Miscarriage as an anti-abortion atheist
[This article is a transcript of “A voice you never heard before” courtesy of volunteer Ben Tomlin. If you’re interested in volunteering to transcribe more of our content, please complete our volunteer survey.]
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I saw this image online today: “Imagine getting into heaven and a voice you never heard before shouts, ‘Mommy!’” I assume it’s referring to miscarriage or possibly stillbirth. The woman who posted it had a caption that said something like, “This is the hope I cling to,” and I don’t begrudge her that at all. If you find hope and comfort in that, I’m glad for you.
I’ve had two miscarriages, and I’ve experienced them very specifically as someone who is anti-abortion and someone who’s an atheist. Particularly with my first miscarriage, I was in deep grief, and I joined some online pregnancy support groups.
The first group I joined had a number of posts similar to this image, talking about the hope and longing of seeing the children you lost someday in an afterlife. There were also posts about believing or trusting that God has a greater plan that will make this loss make sense. I will say again, I don’t begrudge anybody that faith or that comfort, but I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe in God, so for me, those posts were exceedingly painful. That’s the atheist part.
So I commented and I said something similar to what I’m saying now: “I don’t begrudge anyone this, but for me this is actually a little bit difficult. Do you guys know if there is some kind of specifically secular pregnancy loss group?”
The responses were very kind, and they did point me to a pregnancy loss group that was specifically for atheist and agnostic women.
Now, in the first loss group I had been in, the one that had a lot of the more religious posts, they had rules you had to agree to before you joined the group, and one of the rules was that they don’t argue about abortion.
The second group I joined, the group that was specifically for secular people, they also had rules for you to join, and one of the rules was not that we don’t argue about abortion. It was: “This is a pro-choice group.”
I’m not necessarily surprised because being atheist in particular, and also generally being secular, correlates more with being pro-choice, and there are going to be women who are going to talk about pregnancy loss in the context of abortions they’ve had that they are grieving, and they want a space to be able to do that without being attacked for having an abortion.
Still, I feel like it would be one thing to say we aren’t going to fight about abortion in this group, and it’s a different thing to say this group specifically supports abortion rights.
I had just lost my child, and I had just, right after that, gone through the experience of trying to find a way to process it alongside people who believe they will see their child again someday, and having to continually think that I don’t believe that. My heart is broken, but in order for me to find a community of my peers in terms of my non-religious views so that I can, alongside them, process what for me is an emotional crisis, I first have to affirm that I believe in a right to purposefully destroy the same children whose natural, inevitable deaths we’re trying to grieve right now.
The love I have, the value I see in the child I lost—you want me to act like that’s just a preference. It’s way too much cognitive dissonance for me.
These are either our valuable children whose deaths we grieve, or they’re not. A lot of people think that they’re not. I understand that. That’s easier for me to understand than people trying to say sometimes they are when you feel like it, and then they’re not when you don’t.
Anyway, to this day, images like this mess me up because I’m jealous of the hope that I cannot access as an atheist, but then the inconsistency of secular pro-choice people also messes me up because I can’t access that fickleness as someone who recognizes embryos as our children.
Resources
SPL’s Guide for Hospital Miscarriage Care
Livestream Recap: Personal Stories and Policy Gaps Around Miscarriage
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