting in dark rooms with a probe pressed to their bellies, desperately hoping that the dark smudge they see isn’t the start of an agonising, difficult call that only they can make.