Recently in The Birth Monologues Category

My mind is continuously perplexed by the teenagers who stand around in my yard making out one second then chasing a ball and playing the next.

She especially intrigues me. ‘I love taking pictures!’ She tells me, as she twists the disposable camera in weird angles to snap my photo. ‘Hey stupid!’ Pipes in her boyfriend. ‘You’re holding the camera crooked!’ ‘That’s the point, asshole!’ She says turning on him to take his picture as he tries to hide underneath a greying baseball cap. She leaps to tickle him and then collapsing into his lap they begin to kiss deeply. I turn to go back in the house. ‘Hey, where you going?’ She demands.

I like to tease them. Standing in the kitchen I grab my husband and kiss him sloppily while they are in mid-sentence. Unfortunately, instead of getting the point they decide to make-out at the same time. I sigh and forbid them to do this in front of the kids or on my couch.

Recently she asked me if I could help her get on birth control. It’s amazing how just one question can wrench my mind out of control into ten million confused directions. Somewhere inside I tend to think that the answer should be an obvious ‘NO’. I can’t help but think about her body. I have heard many a mother pine after a body like that. It’s hard not to want the thin, petite, frame and beautiful, proportionate, curves. But it is a young body that is not ready to sustain life. It is a body that has helped me to see the beauty in stretched breasts, wider hips, and supple bellies. (I have seen the scars on a thirteen-year-old belly that tried desperately to stretch and contain a seven-pound boy; the owner of that belly recalled how painful it had been as her skin seemed as though it might rip apart.)

Her boyfriend’s mom lives across the street from me. ‘If that child gets pregnant, they’ll take her away.’ I ponder exactly who ‘they’ are as she goes on to tell me that ‘they’ will also lock her son up for statutory rape.

‘I got my period one year ago this month . . . ’She says ‘The year after my dad died.’ She adds as if it is only an afterthought. The one thing she is sure of is that her boyfriend loves her. During one of their many ‘sweet’ post-breakup reunions they talked about having a baby. Consequently she is not worried about me taking my time on the birth control issue.

I am.

My mind can’t help but visualize dismembered fetuses. I wonder at how people fight for rights to encourage a thirteen-year-old to ‘terminate’ a pregnancy. Perhaps it is partly easy when movies portray abortion in such a romanticized-sad-reality way. The woman: weak with a surreal smile pushing back tears is wheeled out of the operating room and into the protective arms of her boyfriend. ‘She just needs your comfort for a while.’ We need a movie maker who cares about truth: to show the procedure, the monitor they use, the disposal system they have. Show the girl who, thought to be unconscious, woke up to see the arm being ripped off of her baby with forceps. She felt the distressed baby convulsing and kicking her womb. A place of life now turned into death.
I can’t imagine her nightmares.
‘I had no idea.’ She said ‘No idea.’

I have met many who have had abortions, but none that don’t regret it deeply. I often wonder if they would wish their situation on someone else.
I want to love and protect our women. The wombs of our mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and selves are too sacred to be a place of death.

Tiptoe
By Ani Difranco

"tiptoeing thru the used condoms
strewn on the piers
off the west side highway
sunset behind
the skyline of jersey
walking towards the water
with a fetus holding court in my gut
my body hijacked
my tits swollen and sore
the river has more colors at sunset
then my sock drawer ever dreamed of
i could wake up screaming sometimes
but i don't

i could step off the end of this pier but i got
shit to do
and an oppointment on tuesday
to shed uninvited blood and tissue
I'll miss you i say
to the river to the water
to the son or daughter
i thought better of
i could fall in love with jersey at sunset
but i leave the view to the rats
and tiptoe back"

Jessica stared at the ground, her fingers picking the worn hem of her jeans to bare threads. “We didn’t want to get pregnant, but we were ready to welcome it. I felt like a goddess. My body feeling so sacred as I carried a baby in my womb.” Then the blood had come. The community garden where she worked was sprinkled with it. The restroom seemed to be swimming in it. Stuffing a shirt underneath her to protect her van, she had driven herself to the hospital. The nurse came whisking in yanking the curtain closed only part way. Not even looking at Jessica she paged through her charts. “Well, it could be a complete miscarriage. No heartbeat is detected. Yet, the fetus seems to still be attached. So, perhaps it is still alive. D and C a possibility. Miss. Miss? Did you notice any discharged tissue? Yes? Well, that possibly could have been the fetus. THEY want to do a pelvic. Check your cervix. A catheter is in order. Need some urine, you know, standard procedure to check your hormone levels. Need it without blood, THEY’RE ordering one immediately.” She remembers her anger at her child being called discharged tissue. 'A baby. My baby. Not some fucking tissue.' She named her own little one (Now dying) Ellie.

Ana leaned forward. So quietly: “I found out that I was pregnant and my mom drove me up here for an abortion. I was only eight weeks along. For some reason it is easier to justify the smaller the baby.” She paused, “I’ve been so depressed lately.”

Sam pulled out a cigarette. She had the look of a librarian. Meek and professional. She was anything but. Addicted to mountain dew and nicotine, she was quite wild, on probation and owing thousands of dollars for smashing a McDonalds window. “If I had to do it over again, I would have disguised myself better.” Was her only comment despite having spent months in jail for the escapade. Her lighter flared up shining on her face behind her cupped hand; “I had a miscarriage when I was seventeen.” She puffed on her cigarette and rocked back. “My boyfriends mother had to take me to the hospital, he was such an asshole. He broke up with me a week after I found out that I was pregnant. They poked and prodded at me! You’ll be okay Jess. I think about my baby all the time, but it gets easier.”

My miscarriage left me feeling empty and dead inside. My womb felt like a sepulcher my body dehumanized. Women were created to bring forth life, not to experience death within themselves. Healing comes to help us embrace life and become what we were meant to be. Even when the odds are against us.

He was born in 1930. The hospital did not have the technology to keep his two pound body alive, and they left him in a corner to die. His mother brave and young scooped him up and stole him from the hospital. Despite his cleft palate she fed him with an eye dropper and rigged an incubator for his frail body. He survived.

Attending a conference with my family a man approached my father and I to discuss pro-life issues. He proudly explained that he was in charge of making pro-life commercials. “You know,” He exclaimed, “I come from a city that has more churches and church attendees per capita than any other city, and yet we have the highest instances of abortions than any other city. I just don’t get it!”
I do, and there is healing yet to come...

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(With the exception of baby Ellie; names in this story have been changed in order to protect privacy.)