Pregnant No More

Mary Ellen was born and died on the same day in 2025, sixty years before she would ruin the United States of America.

It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d been alive when she breached the womb, which she wasn’t, because her partially formed lungs could not have taken in the air. She did not have a nose. Her limbs, at least the ones that weren’t missing, tapered, like the spark of life started earnestly around her torso but gave out the further it stretched from her heart. Her parents emerged from the hospital with the grim acknowledgement that, allegedly, things and people still existed, but they were otherwise like the Great Barrier Reef; unfixable yet still living. This sort of condition makes people startlingly extraordinary for good or for bad.

The death of the baby was the first and only bad thing that had ever happened to Graham and Melody Brickston, who are as privileged-sounding as their names suggest. They grew up in Texas’ Highland Park and University Park, respectively, which are two of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. The Park Cities, as they’re known, sit in the geographic middle of urban Dallas despite being two entirely separate cities from the big D, with their own schools and police force to cement the separation. The rich people who live within the park Cities are unaffected by (and seemingly unaware of) the blight surrounding their island of largess. Graham and Melody were no exception, but despite a screaming absence of self-awareness were quite lovely people before they lost their person-ness.

When they met in high school, Melody was a lithe lacrosse player and Graham a shrewd student council president. After college at Southern Methodist University, she became a volunteer/philanthropist and he, a commercial real-estate developer. It’s a paragraph out of a wedding announcement that’s as boring to read as it is to write. But rich people are often boring and bored.

Fortunately, when there’s money, there’s always something to do in order to keep the restlessness from taking on life and coaxing out compulsive affairs or addictions. One of those things is a child. But the Brickstons didn’t conceive Mary Ellen out of duty, at least not entirely. Some people genuinely desire a baby because they have the ability and love to nurture a little person. Such was the case of the young Brickstons, who set out on the adventure.

They never had any reason to believe that anything terrible would happen, because they had no experience with reality. They were like children running into the street without checking the road ahead or behind. Except there wasn’t a knowing guardian to grab their hands and chide them about being careful. No one that Melody and Graham knew had experienced anything harrowing either. So when the young couple was told that Mary Ellen was nonviable, the magnitude of the comeuppance wasn’t just bad, it was the first glimpse at life as you and I know it. A life where you are crushed under the foot of people and circumstances; a violent and often needlessly cruel existence. The Brickstons were not made of the stuff to withstand that sort of thing.

Until the baby passed naturally, Melody still had to face all the people who knew she was pregnant, but didn’t know that the life had subsequently given out inside of her. Family of family or acquaintances of friends asked about the nursery colors and Melody’s due date. They concernedly inquired about her health or the name of the baby. That last one she had an answer for. The rest she didn’t. She couldn’t yell at the inquirers or hurt them, because the dumb bastards didn’t know what kind of hurt they were inflicting. So she took all of her venom and quarantined it in her mind, in places unknown, until it necromanced later on, raging and snarling. With each passing question, Melody took on this feeling for all of humanity.

She became something of a witch after the birth, when rounds of pain and rhythmic body urgings forced out Mary Ellen, who silently and insignificantly passed from stomach to hand to under ground. Melody’s bitterness evolved into a brand of black magic that she could wish into another person, which she had done unaffectedly to her husband, parents, in-laws and well-wishers from the Methodist church that the Brickstons belonged to. Melody would lower her head and twist her neck sideways to look at people, like a possessed character from a film, to make others understand, intuitively, that she was not the same person that she once was. It alarmed people. It was creepy.

People began to leave her be. Graham regarded her as you might imagine one ghost would acknowledge another. He didn’t feel any one way in particular about the unreachable love that existed in their respective hearts. Because men are often banned from feeling, the numbness that overtook Graham after Mary Ellen’s death and Melody’s descent into solitude felt like a gift. He never had to fight back anything again. He was free.

Melody was not. Her likability was conjoined with her feelings. Her empathy was impressive, given her position, and allowed her to navigate the sometimes complicated world of the well-off with ease. Her intellect and emotions, that is to say her soul, guided her to become a gentle, clever, curious person — a fact that most people don’t understand about the hormonal fluctuations of womankind. Without the capacity to feel the world in all of its flavors, life became blunt and one-toned. A world without nuance, without the influx of meaning so often imbued by emotion and carried out with courage through the miraculous vessels of mothers, daughters, wives and friends, is monotonous to the point of despair. Melody became taxing even to herself.

The next time anyone heard from the Witch of the Park Cities, as some renamed her, they did not hear her voice. In fact, no one saw her either.

At some point in the darkest hours before dawn, Melody distributed fliers up and down the corridor of the two wealthiest zip codes in Dallas. The entire front of the flier contained a close-up of Mary Ellen’s distorted face. The back of the flier had three sentences printed on it.

On September 13, 2024, I learned that I was pregnant with a child. At my 20-week sonogram, we were told that the baby suffered gross abnormalities, but because of the six-week abortion ban, it was far too late to help her. I wish everyone to see her face, because it is the face of death.

The sensationalism was irresistible. Melody and Graham were attractive. They were rich. They were conservative. After the tragic death of their child, they were acting out against abortion restrictions. It was a gold-mine of TMZ-style voyeurism. No one could get enough of the story and in every news segment and thought piece, pictures of Mary Ellen’s flyer took the lede.

Though upon first look, viewers had to wait for Mary Ellen’s image to happen upon them. Her tiny face was too mixed up to be identifiable as such. When her visage became clear, some people, but parents especially, vomited. Or cried.

Since the passage of the six-week abortion ban, women were beginning to earnestly resent the ideals that had lead them here, to this place. Oddly enough, it was the young people who ushered in tighter abortion laws. Generations untouched by the era before Roe, when women’s lives dripped, clotted, from their vaginas in dirty rooms and back alleys, did not understand what was at stake. They did not fight the inching, dangerous inching, of legislators who moved the abortion deadline ever closer to conception, to the point that some women learned they were pregnant after they could legally make the decision to participate in it.

These abortion bills passed thanks in part to people like the Brickstons, who heard the statistics on birth abnormalities and believed it would not, could not, happen to them. After all, 98% of pregnancies are normal. What is 2% in the face of saving — as they saw it — babies’ lives? The rich believe in personal responsibility because none of them have ever been the victim of circumstance.

When Melody thought of her attitude prior to Mary Ellen, the hubris and naïveté of it, it made her sick to her stomach. It was difficult to tell, however, if she hated herself or others, because her odium knew no boundaries. Her rage was messy and everywhere, as omnipresent as God himself. The only clean, crisp feeling she had anymore was when she watched people encounter Mary Ellen. The feeling wasn’t positive exactly, but it did make her sneer in a way that could pass as a smile. The look of horror in their faces buoyed the feral animal within her, within us all, that only needs one reason to take over an otherwise humane individual.

Now that Graham was free to work single-mindedly, as robots are able to do, and Melody replaced shopping and donating with conjuring dark thoughts in dark rooms, the money was more abundant than ever. Melody found new ways to spend it. Whenever she could find a company spurious enough or liberal enough to carry out her wishes, she would place graphic ads in newspapers, subways, billboards, websites and even cable television.

They were not always photos of the twisted parts of Mary Ellen that Melody had captured in that fit of delirious grief following the birth. Sometimes they were renderings that she commissioned artists to create. No matter what, the images were always as macabre and grotesque as she could imagine, so that no one would ever forget them. Melody wanted pictures of her daughter to become part of the collective consciousness, in the interior places where societies harbor dark and terrible things.

She also paid people to write about Mary Ellen and offered bribes to politicians who would say her name. Every day, Melody created public awareness of her daughter that the even the best public relations exec couldn’t pull off. Perhaps it was Melody’s black magic. Perhaps it was her money. But Mary Ellen’s poor face became the Guy Fawkes mask of a new era, a symbol that people took on and made their own.

Once, a politician from South Dakota was holding a press conference. As had become common, a group of enraged women were protesting his abhorrent stance on life, death and pregnancy. (No one believed that the reproductive restrictions would stop after the six-week abortion ban was enacted; they were unfortunately very right.) A woman shoved an image of Mary Ellen in his face, and the cameras caught a moment of humanity. It was subtle, but humans have spent our evolutionary progress judiciously; we read others’ reactions with expert precision. Here’s what viewers saw on the politician’s face: A small eyebrow furrow and a movement of the head as it rocked back on his neck. It was enough.

People recognized that the politician could not handle the real-life repercussions of his arcane beliefs. A lot of conservatives searched their hearts that night. A lot of liberals started talking. But of course people had been talking for a long time.

It was the conversations, online and in real life, that generated the Pregnant No More movement. It actually started as a half-hearted joke on a subreddit. A woman, terrified of the specter of birthing a monstrous Mary Ellen herself, said that she wanted to protest by refusing to birth a baby. From there, the idea was floated semi-seriously.

“But for real. If we didn’t have babies we would have the upper hand. They’d have to listen to us.”

The idea didn’t seem as unrealistic or unorthodox as you might think. After all, there was already an increasing percentage of ladies who were on the fence about having children anyway. It wasn’t any secret that the young generation, the same one that valued life enough to make rules severe enough to ensure it happened no matter what, didn’t actually want to care for or be weighed down by anything.

So, from the threads of the internet, a protest like no protest before it passed through the wires and monitors into real life. The women who considered themselves the founders of the movement distributed this screed:

Hello,

The greatest victories and transformations in the history of the world were propped up by those who would give their lives for a reason. On battle fields across the world, people have fearlessly and courageously abandoned their hopes, dreams and plans in order to ensure a change that supersedes any individual life.

For millions of women across the world, our battle field is not in a foreign land but in our own bodies. For millennia, we have been forced to degrade and kill ourselves to facilitate a life we never asked for, cannot care for and sometimes cannot physically bear. Our fight was never waged; it was picked. We were advanced upon. And we retreated.

No longer. No longer will we cower in fear, when our bodies have become ventilators and our very lives meaningless unless our bellies are round and ankles swollen. We have tried to fight with words. We have tried to fight with votes. We understand now that these tactics will not work. We must fight fire with fire and pain with pain.

We declare that we are no longer bound to your whims, to your hypocritical values of protecting life only when it is in the womb. Please never forget, all you men and children around the world who live in this world among us. Without us, you are nothing. We hold all the power. We are the future. And we are pregnant no more.

xoxoxoxo,

The women of Pregnant No More

The declaration from Pregnant No More (or #pregnomore) was discussed more than any one cultural phenomenon in the history of the United States. The discussions, however, were largely speculation and philosophical navel-gazing at first. No one was actually concerned. The conservative pundits from Fox News waved off Pregnant No Mores as a fringe element of social justice warriors, radical lesbians or feminazis and their ball-busted husbands. The liberal presenters and writers, on the other hand, found the Pregnant No Mores intriguing and somewhat brave. In the same vein as Pussy Riot, these political pioneers had taken on rock star status to the privileged liberals who tended to like things like this in the abstract.

But no one could deny that the birth rate was dropping. The shift had been happening for some time, after a particularly deep economic nadir in the early years of the 2000s. Everyone was nervous to procreate and others started to wonder why they would even want to.

The Pregnant No More movement acted as a catalyst to this existing trend. The women who participated in the protest were highly visible. They were asked to appear on the Daily Show and write personal essays for the Huffington Post. They became famous on YouTube and Twitter, as heroes to young women who fancied themselves anti-establishment. The Pregnant No Mores became the new Kardashians, who reflected a life of glamour and intrigue.

Young people saw how happy life could be absent children, contrary to what their parents and grandparents had been told and had told them. Far from turning into crones wrought with despair and regret, the Pregnant No Mores aged beautifully. They traveled and attended art openings, they worked and socialized and slept and made love. Their marriages flourished. The movement exposed a truth that no one could have proven in generations past: There are a lot of people who have children because they think they’re supposed to. That biological clock? Eh. It seems the clock was more of a social construct than a physiological one.

The baby strike helped to alleviate the pressure of the unknown. What started out as a battle cry became more like an advertorial for a certain type of life. The women and couples who participated were guinea pigs and role models and Eves, who ate from the tree of knowledge. But instead of getting expelled from the parenting Garden of Eden, the Pregnant No Mores found a better, more exclusive garden and summered there. Soon enough, it became a status symbol of enlightened and progressive couples in America, who differentiated themselves from the hoi polloi through their choice to live life not compelled by evolution but by their own will. To be better. To be free.

Other Americans weren’t participating in the protest — not because they didn’t want to, but because they couldn’t afford to. Poor women, spanning all races, geographies and backgrounds, weren’t able to find and pay for contraception that had become increasingly expensive due to an alleged and ongoing shortage from the manufacturers. (Though the conspiracy theorists believe this was orchestrated by the government in response to the Pregnant No More Movement.)

On the day that Mary Ellen came into the world, the rate of childbirth was roughly 1.3 children per woman. On the day that Mary Ellen would have become an adult, that rate had plummeted to -1.9, and all projections expected that number to dip further. It was unlike anything that sociologists, anthropologists and economists had ever seen. It wasn’t so much the precipitous decline in childbirth that worried them, it was the reorganization across social classes and demographics. There were a lot more poor people being born than there were wealthy people.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot for the poor people to do, which has always been the trouble with being poor. When five bucks is a lot, you can’t even go grab a meal. You can’t walk to the grocery store. You certainly can’t go to a movie or shop at the mall. Your life becomes a few streets in one neighborhood in one city. The future, the horizon that rich people look towards and pay for, doesn’t exist. Everyday is gazing into yesterday, longing for a tomorrow.

The increasing percentage of low-income people quit trying to go to college, which was once the great equalizer, because paying for an outrageously expensive piece of paper passed a tipping point around 2055; it no longer yielded a positive return on investment. Poor people, contrary to popular belief, have a great understanding of ROI. Unfortunately, employers still required a formal education to work in well-paying jobs. In cities big and small across America, cubicles sat empty and positions remained vacant until they were taken off the job board, and then removed from the company’s organizational chart altogether.

Doomsday preppers had created scenarios for dealing with zombies and natural disasters, but they had not envisioned a country that wilted at the assault of economic stagnation. It sounds so harmless, doesn’t it? Stagnant, as if the problem were a placid lake in the sullen Oregon mountains or night sky in the flat plains of middle America. But in a country that had experienced continuous and unimaginable economic growth throughout its ascendancy as a world power, the stillness choked out the life of a population used to endless consuming.

Dyed-in-the-wool capitalists did not understand this strange new world and did not know how to steer the ship. Instead they simply stayed the course. The continued concentration of wealth among the tippy-top of the social pyramid aggregated even more quickly now, as rich people hoarded their cash. They were scared — and not just that the money would run out if no one was consuming anything. They were scared of the people.

As it turns out, they were smart to be scared.

Marx was half-right when he talked about the workers’ revolution and subsequent takeover of society. That happened, in the years following the Pregnant No More movement, but the result certainly wasn’t a Utopia of proletariat rule. Neither was it an anarchist free-for-all, the kind that hippies and libertarians had nocturnal emissions about prior to the downfall. The “people” did not storm the homes of the 1%. What they did do, however, was find ways to busy themselves. One of the best ways to fill the time when you don’t have any money is to get into trouble.

It was impossible to walk through any big city without being molested by roaming groups of bored young people. The adolescents with hollow lives liked to antagonize the people walking around in suits and dresses, those assholes walking with purpose and with a destination at the end of their route. Mostly, the little gangs just played with the business people and made crude comments to women who were jogging or pushing strollers. But every so often, and with intensifying frequency, things would take a turn for the dark. Someone would get stabbed. Someone would get raped.

These problems, however, were more manageable than the terror of those lackadaisical mobs who didn’t leave their streets at all. Entire neighborhoods would begin to devolve, as people melted into their arm chairs because of depression or drugs, becoming one with the bleakness of boredom. Porches were filled with blank-faced people, who always held in their hearts a palpable rage that occasionally became unearthed on their wives or children, who were easy targets.

Travelling through big American cities felt like walking from third-world to first-world, a dystopia that one could dip a toe into before shuddering and removing it. Except for those who lived in it. They were stuck. Rural areas didn’t stand a chance, either. Health providers left and so did teachers. There was nothing for them there, no jobs to speak of or people to fill them. Those Main Street towns and American-version villages were quiet and sad. They were as rundown as a front-lawn car.

It became an eery America. The old people remembered when they would walk into the mall and jostle crowds and flirting teenagers. Now, walking into the mall you’d find silence and still. A lone person would pop up, like a doe, and scurry from one store to the next. When the home team played, there wasn’t a stadium full of painted faces. Who could think of football when they didn’t have formula for their babies? Instead, it sounded like a 3A game in the middle of Bumfuck. It was quite simply, creepy.

In the canon of torture methods, one of the most agonizing is called “lingghi.” It’s sometimes called “death by a thousands cuts.” Essentially, the victim is slowly flayed so as to keep the torture going for the longest possible period of time. When a society starts to turn, like souring meat, it’s very rarely a swift death. It’s just like lingghi, a slow plunge into nothingness.

America was dying excruciatingly slowly. It was still alive, but the hope, the distinctive American positivity and grit — that was already a corpse.

In 2085, Melody, who had long lost track of Graham the automaton, looked around at the newspapers from major cities across the U.S. that she had strewn across her dining room table. Things had really hit fever pitch. She saw so many deaths and needless pain showcased in the words and images, caused by people who had experienced loss and had given it, as well. It made Melody proud. Because of Mary Ellen, people had truly seen the face of death. She folded up the newspapers and put them in her basement, alongside the images, ads and cartoons of Mary Ellen that she had distributed to the American people.

As Melody looked down, one of the original flyers that she passed out among the mansions of the Park Cities caught her eye. Even this many years later, she was still entranced by the sight of her daughter. She looked upon Mary Ellen with a wistful curiosity and thanked her for the strength that she continued to give to so many people, years after her life was extinguished. She was an engine. She was a spark. And Melody loved Mary Ellen more than ever, because she was the bringer of knowledge and truth.

“Night, darling,” Melody said, as she closed the door and blew a kiss downstairs to the yellowed pile of papers beneath her. She wrapped her black shawl tighter and went to sit on the front porch with the rest of the miserable people. Finally, the Witch of the Park Cities didn’t feel so alone.