Mothers deserve “a way out.” It’s why I’m pro-life.
Image credit: Stormseeker on Unsplash.
“If you struggled so much with postpartum anxiety, then you of all people should support abortion.”
This was a recent encounter with a pro-choice friend. She was trying to wrap her mind around a seeming cognitive dissonance between my lived experience and my anti-abortion position. While many pro-lifers (and even women who previously wanted to abort) feel strong positive emotions or intense bonding toward their children, I did not have a similar experience. I even had a friend once tell me that the smell of a newborn was enough to calm her down after a bad day, but again, this is absolutely not what I’ve felt.
After the birth of both of my children, I experienced severe anxiety. I had unmedicated births, with the experts promising me I’d get some rush of oxytocin and a “high” upon being handed my newborn. Instead, I felt nothing but pain, exhaustion, and overwhelm. Each time I felt as though they were handing me someone else’s baby. I loved my children, and something instinctual made me a fierce defender of them, but truthfully I felt no immediate bond that was any different from how I felt about my nieces or friends’ children. This is not uncommon.
No, the snuggles didn’t make it any better.
Both of my babies were colicky, and the sleep deprivation and constant auditory stimulation left me drowning from one panic attack to the next. If I’m honest, my experience with early motherhood was of wanting relief more than enjoying much of anything. No amount of cozy newborn snuggles overpowered the feeling that I just couldn’t cut it. Especially in the infancy stage, I didn’t want just a day off, I wanted to send my kids away and let someone else raise them for a few years. The mental and physical overwhelm, coupled with the feeling of constant failure as I tried to soothe a screaming cry that never ended, crushed me. My mental health was formally evaluated, and medication wasn’t deemed a good fit (though for many moms it is, and if you are struggling right now as a parent, this is your sign to take seeking help very seriously). In my case, doctors determined I needed a “lifestyle change” instead. But I am a stay-at-home mom, with very limited access to help. I live in a tiny, cluttered home with no yard or driveway, and there are sex-offenders in our neighborhood, so my children can’t play outside unsupervised. My husband was great, but had absolutely no paternity leave, was enrolled in a master’s program, and was being assigned grueling hours at work. Sometimes I got just an hour of help a day, and sometimes none at all. My oldest child didn’t sleep through the night until she was nearly five years old, and all along the way we faced countless health issues, insurance battles, financial concerns, deaths in the family, and other blows. The feelings of “alone,” “trapped,” and often “hopeless” were the main themes of my early motherhood. I had no power to change my circumstances, and no one was coming to help me.
Cue my pro-choice friend, who couldn’t conceptualize that I know other women would face a fate just like mine, and that I would still withhold from them a “way out” of that hardship.
The baby was never the problem.
A lot of pro-abortion rhetoric paints children as oppressors or parasites, as though they intentionally seek to ruin lives and we must all be on defense. But the truth is that while kids are indeed hard, they are so in developmentally appropriate, and often involuntary ways. For Homo sapiens to exist, infants (and all the sleep deprivation that goes with them) must be given space to exist. The very survival of our kind depends upon mature humans tolerating the behavior of maturing humans, both individually (as their parents) and collectively (as a species that will die out if we don’t continue to reproduce). And herein lies the difference between my pro-choice friend and I.
She believes that child-tolerance is only for those who want to offer it. Her argument is that if a woman wants to take on the risks of parenting, she is free to, but for those who want out, they should be able to take any actions necessary. This argument, however, resigns itself to a motherhood-as-isolation stance that ends up permeating all of society, and that I cannot abide. The trickle-down of this ideology is what hurt me in my most vulnerable state and what I’m battling now as an activist.
What happened to the village?
When the toll of motherhood is something to either absorb on your own, or avoid through violence toward offspring, we exile women to their own islands of difficulty. When seeing children as valuable becomes a choice, you can choose to disregard both them and their mothers. When this happens, boy howdy do we feel it. A huge part of my postpartum struggle was the safety-net I sensed missing. It was so apparent that I started a local support group for moms when my youngest was three months old. Women flocked, regularly seeking a chance to voice how beaten-down they felt. “We have to scrape harder than anyone else for access to anything.” “We’re on waitlists for childcare that doesn’t exist, and even if we can get it, we can’t afford it.” We’re accused of “being dramatic” when PPA/PPD consumes us. We are without help in formula shortages. Our insurance doesn’t cover pelvic floor therapy. Our bodies are targeted by algorithms meant to communicate that saggy bellies are because we just aren’t trying hard enough. We field comments about how “rude” we are every time we don’t want a stranger near our children during flu season, and we haven’t been to the dentist in three years because the office is only open 9-4:30 and all our babysitters work 9-5.
But in all this, the child does nothing to oppress. He or she makes no conscious choice to either inconvenience or benefit anyone. The culture, however, has a different kind of agency. It can choose to be supportive or to marginalize, and the pro-abortion narrative has made us complacent with marginalization. It tells a mom that if parenting is hard or scary, well that’s her problem, and if she’s desperate enough, she can always choose violence as “a way out.” Parents are wildly under-supported in the U.S. and the “pro-woman” narrative has shifted focus from actually creating meaningful cultural change to simply allowing us to “get rid of” what causes us to need support. The abortion-rights strategy reinforces a system that functions exactly the way my pro-choice friend said: care about children if you personally want to, but don’t force anyone else to. In so doing, our culture outsources all responsibility for our species’ next generation to mothers as singular units who must somehow either sink or swim against all odds. Is it any wonder we struggle?
Something has to change.
I don’t think my pro-choice friend is wrong for wanting a way out. But women don’t need a way out from the existence of their children, they need a way out from the things that make motherhood a liability. Violence offered as the solution should be seen for what it is: scraps thrown to women by systems who don’t want to have to care about them or their children more sacrificially. When “a lifestyle change” is what I needed to thrive, a culture that wouldn’t step up to help (and that couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t champion destroying any future children instead) was exactly the problem. My work as a pro-life activist now isn’t because I hate women or am out of touch with the struggles people face. My work is precisely because of my struggles and the frustration that not more is being done to keep women from the same “lifestyle” I faced which was, in fact, preventable.
A better way out.
For many feminist pro-lifers, our activism is a way to avenge the grief of mothers who have never been taken seriously or had truly inclusive space carved out for them. It’s a refusal to allow dehumanizing our kids to be a solution to the fact that they can be hard to raise. Someone has to make it so that when my daughters have their own babies, they aren’t faced with the same marginalization I felt. Someone has to put pressure on the culture to finally change. If I had birthed my children into a world where a baby spiking a fever at 3am didn’t come with a $2,000 emergency room bill, I might not have been so anxious. If I raised kids in a culture where work/life balance was a priority and people could generally afford the cost of living, my husband might have been able to take a little time off. If many women’s issues weren’t “uncharted waters” in medical science, I might have had better access to evidence-based postpartum recovery and solutions when we couldn’t breastfeed. Nothing makes motherhood “easy,” but I can think of fifty things on both sides of the political spectrum that would have made my transition doable instead of seemingly impossible. Every time we make women’s rights about abortion instead, we distract from what would truly help in every other circumstance.
Too many moms need “lifestyle changes” to make their motherhood possible, but much of that can only be delivered by the world around her. We have the power to collectively influence the cultural factors that shape how someone experiences parenting. While babies can’t stop the fact that they cause sleep deprivation, we can stop making mothers feel like if they can’t do this alone, then they can’t do this at all. If that means forcing more people to care about women and children… even if they “don’t really want to…” then I’m ok with that.
