Whitewashing The Pain of Abortion
Even smiling abortion doulas can’t make abortion a feel-good experience.
One of the symptoms of recent and growing polarization of American society is the push to make abortion cool. The more nuanced decades-old pro-abortion position of keeping “the procedure” safe and legal is no longer an effective rallying cry. A simple, edgy pitch is necessary to get the younger generation of women engaged in the movement. Down with euphemisms; long live radical mottos.
The new paradigm is to declare one’s love for termination of the unborn life. Hence Hollywood’s attempt at abortion comedy and the #ShoutYourAbortion hashtag. Women participating in the latter exercise tweeted about the abortions they allegedly had and insist that they are proud of. The target audience for this kind of deranged pageantry is blissfully removed from the sorrowful reality of it. Young, white women don’t usually get pregnant, so there is nothing to vacuum out of their gloriously independent uteri. (Abortion happens far more in minority communities, particularly the black community.) To wit, the hipster icon Lena Dunham apparently lacks the street cred in this department: she never had an abortion, though she wishes she had.
One recent pro-abortion piece reveals the lie which is the attempt to present termination of life as an upbeat experience. Monica Hesse’s The Long Five Minutes introduces readers to an innovative approach in the abortion industry: the use of doulas — birth and postpartum assistants who provide physical and emotional support to laboring women.
….
Where I came from (the Soviet Union) women are known to wallow in their misery. Abortion was just another facet of their grisly reality, like the lines to buy toilet paper, and flashers in every lobby, something long-suffering Russian women resolved to accept. It should be looked at in the context of the woeful ignorance about prenatal development and high rates of alcohol and drug dependency.
I am forever grateful to my adopted country that I do not have to lead this kind of existence. Contraception here is cheap and plentiful, and men are generally committed to avoiding accidental pregnancies.
That’s why the amount of misery in Hesse’s story stands in sharp contrast to my experience. There is plenty of sobbing and loneliness, and regret is right, front, and center. No woman at that clinic had a good abortion, and “abortion doulas” are, apparently, instructed to deal with that:
She had listened to her trainer doula, Shelby, when Shelby told her to keep an eye on a woman in a sports jersey who had seemed particularly stoic. It was often the patients who thought they would be fine who ended up breaking into tears, Shelby said. [emphasis mine]
The woman had started to cry as soon as she came out of the exam room. Lila sat next to her and stroked her arm.
“She kept repeating, ‘I didn’t want to have to do that,’ ” Lila told Grace now. “But I didn’t know her story at all — if she was just coming off of anesthesia, or what it was that made her want to say this to a stranger who was holding her hand.”
Which, of course, brings up the question of what is this hand-holding for. Real doulas cheer on laboring mothers, assuring them that they are doing their best and that something absolutely amazing is about to happen. Non-judgmental in theory, they trend on the side of natural childbirth, and are frequently sought out by mothers who wish for a wholly unmedicated delivery.
The “abortion doulas” are told to distract mothers in the “long five minutes” with small talk about food, workout regimens, kids the women already have, and whatever else comes to mind. They inform clients that total anesthesia is available.
The mission couldn’t be any more different, right? Except that “abortion doulas” themselves see their role as helping the women to go through whatever it is they are going through. It’s the mother’s choice, after all, and their role is to make it more bearable. On the surface this is a cop out: just because it’s someone’s choice doesn’t make it right. One can make the choice to threaten a congressional intern with having an inside scoop on Chandra Levy’s murder, for instance. Should we help him to carry out the action? The decision to abort a baby is much weightier.
The recently deceased Charles Manson preached that it’s OK to kill because life and death are the same. Not unlike him Hesse goes on equivocating between life and death: “Life was beautiful, life was sacred, and it could turn out in so many ways.” Um… what? Even for a piece ringing with cognitive dissonance, this is pretty bad. Then again, she also gave us this gem, courtesy of one of the trainees:
If I had an abortion I would be ending a life, one question read.
“Death can exist without it being murder,” a doula replied, explaining how she could agree with the “life ending” statement but still believe in abortion. “I can love animals and still eat meat. I can do this kind of work because of these gray areas.”
One of the challenges a Russian speaker faces when learning English is dropping the passive tense typical of Russian speech and adopting active verbs, which of course require an actor. In the process, we learn to invert our sentences. But here we have a very Russian, oblique statement made without the benefit of passive verbs or structure. Quite an achievement. “Death can exist.” I could have stayed in the Soviet Union.
What exactly the doula program brings to the abortion experience is unclear. Perhaps the industry leaders believe that having an abortion in the lap of luxury (most women can’t afford doulas, and once we get socialized medicine, it will take quite sizable political clout to keep our L&D Departments as customer-oriented as they are now) will encourage them to talk about the treatment they received to their girlfriends. Perhaps these women will be less likely to say that they regret it.
However, while “abortion doulas” might make the stay at the clinic a little easier, they can’t change the fact that frequently the pregnant women’s actions, by their own admission, went against their own consciences. Even if that’s not the case, if 20 years down the road a woman decides that what transpired at Planned Parenthood that day was, indeed, murder, will it make any difference that there was a gentle smiling lady by her side?
…
I’m sure there are some women who, even with what we know about prenatal development, can just go ahead and destroy the gestating embryo without harming their own psyche. I suspect there aren’t very many of them.
Take a look at the self-reported story of Amelia Bonow, the woman who started the #ShoutYourAbortion movement:
Before I entered the exam room, I sat down with a counselor. She was there to make sure that I was making the choice to end my pregnancy on my own volition, and that I felt informed and supported going into the procedure. She asked if I had questions. She held my eyes with hers, and asked me how I was feeling. I exploded into tears, because my gratitude felt inexpressible. I wanted to thank her and everyone in the clinic for believing in the importance of their work. For being proud of their work.
But if we believe Hesse, lots of women cry at abortion clinic, and it’s not tears of gratitude.
Also Bonow: “I got high [during the abortion] because I like getting high, not because I was scared.” Well, if she ever decides to sober up, she will have a lot of work to do, and figuring out why she cried at Planned Parenthood that Saturday should be high on the list of things to mull over.
There is no hiding of the fact that abortion is devastating for women. Amelia Bonow knows it but enjoys flaunting her transgressions too much to admit it. “Abortion doulas” know it too, but for some reason elect to support their clients through abortions, which can make termination of pregnancy easier, but what does it do to their lives?
Truth is, the experience is not over once they walk out of the clinic. Moral dilemmas are not resolved. Regret may take a lifetime to set in. Ladies, consider your other options first. Don’t get abortions.
