The Girl With the Stork Tattoo
In October of this year, I got my second tattoo. My first had been for the purpose of aesthetics: three antique pearl buttons on the back of my neck. I’ll never be without an accessory. They symbolized nothing, making it immune from pretense.
My second would have a different intent. I got an image from an early 20th century ad for birth control tattooed on my leg. A woman in a red dress holding an umbrella beats away a stork carrying parchment scrolls. The original image depicts the stork carrying an infant in the cloth dangling from its beak. I asked the artist to replace it with paper scrolls, symbolizing TRAP laws and other legal attacks on reproductive rights.
TRAP stands for Targeted Restriction of Abortion Providers. TRAP is one of the ways in which states are legislating abortion out of existence without having to challenge Roe v. Wade. These arbitrary regulations, such as requiring clinic doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic, are intended to make it impossible for clinics to operate. It has resulted in the shutting down of numerous clinics, leaving women without access to abortion care.
The wave of “heartbeat” bills in the past year has been similarly disturbing. Several states, including Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Ohio, have passed or attempted to pass legislation that would ban abortions as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. This is before many women know that they are pregnant. This poetically misplaced concern over the “heartbeat” has no basis in medical science.
The beating of a heart has a place of honor in romantic literature and metaphor, but is in reality, no more important than functioning kidneys or a liver. It certainly has no relation to brain development, which is the seat of human individuality. “Heartbeat” bills and TRAP laws are the creations of politicians with no scientific backgrounds. In my humble opinion, medical regulations should be decided by medical professionals, not the arbitrary whims of uninformed politicians whose main source of information on reproductive care is their childhood Sunday school teacher.
Reading the news has become an emotional chore. Everyday seems to bring more of these stories I’d rather not have in my head. But in ignoring oppression, I would be taking the side of the oppressor. I decided I needed a push.
My first tattoo had felt like a sunburn. This one, on my outer right thigh, felt more like being carved with the corner of a razor blade for the better part of two hours. It also provided a lesson is nerve anatomy because whenever the needle would go over certain spots, the pain would shoot through my back.
My artist and I got to talking. This is somewhat inevitable when you’re on a table with someone drawing next to your groin. She asked me about how I had picked the image and I told her. I told her about the internship with Planned Parenthood I did when I was in grad school. I talked about my fury over news stories about Savita Halappanavar, a woman who had died from sepsis during a miscarriage in Ireland in 2012. Her doctors had refused to remove the inviable fetus because it still had a detectable heartbeat. Savita had a heartbeat too, but “pro-life” politicians often only concern themselves with fetal ones.
I told my artist about walking out of Planned Parenthood after a meeting and protesters shouted at me and my fellow interns that all of our friendships were based on death. This was followed by another protester saying, “Turn back to Jesus and choose life. Your mother did.” The girl walking next to me shouted back, “My mom had an abortion!” I said, “Hey, so did mine!!” We high-fived in front of them.
The protesters’ attitudes came from the conception (sorry about the pun) that women who have abortions never have children. A related attitude is that there’s a certain type of woman who has an abortion: someone selfish and irresponsible. Here’s a bit of personal history: My mother became pregnant at 17. It was 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade. She and my grandmother drove several hours to New York, where abortion was legal. Almost two decades later, she had me. She worked around 50 hours a week most of my childhood and helped me with my homework every night.
My artist told me about her abortion. She told me about her ex-husband who 15 years before, had picked her up from the clinic and said, “So did you hear the heartbeat before you killed it?” Then he dropped her off at their apartment to hemorrhage in the bathroom while he got drunk at a neighborhood bar.
I told her that’s why I was getting the tattoo. To be worthy of the image I marked myself with, it is pressure to never be complacent. If patriarchy depends on telling women to shut up, it is a badge that I will be loud. In conversations where someone shrugs and says, “Why can’t women just give the kid to someone who wants one?”, I will retort, “It’s not a goddamn sweater.”
Women are not embryo farms for the childless. We are not incubators or petri dishes. Consent is a must, not just for sex, but pregnancy as well. Woman are human beings. And I have marked my body with a constant reminder to speak that truth.
