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I don't even remember seeing the pill, but I know I took it. It is in the public record. I remember only being asked to sit up from the kit exam as it was ending, and a hand giving me a thin plastic cup filled with water. For a moment, like a flicker of the light as the electric current regains its standing, I noticed the bright light above reflecting off of the tiny pool in my hand, and in that moment, in that hospital room, with just three women I did not know around me, holding me with their presence, I felt a sliver, just a small and fleeting shadow, of freedom.

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When searching for an OBGYN 16 years ago, I asked each of the doctors what their position was on the termination of a pregnancy. I told them that I was Jewish and what Jewish law states about life. The doctor said that he would follow our choice. The wrinkle occurred with our health insurance. My husband works for the government we have government health insurance. After my first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage, we were excited but guarded during the second pregnancy. I was in the ninth week when problems started to happen. We were told the fetus had not developed a brain, only a brain stem but had a heartbeat. It would not live without medical intervention once born. My husband and I asked when a medical procedure/abortion could be performed. The doctor told us that due to our insurance, we could not make that decision and have the procedure covered. The fetus had to be declared unviable medically. He sent us home for a week. It was agonizing! A week later we returned and was told that the fetus was declared unviable.

I have testified before the VA legislation about getting the government to allow individuals to make their own health choices. As women, we know our bodies better than anyone else. We need to be able to make our own decisions concerning our health care.

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When I look at things from a close perspective, let's call it the google map view, my life is removed from issues and questions related to abortion.  As lesbians, my wife and I had to work hard and pay some pretty pennies to get pregnant.  And we each did and had two great kids who are now far too old to be called kids.   We never had the opportunity to address abortion in our lives.

And from the google earth perspective, my life is very wrapped up in this struggle.  A woman's right to reproductive freedom, the right of the LGBT community to have children and create family, all of our rights to travel where we wish in the U.S., the Dobbs decision challenges all of this.  And if we do not stand up now, we may not have another opportunity.

Many in my family died in the Holocaust.  I was taught from a very young age to be ever watchful of the possible rise of tyranny and fascism - the mutation of the rule of the law into some kind of monster that would eat me and all those I cared about.

Dobbs seems to be bringing us closer to that. The Dobbs ruling is pretty clear that some lives are less valuable than others, some people are less able to make decisions than others, some religions are worth less than others.  This terrifies me.

I know this wall is a space to write about our personal stories of abortion.  And I have not done that.  I have written about my personal fears of what Dobbs could lead to in the US.  My feelings and fears are very strong.  We cannot underestimate our enemies in this fight.

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I will not be writing anything "incredible"; my story is deeply ordinary. Truths are not always incredible or beautiful, they simply are the fullness of our lived experience.
When my husband and I were dating I became pregnant (contraception failure). Although I struggled with the decision I opted for an abortion. It was simply not the right time for either of us individually or as a couple for a myriad of reasons. Naively, we both assumed that when we were "ready" conception would be no problem. In the fullness of time we married and decided to have children. But conception was not immediate...or easy...or automatic...or anything. Countless months crying each time my period arrived. For the first time since the abortion I began to second guess that decision. Did I destroy any possibility of our having a family?
Ultimately, and with medical intervention, we conceived and 2 1/2 years later did so again.
Those 2 conceptions are my magnificent  kids, now adults in their twenties.
If I could go back and do it again I wouldn't change a thing....not the decisions, the struggles, the outcomes, the growth...none of it. It is all a part of my messy, ordinary truth and I love it.
That any person would think for even a moment that they or the government have the right to intervene in any part of this process is beyond my understanding. It leaves me sad and angry, but also curious as to how to process this and respond.

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I have taken the morning after pill. I have taken Misoprostol. I have had a d&c.

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I was 23 and unemployed. The pregnancy signs were there but I didn't think it was possible because I had a copper IUD. I didn't have a job, let alone a place for a crib. It makes me sad that I had to terminate a pregnancy but I wasn't ready to become a parent. Reproductive justice isn't just about bodily autonomy, it's about the ability to determine the course of one's life.

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Why is the instruction to write something beautiful? What does that even mean?
I don’t have anything lovely or terrible to say. It’s rather straightforward.

I had two abortions about 35 years ago. Both pregnancies were the result of birth control failure. I was a single 30-something. I was figuring out my own life. I had no intention of having children at the time. And I did not feel attached to a non-sentient entity. I did not need to spend any time figuring out my decisions, and I have never once regretted them. I eventually married the man with whom I had the second abortion. We have 2 beautiful children and a wonderful life.

The press seems to write about abortions as emotional journeys. And only if the woman agonizes and suffers emotionally is an abortion “allowed” to be morally justified. That is wrong. It’s important to not turn all abortions into a deep personal journeys. Every woman is different and her physical and emotional needs will be different. But it needs to be said that that in many many situations abortion is simply not a hard decision. If you are pregnant and do not want to have a child, it should be a very straightforward decision. And that kind of decision is fine.

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Last Rosh Hashana as the shofar beckoned us toward the new year, to become brave as the breath of theBaal Tekiyah, to feel time wrap us in its tallit of embrace and release; I heard the cries of women, of mothers who had to let go of what they held most close-their children.

The shofar, which in the past has been a celebration of connection to the higher spiritual realms and joyous journeys inward that although tinged by trepidation, always led me to a spiritual and emotional place of moving forward. But last year it blew my spirit elsewhere.

Midrash and text have likened the shofar sound to the wails of Sarah as she assumes Isaac has died at her husband's hands. Hagar's sobs from seeing and not being able to see her son die as she turns from him are also part of the shofar's tomes, as are Sisera's unnamed mother who stands at the window and weeps for her son, and Rachel's weeping for her children on their exile. Women's tears and laments contain much of our tradition, our mourning and tears illuminate our humanness, connection and responsibility and accountability we hold to each other.

This primal agony surges and spins into a tornado contained by the wildness of too many feelings to sort. It reverberates with the power of a broken heart. It is soul seared grief that is soaked by tears. This shofar blew an unexpected torrent of notes of reckoning about something I had done years before. It could be silenced no more. It was time to see deeper and to make amends, to do teshuva.

It was the day after Yom Kippur. I looked out the window of the room I 'attended' services in the day before. The leaves wafted gracefully from their branches to the grass when the wind was a gentle lilt and then plummeted to the ground when the wind became a harsh gale.

This is what my prayers were. I was being shown that Nature and the Divine will not forget. I was heard, and I was seen. And now I am being led to see myself and not to forget. This year's prayers were particularly deep as an old pain and grief joined the pain and grief of today. They mingled upward like the smoke of incense in the Temple.

I had an abortion when I was 22. Over the years the pain I hold about it would step forward. I would ride it till it retreated. But this year it came like a frost heave. It erupted from the deepest, most buried part of me. It expanded and contracted with the pressure of not being able to hold this any longer. It had to breathe. It had to speak. It had to be healed.

I was suffering from a serious back condition when I became pregnant. My doctor was not optimistic that I would be able to walk if I went to term. I would likely find myself in a wheelchair as a result. Although I knew in my gut this was the right choice, I also believed, and still do, that life begins at conception.

So, life went back to what it was...except it did not. The primal topography of my being shifted like tectonic plates of Earth in days of formation. I did a series of paintings about it, I cut my hair, I wrote, but I remained and remain in the two pieces of this fissured state. I had to learn to live with knowing I determined the fate of another being. While I took solace that Judaism does not have a non-negotiable restriction of abortion, especially when the mother's health is at stake, I wanted to reconcile the morality of abortion and the iniquity of ending a life, but I found no way to do it. This year I was pushed toward finding a way. That way was asking for forgiveness.

I watched services from my couch. I found myself in a squatting position. My body was birthing my prayers. They were strewn with flowing tears and solid stillness much like the physical births I have nurtured in other women as a healer. I was in a liminal space between the present Yom Kippur and the pith of emotional pain. It was filled with an anguish that was too heavy for tears to move. It had been tethered to my soul for so long that it had been unable to receive any touch of comfort.

I faced the soul that I had taken toward its death and asked its forgiveness. I asked permission for connection in order to come to a deeper healing for both of us. Was I presumptuous to think this innocent one needed healing? I was not sure, but I did it anyway. It didn't matter that I still felt my choice was correct, this was an act against another, and I needed to reconcile it. But I realized that I could not. I could only ask, again, forgiveness for the stark truth that there are some things that cannot be reconciled. We need to learn to live in the haziness of ambiguity

This spirit was part of me. Did a part of me die along with it? Is that crevice of my inner geography made of my death as well as the death of this soul that was inside of me? I asked for forgiveness for myself from the Creator. I asked that this loss that will never leave, how could it, be taken to a place within myself where it can rest swaddled in love and compassion.

My heart reached toward my unborn child's soul. My invocations for forgiveness and peace squeezed my breath to a whimper, but my soul roared. It bellowed through my blood releasing decades of immobile torment. I was finally able to let the self-hatred and shame be washed away. I was being cleansed and nurtured on this most holy day. My child and I were held together by the Supernal's strength of love for us both.

Today is the last day of Sukkot, the last of the High Holy Days. The rise and the dive of this time when inquiry of our darkness and celebration of our light heals and restructures us. It invites us to muster the faith that Spirit is supporting our walk. I have been in my inner Succah, my place of rest and recuperation. Each day when I shook my lulav and etrog, I did it for myself and for this child who is now wrapped peaceably within my heart.

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Reckoning With My Past Abortion on Yom Kippur

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Last Rosh Hashana as the shofar beckoned us toward the new year, to become brave as the breath of the Baal Tekiyah, to feel time wrap us in its tallit of embrace and release; I heard the cries of w...

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My parents never told me the full story. My mom passed away several years ago but she told me that in the mid-70s in college she learned she was pregnant before she started dating my dad. It was not his child, she was no longer with the man who’s baby it was and they were not ready to start a family. They just met! My dad accompanied her. Im so glad that my mom had the choice and the right to terminate. God willing my daughter will never be in a situation where she needs an abortion, but when she one day comes of age I don’t want to have to consider colleges based on the states abortion laws.

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I think what's important for this context, though, is that I've come to find the way the secular pro-choice movement often speaks about Judaism as the "good" or "liberated" religion on abortion deeply troubling, as it prevents us from addressing bias and bigotry within our own communities and makes Judaism into a sort of model minority caricature of what is in fact a complex and often painful struggle between Torah and modernity, obedience and sovereignty.

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Rivers of Babylon: The Story of a Third-Trimester Abortion

And so it came to pass that Hannah conceived and bore a son, whom she named Samuel, saying, "I have asked the Lord for him."

- 1 Samuel 1:20

Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac. Go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.

- Genesis 22:2

And when the water in the skin was gone, she put the child under a bush. She walked away and sat down, about a bow-shot away, for she said, "I cannot watch the child die." And as she sat there, she began to cry.

- Genesis 21: 15-16

A one-day old infant, if it dies, is [thus] considered to its father and mother like a full bridegroom.

- Mishnah Niddah 5:3

The first walk I took outside my house after my abortion was with my rabbi. It was a humid, hot Sunday for October in New England. I didn't make it that far down the road. We sat down outside a Jewish day school a few blocks from my house.

She walked us through the basics of what was permitted and what was required and what she, personally, felt comfortable doing for us. We would bury my son on Tuesday; she would not say kaddish; we would sit a one-day shiva. My husband would say kaddish, once, at home, with a minyan. And then it would be done. It was a middle ground; a way to show respect to a life that almost was.

She said something to me, then, that has been a great comfort. "You had a choice," she said, "but you did not have free will." A choice that was no choice at all.

A standard pro-life talking point on the ethics of abortion for a terminally ill fetus insists that any life, no matter how short or painful, is better than no life at all. I hope, on my good days, that the people who repeat this mantra never have to dwell in the fullness of their ignorance.

Traditional Jewish law does not obligate the family of a child who dies at less than thirty days old to mourn. The community burial society buries and names any child lost after the fifth month of pregnancy, but the family does not attend the burial, does not sit shiva, and does not say kaddish. There is no middle space of mourning beyond that; it is simply as if the child never existed to the community. In times of high neonatal mortality this lack of public grieving was likely intended as a kindness. Shiva interrupts every aspect of your life, holding a tangible emotional space of grieving that, while therapeutic, is extraordinarily draining for the mourners.

Barring parents from grieving with the community is not so kind, though, today, and I think it may never have been. It is probably no accident that the first rabbinic opinion advocating for an interpretation of the tradition that would allow for mourning stillbirth, third-trimester abortion, and neonatal loss was written by a woman, relatively soon after women were allowed into the rabbinate of Conservative Judaism.

The lack of defined mourning rituals should not be read as evidence that Judaism is hyper-permissive on the issue of abortion. On the contrary, it is a serious matter across the ideological spectrum of modern Jewish religious thought: A fetus is "a life in the process of development" and must be treated accordingly and with greater gravity as a pregnancy proceeds.

But even the most conservative religious authorities do not grant the child full personhood until the head is delivered from the mother's body-at that moment, two human lives exist, not before. Because of that distinction, the mother's life always takes absolute primacy over that of the fetus, whatever the stage of development.

While the Reform Movement emphasizes the gravity of the decision but leaves the ultimate choice up to the woman and her family, a number of Orthodox rabbis and all Conservative formally allow abortion in cases where the mother's health, mental or physical, is at risk and in cases of serious fetal illness, such as Tay-Sachs.

What 'serious' means is left to the individual woman and the medical and religious authorities with whom she consults.

On the second day of the four-day procedure to end my pregnancy, the sky was huge and blue after a storm the day before. There were protestors outside the clinic. The doctor washed my vagina out with Betadine to put in the first laminaria that would (in theory) dilate my cervix slowly and gently. He would announce it first in a firm voice, "I'm going to wash out with an iodine solution now!" It gave you a blackish-green discharge that smelled of hospital for the rest of the day. I used to associate iodine with hiking and my mother, who after a career in nursing always used it on my scrapes. For the rest of my life, I think I will remember it like heartbreak and the cracked ceiling tiles of the clinic's tiny operating room.

After the appointment, my husband and I drove up into Rocky Mountain National Park. The rain had turned to snow on the Rockies and the scenic roads were all closed, but I wanted to see what we could. The mountains felt clean, something sublime thrown into the legal morass that had forced us to leave our young children with a family friend and fly from Boston to Denver for the abortion. The elk were out, lazy and napping on bare patches of grass. We stopped at one of those tiny mountain town restaurants on the way out, same as you get next to any national park. It claimed to have umpteen varieties of pie but was out of most: We had chicken pot pie and blueberry pie, on an uneven linoleum table.

Back at the hotel, my husband called the clinic to confirm they would release the body to the local, secular funeral home we had called. I could only hear his end of the conversation. "Oh," he said. "That's terrible," he said. "Oh."

He hung up and didn't want to tell me what it was.

"No," I insisted. "Tell me."

"We can't use that funeral home," he said, "Workers at the funeral home stole remains from the clinic a few years ago, when they had a contract with them."

"What do you mean, they stole them?" I asked, incredulous.

"They gave them to the archdiocese," he said. "To bury. The workers cremated the bodies and the local church buried them without permission. Some of them were from women who wanted the remains back, some weren't."

My knees went out from under me and I sat down, hard, on the hotel room floor. All the horrifying hoops to jump through and legal tests to pass just to get here and now, this? It wasn't enough to picket my doctor and insert yourself into my healthcare and claim to know what was best for my child, now you want to steal his body? I had been holding it together, all day, and all I remember is screaming over and over, How could someone do that? How could someone do that? This is the only thing I can do for him, to keep his body safe now. How could someone do that?

Later I found out that in 2015, two years before my abortion, workers at the funeral home went on the record as having found remains from the clinic "disturbing." In 2005, the media caught wind that the same workers had stolen remains since at least 1999-they called it "donated"- from both the clinic and women who had miscarriages at a nearby hospital. When asked about the story, the spokesman from the archdiocese pontificated, "This discussion clarifies the distinction between people who believe in the sanctity of life and those who don't. What is their view? To discard unborn children and then worry where they end up."

I don't even know where to begin, with such cruelty. It was at once something that had never occurred to me and, once it had, entirely predictable.

Fetal burial laws are increasingly a feature of Trump's America, or more specifically, Pence's: multiple states are either in the process of passing such laws, have recently had a law struck down or litigated, or have a law in effect. Even without a law in force, Catholic hospitals-which take federal funding dollars in the form of Medicaid and Medicare-have repeatedly pressured non-Catholic women who have miscarried before twenty weeks into fetal burial programs, berating them about the ethics of an intensely personal decision with which they have nothing, properly, to do. And Catholic churches, like the Sacred Heart of Mary in Boulder, continue to collude in unethical burial practices under the guise of universal human dignity. In the process, they violate the religious norms of other communities-neither observant Jews, nor Muslims, cremate.

Who by fire, and who by water?

- Leonard Cohen, via Jewish high holiday liturgy

You get what you get and you don't get upset.

I hate that, when we say it to children. Of course you get upset. What are we, if we can face the bareness of life stripped of any illusion of fairness, of covenantal decree, and not get upset. Tch.

We don't get intercession. There is no-one, no conveniently human figure between us and totality, between us and the still, small voice of what we might call God, whom we can meaningfully ask to plead on our behalf. There is only the starkness of the unetanah tokef, the breath of teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah, repeated in the desperate, human hope of anchoring the future contingent-tomorrow I will live, tomorrow he will die, tomorrow she will be cast down and he will be raised up-in the firmament of the divine.

I don't believe it, anymore, the way a child does, if I ever did. You get what you get, el malai rahamim, fine, good, fantastic, were God not so full of mercy, there would perhaps be more mercy in the world, and not just in him. What happens to us has nothing to do with fairness, with who prays harder or does more or repents better or eats cleaner. The messianic age will not be gluten-free.

What happens to us has everything to do with who we are, to each other, with how we pick up the pieces of our brokenness and hang onto each other, with the responsibility written first in the flesh and the face of the Other. The veneer of civilization is as thin as the blood the high priest spills on the alter, as easily blown away as the ashes of his sons, as self-destructive as a society eaten alive by idolatry, by racism, by greed. Careful, we go, or we will sit on the shores of the rivers of Babylon, and weep to remember Zion.

(Zion is a metaphor. Except when it isn't.)

I found out I was pregnant at the end of April. I was a few days late and had been feeling off. I finally bought a pregnancy test after being prodded by my husband. After I bought the brand-name kind (might as well be certain) I took the kids out for pizza and decided I might as well get the test over with so I could relax. We'd never had a real pregnancy scare, not in the ten years we've been married or the twenty years we've been together. We are, as my stepfather says, "terrifyingly responsible people."

There's a first time for everything.

I was surprised, to say the least, but immediately, fundamentally happy. My husband was worried: we lived in a third-floor, two-bedroom walkup with two young children and couldn't afford to move and keep our son in the good school district. But, a few weeks later, he saw the first sonogram and that was that.

Because of a rare anatomical defect that puts me at high risk of premature labor-a duplication of the reproductive system means I have two intact uterine cavities-I had weekly growth scans. My first two children were born at term on the right side-in the oddly judgmental language obstetricians apply to female bodies, that uterus was 'proven' but the left one, 'unproven,' was new, untrusted territory.

This child was on the left. I remember thinking perhaps he would be different. Sidereal. Dark-haired, possibly quiet, where my other two children are ragingly intense redheads.

I would have so liked to have seen his face, just once.

There was a heat wave in Boston on the Monday after Rosh Hashanah. I'd gone to the dentist that morning because I read somewhere that plaque increased preterm labor risk. I remember showing up to the twenty-eight-week scan in the afternoon covered in sweat and exhausted. I reminded myself to order a bassinet for the used double stroller I had bought.

My husband was able to come with me, which was unusual. For most of my appointments, I had gone alone. But the hospital where he worked let him out early, so he came. The technician was blonde, middle-aged, and kind. She talked about the one time she had mistaken a girl for a boy on the scan and then had to correct herself. "It was so embarrassing," she said, "Now I never say anything until I double check."

The numbers that flashed onto the screen this time were not reassuring. I didn't know exactly what they meant, but it wasn't good that he was lagging behind on growth. I knew it might mean we had to deliver him prematurely; I also knew we could give him steroids before he was born and that he would almost certainly survive and go on to have a high quality of life, if not a life without long-term disability.

The doctor wasn't there in person. We talked to her on speakerphone, huddled over the landline in the empty office. "The brain anatomy looks normal on ultrasound," she said firmly. "I don't think this is a genetic issue, but it's on my list. The baby is very small and the head circumference is smaller. I want you to go to Children's and have a fetal MRI. It will give us all the information we can get. We may need to deliver him early. I want you to talk to a specialist first."

The period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called the Days of Awe, in the Jewish calendar. On Rosh Hashanah we read about Issac and Abraham, Hannah and Samuel, Hagar and Ishmael. Fathers and sons, mothers and sons, blood and knives and terrible, hard choices. Right before, we read Ecclesiastes-ashes to ashes, dust to dust, to everything there is a season. The calendar this year was either toying with me or trying to tell me something, and I wasn't sure which or what I was meant to get out of it.

I took my children to school and back; I tried to stay off Google. I worked. I forced myself to eat more meat because one of my brief forays onto Google said that could help small babies. I vowed to eat breakfast more regularly.

Children's called on Thursday. They wanted to schedule the tests for eight-thirty the following morning, the day before Yom Kippur.

It wasn't just an MRI, as it turned out. It was a fetal MRI followed by an ultrasound done on a fancier machine than I had ever seen. The pediatric radiologist proudly told my husband the department had been on a waiting list for it for six months and it had cost $300,000. After the scans, a pediatric radiologist, a pediatric neurologist, and a geneticist would review the results and my previous record, call my high-risk obstetrician, and then meet with us in a conference room. We were told to show up at eight and plan on being there until three in the afternoon.

After the MRI, I asked the ultrasound technician if it was depressing to work here, in the Advanced Fetal Care Center where no pregnancy was healthy. No, she said, it was inspiring; there was so much to be done. I knew a little about this-Boston Children's and their sister hospital, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, had pioneered fetal surgery, EXIT to ECMO, neonatal cardiac care, and a list of other interventions I couldn't begin to explain. These are the people you go to when you need a fucking miracle. These are the people that intervene when, perhaps, you shouldn't.

"All the structures are normal!" chirped the pediatric radiologist after the ultrasound. "Maybe the head is just very small and that's normal for this baby, but I'm a radiologist so I just say what the images say, not what they mean. You'll talk to the neurologist later. What are you guys going to get for lunch? Just come back before your appointment time, even, I'm sure we can just see you sooner and get you home."

We had hamburgers and fries. I had a chocolate milkshake. I hadn't been hungry like I normally was by this point in pregnancy, but I ate anyway. Maybe it would help. We were cheerful and the radiologist seemed to think the baby was healthy, if small.

They took us out of the waiting room and back to a conference room almost immediately. We joked about the tissues on the table, little boxes of sad tissues in every sad little room. We waited for almost an hour, so long that my husband started to take calls again about his patients and eventually went to the front to ask if they had forgotten about us. They hadn't.

The neurologist was an older man with a grey beard and a quiet demeanor; the geneticist was a younger woman with blonde hair and a firm presence. The radiologist and my high-risk obstetrician weren't in the room; they had been in on the meeting before this meeting, along with the ultrasound tech, they explained. They all reviewed the results together.

The neurologist talked first. "Are you sure about your dates?" he asked. "If your dates are at all wrong, all of this goes away, poof." (He made a little exploding motion with his hands.) "So, let's be sure about your dates." I told him I didn't know, but I had had a six-week scan at a different hospital because I had felt terribly faint. They could pull the records from there. He nodded at the geneticist. "Make the call after we talk," he said.

He repeated again that the problems would all go away if it were a dating error. "Okay," I said, "say it isn't a dating error. What are you saying is wrong?"

The two doctors kept repeating potential causes (infection, genetic, placenta), circling around the central question: What would this mean? Finally, the neurologist answered me. He cleared his throat and looked at the table.

"Right now," he said, "you are most likely, although I cannot promise, dealing either with a baby with profound cognitive impairment that will die shortly after birth, or a baby that will live with intervention, but will never be able to swallow to clear his airway and may not be able to regulate his own breathing. He will certainly not develop language, reach for objects, be mobile in any way, and may not be able to see or hear."

"Will he be able to live at home?" I asked, still bargaining. He gave me a strange look.

"Most babies like this can live at home now," he said, "if they survive birth. You put a tracheostomy in their throat (he made a short jab towards his trachea) and insert a tube into their stomach, through the belly button (another jab, this time toward his side) in to feed them."

I had been asking all the questions until that point. I had to get up and leave the room before I started sobbing. I patted the geneticist on the shoulder, to make her feel better. I don't know why.

I pulled myself together and came back in. "What are our options?" I asked. The neurologist sighed. "Well," he said, "we measure the baby's head at birth and we go from there with palliative care." "Is there any treatment?" I asked. "No," he said. "What is the next step?" I pushed, again.

The geneticist shuffled some paperwork on the table, and said, "If you want to continue the pregnancy, we bring in a social worker to talk you through how that will work. If you don't, we will refer you to a clinic in Colorado. Our center refers people there, when this happens, about once every other month. We can have your records there in ten minutes."

"Why not in Massachusetts?" I asked. "The law here bans termination after twenty-four weeks," she said. "And there is no one here experienced enough to do the procedure, in any case." I didn't have to ask why twenty-four weeks; I knew it was the closest the state could come to an abortion ban that would hold up in court against Roe.

It helped, when the doctors finished speaking, that my husband and I had already talked about when and if we would ask to withdraw care if we were to have a very premature baby. We had already agreed on where we thought the balance between senseless, unending suffering and the preservation of a potential life lay. I remember I looked at him, and I looked at the doctor, and then I looked over at the geneticist. "Check the dates," I said, "and then call Colorado."

We went home. My son was already asleep; there was no question of going to Kol Nidre now. I paid the babysitter and crawled into a bath with my two-year-old daughter. She laughed and laughed, delighted that an adult had crashed her bath-time. My husband came and sat on the floor of the bathroom with us. I tried to hold her on the couch until she fell asleep, but she asked for her father to put her to bed. She's so big now.

Life is movement.

- Aristotle, Physics

Monday was the day we had to kill the baby. It rained and rained and rained all day and snowed on the mountains. I was grateful to the rain; it felt like God agreed with me about the day. It also meant that the clinic didn't have protestors out front like the other days we would be there.

There was a lot of paperwork and a lot of counseling, with my husband and-to be sure I wasn't being coerced-without him. We paid $11,500, up front. There was a medical student from Arkansas who sat in on most of it. Fresh-faced, pretty, young but grave. It was the end of her two weeks at the clinic: a hard-won chance to learn from one of the four doctors left alive who will perform third-trimester abortions.

Despite the fact that they rarely did them, the clinic had agreed to do an amniocentesis for us because we didn't know what had caused the microcephaly. They had called my hospital back home and arranged to have the sample sent back to the prenatal genetics department there. It was one of the more surreal aspects of the experience: the entire time, the clinic was in touch with my world-class obstetrics department in Boston. The law had, literally, come between us, imposing a geographic divide between doctor and patient.

They took me back into the exam room. The ultrasound was on the whole time. You have to be sure. The doctor did the amnio first. It hurt. The baby woke up afterwards; he always woke up during ultrasounds. He started moving around and I started trying so, so hard not to cry and not to move. The doctor asked if anything was wrong. I told him I would be fine and to do what he had to do. The nurse held my hand so tightly. She knew. I had whispered it to her that he had woken up. When they tried the first digoxin injection, he rolled away from them. No one in the room said a word. I think they didn't want to upset me, but I knew. They had to prep me to try again: more lidocaine injections, another drape, more Betadine, more ultrasound. I laid a hand on the baby and I told him, please, please go to sleep. We have to do this for you now. He stopped moving, just for a moment. He could probably hear my voice, or at least the vibration of my lungs. They got the shot the second time, and he kicked, very gently, right in the lower left of my stomach. That was the last time I felt him move.

They let me go back to my husband a little while later, when they were sure I was stable. My blood pressures were high the whole week, even before they did anything. (Later, I would find out that I had developed gestational hypertension, which can happen with placental problems.) They let me go back to a private recovery room. I hung onto my husband and cried for a long time. Then we went back to the hotel.

The week I started writing this piece, a federal judge overturned a Texas law, Senate Bill 8. Among other things, the law includes a fetal burial provision, a ban on donating fetal tissue for research, a ban on elective abortions after twenty weeks, and a ban on what the bill calls "dismemberment abortions." The bill is part of a string of similar omnibus abortion bills around the country which feature "dismemberment abortion" as the newest prong of legislative attack.

The name for a "dismemberment abortion" is properly a dilation and extraction, or D&E. It is the most commonly used abortion procedure in the first half of the second trimester of pregnancy. The law's proponents claim it is about banning the specific procedure, not about banning abortion. The language in the Texas bill, the "unborn child," the "dismemberment," the "slices, crushes, grasps" of the verbs, belies that claim and insists that we are not merely talking about banning an abortion procedure, but about banning abortion itself.

I was never supposed to have a D&E. The standard of care for a third-trimester abortion is the same as for a stillbirth: ensure the fetus is dead, then induce labor. Done properly, it is safer than a live birth.

At least, that's how it works in theory.

I came in Thursday morning nervous but unconcerned, fundamentally, with my own safety. My husband was not so sanguine; he kept asking the nurses what they would do if I needed blood. They laughed at him. Their patients lose blood measured in milliliters, always. Fewer than one percent of abortion patients suffer any kind of hemorrhage, let alone one severe enough to require a transfusion.

The doctor who performed my abortion has never lost a patient; he is obsessive, if old-fashioned, in his safety protocols. In case of a true emergency, the clinic is across the street from a hospital-a hospital today hostile to abortion patients, but a hospital. When he did the pelvic exam he seemed gruffly concerned; the second set of laminaria had fallen out overnight. He broke my water, inserted misoprostol, and did a pudendal block to help with the pain. His nurse did an IV and hooked me up to Pitocin to induce labor. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

And wait.

I sent my husband out to get lunch. When he came back protestors were standing in front of the clinic entrance. He stared at them, silently, until they moved out of the way.

The trick of inductions for late-term abortion is that you don't have to get to ten centimeters; the fetus is still quite small, so at most one needs four. If you are a woman of childbearing age in this country, you doubtless know at least one woman who has had a cesarean for a failed induction. Most of those women will have gotten to at least four centimeters.

After four hours, two rounds of misoprostol, and a bag of Pitocin, I had made it to one. The nurse came in, again, and said the doctor wanted to see me. I told him I didn't mind waiting longer, I didn't mind any pain, I wanted to be able to deliver the baby's body intact. He looked at me, sat down on a chair, frank but kind.

"Listen," he said. "Sometimes they send me women from the Catholic hospitals, you know, when the fetus has died and they have tried to induce for days. You've had no pain, you've barely dilated. This is not going to work. We do a D&E now, or we do it later, or you wait and have a crash cesarean at the hospital. This is the safest option. I am not comfortable waiting. Okay?"

"Okay," I sighed. "I'll see you in there," he said, got up, and left the room. My husband spoke quietly, from the corner.

"He's not wrong, you know. I've seen the kinds of inductions he's talking about. He's not wrong."

"I know he's not wrong," I snapped. "It's just hard."

That's the thing, about the pro-life discourse. It steals my right to say without fear of legal reprisal targeted at women like me that what happened next did feel like dismemberment, it did feel like desecration, like mutilation, that I did want his body intact, that I desperately, beyond reason, wanted an intact body for burial. I wanted it viscerally, animally, the way your body wakes up in the night looking for a newborn, the way you feel a physical connection to your children even when you cannot see them, the way you want something when everything else has been taken from you. It is the same reason I buried him; I wanted to know where he had gone from me and how.

The nurse took me back to the operating room. She gave me a shot of Dilaudid, saying, "Ten shots of tequila, here we go!" with a brisk pat on my arm and left.

The medical student, the young woman, stayed with me. She said, tentatively, from the corner she had flattened herself into in the small room, "I think you are very brave." I didn't answer. Eventually, the rest of the team came into the room. The social worker came around to the head of the table to hold my hand and help keep me calm and still while the rest of the team worked.

"I have to get through this," I declared, mostly to myself. "I have to get through this so I can see my kids again." She tilted her head at me, quizzically, and said, "Yeah, that's a positive attitude." I turned my face away.

The world narrowed to the clicks of surgical instruments and the effort to be still against the pain. The social worker talked me through a breathing exercise; I tried to regulate my breathing and thought it was working. I heard a voice bark from the bottom of the table, between my knees, "Tara, if you don't breathe slower you will pass out."

I lost track of time, after that. Everyone in the room became very, very quiet and I became frightened: Surgeons, as a rule, only shut up when they're worried. I heard the doctor order the first nurse to give me more Dilaudid, this time intravenously; sometime after, or maybe before, I moaned, trying to be quiet, and heard the nurse whisper to the social worker, "try to help her stay quiet; it's going to terrify the other patients." Someone asked the doctor if they should put me under, I think, and he said, "No, it's too dangerous." I kept breathing, in and out, in and out, I closed my eyes and tried not to think. I started to feel I would fall asleep, I was so tired.

I heard the doctor breathing heavily, at the foot of the bed, like he was running a marathon. I started to be afraid that he wouldn't be able to get the body out, that I would have to go to the hospital, be wheeled there with my dead, mutilated baby hanging out of me like a perversely medicalized Medea. I heard the clink of the forceps on a tray and a wet plop. I refused to contemplate what part of the baby had just been dropped into the tray. Time became fuzzy around the edges.

And then, the doctor took his mask off, stood up and said, "Okay, we're done. The nurse is going to massage your uterus now, to help the bleeding. I'll see you in recovery."

Recovery is patchy, white scratchy pillows over a floral blanket they use to make the place look cheery. The nurse came in to tell us how much the baby had weighed, what his head looked like, that the scans had not been a mistake. I ran a sudden fever; I started to shake. The nurses kept asking me why I was so anxious. I didn't feel anxious at all. I felt fine, but exhausted. I asked how long I was gone; I had no idea how long the surgery had taken.

"A long time," my husband said. "A long time."

He got a look on his face I will never forget and kept hitting the call button, again and again.

"She's still bleeding," he said. "She's still bleeding." The nurse scolded me, waving a soaked chux pad, "This is too much blood. You need to do the fundal massage harder. This... this is too much."

It stopped, mostly, eventually. The doctor came in again, told me that the placenta had been calcified and fibrotic, that the tissue had aged like the placenta of an overdue baby, that it had stubbornly refused to detach from the uterine wall, causing the blood loss. "I'm tired," I said.

He laughed and said, "Well, I don't know why; I did all the work."

I smiled, recognizing gallows humor when I heard it. I told him thank you, thank you for your service to women. Thank you. He nodded, short and sharp, nodded at my husband, and walked out. The medical student was still standing in the corner. I was too weak to sit up. I looked at her. "You do this," I said. "You go home, and you do this." She looked at me, her face set and still. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I think so."

A standard D&E lasts thirty minutes and is done under waking sedation, sometimes under general anesthesia if done in a hospital. The patient typically loses less than five-hundred milliliters of blood.

All in all, I lost two liters of blood. The procedure lasted over an hour. I was awake the entire time.

(Do you know how much two liters of blood is? It's one of those giant bottles of soda you buy at the store, but blood instead of Coca Cola. I saw one of those on our counter when we got home and blanked out for a minute, came to sitting on the couch a minute later.)

When we got home I tried to get back to normal, a little. I woke up the day we buried him with a fever and chills, whole-body aches like you get with the flu. The staff at the funeral home treated me like I was made of glass and I overheard my husband whispering to the rabbi, "After this, I'm taking her to the hospital." We went from the cemetery to my obstetrician, grave-dirt still on my husband's shoes from where he had shoveled over a stark, tiny pine box. There was a teddy bear upholstered in floral fabric with a streak of dirt over its button eyes, sitting on another grave by the bushes. The funeral director grasped my hand with a queer urgency on the way out, after we washed, clear water over each hand, a symbolic transition from death to life. "Now," he said, "Now you have to go get better. It's time to go, now."

I didn't think I was particularly sick.

The rest of the story becomes increasingly mundane: I was admitted to the hospital that day for hypertension, tachycardia, and what is called post-procedural endometritis and was there for three days, hooked up to an alarming rotation of three antibiotics with side-effects I try not to think about. They had caught the infection in time, before it turned into sepsis, and I recovered fast. By the time I left I was still anemic, still tired, but fundamentally healthy. I was very, very lucky. My survival is a privilege unearned, bought with the coin of whiteness, through the poverty we as a society have chosen to tolerate, by the nakedness of those we have not seen fit to clothe.

It took a month for my husband to stop surreptitiously checking my pulse under the guise of holding my hand. I pretended not to notice.

Because of the nature of the abortion fight in the country, let me say this plainly: what happened to me was not the clinic's fault. It was not the doctor's fault. It was not his staff's fault. There was no error of medical judgment or medical practice. It is the fault of forty years of pushing abortion care out of hospitals and stigmatizing and marginalizing women and care providers to the point where only four doctors in the United States are foolish enough to risk getting shot point-blank every day on their way to work to provide late-term abortions. It is the fault of legislators terrorizing physicians with spurious investigations instead of funding abortion research and finding ways to make the procedure safer. It is the fault of giving extremist, hateful, radicalizing discourse equal airtime with scientific fact and medical expertise. What would it look like, if we truly funded women's healthcare? I wish I knew.

A time to be born, a time to die.

- Ecclesiastes, 3:2

There are multiple legends about how Sarah, Abraham's wife, died. This is one:

Satan went to Sarah and appeared to her in the countenance of Isaac. When she saw him, she said to him: "My son, what has your father done to you?" He answered her: "Father took me and raised me up to the mountains and brought me down into the valleys. He took me up to the top of one mountain, built an altar, arranged the woodpile, and placed the logs. He bound me on the altar and took a knife to slaughter me. If God had not told him: 'Do not raise your hand against the boy,' I would already be slaughtered." Satan did not finish speaking, and Sarah passed away ( Tanhuma, Vayera 23).

My grandfather died on November 6, a month and a day after my son. His son, my uncle, had died not three months prior. It cracked something deep in him, something unfixable and vital. The cancer took both of them each after the other, eating them alive until, at the end, their faces, unalike in life, looked so similar that my grandmother repeated, over and over, "Doesn't he look just like Rob? Doesn't he look just like his son?" I held my grandfather's hand while he died. His heart was the last thing to go, refusing to quit even when the tumors had filled his lungs. A lion of a man, right up until the end. We talk about dying as if it happens all at once and yes, there is that moment of death, when the breath leaves the body for the last time. But dying-oh, "active dying," as they call it in hospice, takes days. It is a blessing for the family to have that time. It is not a blessing for the person doing the work of dying. And it is work-a labor not unlike childbirth, with the difference mainly in the end result. Both are crucibles, passages with a before and an after.

Some things you never get over. A teacher of mine said once, "We are redeemed into the desert. That is what it means, to be Jewish." Perhaps, that is also what it means to be human. When Miriam sings and the seas part, we are redeemed into the desert, not into the promised land. I don't know where the story goes from here; all I know how to do is to keep walking into it, one day at a time. I am the mother of two children and a ghost, a baby ghost who never drew breath but whose memory I will carry for the rest of my life, even as I would not carry his body. And I killed him, as surely as if I had held the needle myself. I am your Lilith, your Medea, your Sethe, your imago of monstrous maternity and the dark heart of what it can mean to love our children.

His ghost rests easy with us, full of sadness, but easy. We are beginning to put the patchwork of life back together, jumbled and beautiful, and he is part of it, always. And my conscience, such as it is, is clear.

***
If you would like to donate to supporting women in need of abortion care after twenty weeks, please consider the Tiller Fund, Medical Students for Choice, and Sister Song.
***
Rumpus original art by Briana Finegan.
T.S. Mendola is a writer and editor living in Philadelphia. She has published in The Rumpus, Lilith, Rewire News, Health Affairs, and a number of academic journals. Find her on Twitter @tsmendola or at tsmendola.com. More from this author →

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Rivers of Babylon: The Story of a Third-Trimester Abortion

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Rivers of Babylon: The Story of a Third-Trimester Abortion And so it came to pass that Hannah conceived and bore a son, whom she named Samuel, saying, "I have asked the Lord for him." - 1 Samuel 1:20 Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac.

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I want to hear the true Torah position even if it is hard to hear or not PC or too nuanced to fully cover in a short time. 

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I want to hear the true Torah position even if it is hard to hear or not PC or too nuanced to fully cover in a short time. 

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I want to know what our tradition holds and has held since the Torah was given.  I also want to know how we can not like someone's behavior or choice without not liking the person themselves.

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I was 19 and in an abusive relationship. 1000+ miles from home. 

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I was 19 and in an abusive relationship. 1000+ miles from home. 

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I ignored the signs out of fear until I couldnt ignore them anymore. I took a test and cried in my room for days. Had to ask my boyfriend for money as I didnt have enough. He told me I killed his baby. Went to Planned Parenthood alone. Walked by people screaming at me. I told no one until my roommate finally coaxed it out of me. I now have 4 beautiful children and a husband who cherishes me. None of that would have been possible if I didnt have that choice.

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I was in college. I only ever had one partner. I never had unprotected sex. But it happened. We agreed to have an abortion because our lives as we hoped they would be would never happen if I did not. We knew our relationship would likely not last if we did not. We also knew that our relationships with our parents and peers and communities would never be the same if I did not. And so I did. It was not easy, but it was available. Only one friend ever knew. Our lives continued. Years later, when the time was right, we married. We have a beautiful family. All built on the foundation of a hard, but sound, health care decision that women in many states will no longer be able to make. It makes me want to scream!!! I can’t even imagine my life if I had been forced into motherhood before I was ready.

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In 1962 I was 17, about to go to university when I became pregnant by what would today be called “date 🤬”. 

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In 1962 I was 17, about to go to university when I became pregnant by what would today be called “date 🤬”. 

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There was no question of going to term, and my family was very supportive. A doctor was found who was also supportive, but his support did not include the use of anesthesia. It was a horrific experience that I would never wish on another woman…

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My second trimester abortion saved my life. I did not know I was pregnant in my youth and naïveté. It was many many years ago. I was deeply involved in an abusive relationship that began when I was 16. It was terrible in other ways as well including our religious incompatibility and the likelihood that he was gay. If I had been forced to bear this pregnancy to term, my life as I knew it would have ended: educationally, career-wise, family. I would have been shunned by my biological family. I would have been unable to extricate myself from physical abuse, which didn’t even have a name back then. Since it was 1974 and I lived in a metropolitan area I was able to find abortion care without too much trouble. The shame of being pregnant was enormous. The care I received was adequate but I could feel the judgment of the staff. It was shaming. Pain medication was withheld in a punitive way. I was forced to labor alone until my womb was empty. But I remain grateful that it was my choice to make. My life turned out well and I am content with most of it. This is what many states are stealing from residents who are women.

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In a pregnancy that got difficult in the second trimester, I faced a scenario where I'd already lost one twin and there was a probability that the other would lose its heart beat. From professionals and close family members I was being pressured to terminate. But I felt that if the choice was living with the potential for loss or initiating that loss in the first place, I would rather do the emotional work of waiting, hoping and worrying. I had to proactively seek out the support - from friends and medical professionals - who would enable me make that choice. I wish the structures and relationships holding the reproductive experience were more intentionally focused on pregnant people listening to and being able to act upon their inner desires.

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I saw a T shirt I would love to wear that said "I love someone who has had an abortion." I could wear that shirt for four different women in my life. This story speaks for one who cannot or will not speak for herself. Because she was then and still is mentally ill.   

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I saw a T shirt I would love to wear that said "I love someone who has had an abortion." I could wear that shirt for four different women in my life. This story speaks for one who cannot or will not speak for herself. Because she was then and still is mentally ill.   

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This story happened over 35 years ago. I  had pressured my friend to seek professional help for her increasingly symptomatic mental illness. She reached out to a radio shrink, who referred her to an unscrupulous therapist who took sexual advantage of her. Given the power imbalance in the therapist-patient relationship, this was 🤬. A pregnancy resulted. Fortunately for all concerned, my friend had enough self awareness to know that she was completely unable to raise a child, and had a first trimester abortion and a quick physical recovery. However, after that experience, she did not trust any subsequent therapists and her mental illness has continually worsened.

We later learned that the unscrupulous therapist had several former patients in several states suing him for the same behavior, and he did later loose his license.

I dread what might have happened to my friend and to this child had she been forced to carry to term. The ease of accessing an abortion was a true blessing for her and all of us who love her.

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At 21 weeks we learned that it was unlikely the baby could be born alive, or survive more than a few minutes. The doctor who read the ultrasound seemed nervous that we were a "religious" couple and might choose to carry the baby for longer. She was kind, and we took her guidance to terminate.

Following the advice of our friends in mental health professions, we didn't tell our three young children that it was an abortion. We told them the baby had died. We called it "the miscarriage." It also seemed true.

Unfortunately they perforated my uterus,  and then they rushed me in for a second surgery, this time an emergency surgery, so they could save my life.

I was in the hospital for days, away from my children.

It was like a recovery from a terrible c-section. I couldn't walk straight, or reach a glass from the cupboard, for a long time.

They told me that after a year we could try again, but any subsequent birth would have to be a planned cesarean. We never did try again to have that 4th baby. Other things happened in life.

A few years ago my daughter was 11 or 12, and she asked me, "Imma, was the miscarriage an abortion?"

I told her yes, it was.

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Can we acknowledge that this isn't always a "choice"?

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Can we acknowledge that this isn't always a "choice"?

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Sometimes ending a pregnancy is the ONLY thing to do. It's the RIGHT thing to do. Why do lawmakers (or clergy for that matter!) get to decide what's "right" for me? My life? My body? My baby?

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I'm not one of those women who had an abortion because the baby was sick. I'm not one of those women who had an abortion because pregnancy would have harmed my health. I had an abortion because my partner's vasectomy failed. We were done with our family. We made responsible medical decisions for our family planning. And, yet. We found ourselves pregnant with a full house of young children and one VERY unplanned one. Could I have had that baby? Certainly. Was is a terribly painful choice to make? In some ways, yes. In other ways, I had already made my choice. We had the family we wanted -- the one we could support financially, emotionally, logistically. This was not what we had planned or wanted. I don't have an extreme medical story to "justify" my decision -- but I don't think I should have to justify my decision to anyone. We had made our decision already.

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You got pregnant from having sex with someone whose fiancee lived in another country. Although in your early 20s you were too young and alone to have a baby. The hard part is admitting you were ever so careless and cavalier and stupid to think someone who didn't care about you could make you feel worthy, desired etc And there were no regrets. Just that even in a very blue jurisdiction, it was all shrouded in secrecy and looking back, in privilege, to have access to funds without telling your parents.  Sometimes you think, hmm who would that potential life have been but really it's not painful or life altering. Its the stigma and secrecy is the hard part.  and what else will they take away next? It's the healthcare part and lack of respect for women that horrifies me now. And now postmenapause, I wonder if sharing these stories is necessary to fight back and change the laws.

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I need to talk about the language around heartbeats and fetuses in the abortion discussions.

I'm pro-choice. AND. I know that my Almost Child was real enough, human enough, grown enough, for me to grieve them when they died at 12 weeks. It's been hard for me to hear language like "it's not even a baby yet." It's been really hard for me to hear Jewish leaders brush off embryos by quoting "It is considered mere water," as if that water didn't hold all my hopes and dreams. I always have a tough time with sonogram and ultrasound pictures, but it's especially hard when they're used to "prove" whether that cell cluster is a baby or not. Mine was. To me.

And here's the thing - the truth is, that doesn't really matter. The difference here - the crucial difference - is that I desperately wanted my baby. I still do. If someone doesn't want to keep their zygote, their embryo, their fertilized egg, their cluster of cells with a heartbeat...that's their choice. That's the important part, right? It doesn't really matter what we call it. It's about choice, and it always has been.z

I don't have any brilliant answers to offer at the moment. I guess I'm just asking you all to please be careful with the language you choose. I'm a grief counselor and it was still a long time before I allowed myself to grieve my Almost Child. Disenfranchised grief is really tough. My loss has not changed my mind about abortions. But it has made it harder for me to hear dismissive comments about heartbeats.

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I want to talk about not simply the horror of this ruling, but all the things we are worried may come next. 

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I want to talk about not simply the horror of this ruling, but all the things we are worried may come next. 

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I want to talk about why we are being demonized for trying to save the lives of women. Why is there no acknowledgement of the importance of the literal lives of women? I want to talk about how to talk about this without sounding like a crazy person, because this ruling makes me crazy!

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The pro-unborn children groups (mostly the Catholic Church) have purposely made the Constitutional Amendment and the ads supporting it misleading. There's even a billboard that says "Trust Women, not the Abortion industry" as if abortion providers aren't just part of the general healthcare system. 🙄
My parents have gotten more conservative with age, even on social issues, which has been hard on my siblings and me. Luckily, my mom is very pro-choice, but I had to explain to her that a NO vote is the way to go. And we even talked about how she had a D&C for a miscarriage the year Roe was decided - with no hesitating on the doctor's part.

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I need white women to acknowledge the presence of race in this conversation. This issue is many times compounded for women of color, and for Black women in particular. We can’t limit our feminism to the experiences of white women. And this isn’t a political talking point: it’s real life. Imagine your suffering and then multiply it. Women of color suffer this ruling in so many ways that white women don’t. So if we fight, let’s fight for all of us.

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I’m still looking for the Torah that can heal the wounds people cannot see.

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I’m still looking for the Torah that can heal the wounds people cannot see.

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Here's what the last weeks of a normal pregnancy was like for me, a real person with a body who feels things. I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes in month 7, despite having no risk factors.

1. Painful kicks from inside my body
2. Stomach pain from contractions
3. Leg pain wakes me up at night
4. My own snoring wakes me up at night
5. Constantly anxious making sure I'm positioned correctly when I lie down
6. Need to pee, again, so I'm up, again
7. So. Much. Sweat.
8. Painful finger pricking 4-6x a day
9. Anxiety about what my blood sugar number will be, and feeling like a failure when it's a high number
10. Constipation, all the time...
11. ...Except when my bowels just inexplicably leak.
12. I can't laugh, sneeze, or cough without peeing...
13. ...Even though I go to the bathroom at least once an hour.
14. I'm on the most strict diet I've been on in my entire life. If I mess up, my baby will be in danger.
15. I have set meal and snack times, so I often can't eat when I'm hungry. And I weigh 120 pounds and I'm 8 months pregnant, so I'm always hungry.
16. Sitting hurts.
17. Standing hurts.
18. Leaning hurts.
19. Random foot cramps, so painful that I sometimes fall down from them.
20. Headaches.
21. Exhaustion.
22. 2 doctor visits and 1 pharmacy visit per week. More, if something goes wrong.
23. I feel like a lump, not a person.
24. I can't bend at the waist. If something I need falls on the floor, that's where it stays.
25. Feeling physically useless because I can't lift anything.
26. Feeling like everyone around me either pities me, expects something from me, or is judging me.
27. Once a week, an entire team of medical professionals reviews what I ate and reprimands me for getting something wrong.
28. The baby kicks, still painful, also make me nauseous.
29. My nipples itch.
30. When my nipples don't itch, they hurt.
31. It's getting hard to climb stairs because my stomach gets in the way of my legs.
32. I am constantly, constantly, constantly out of breath. I can't shout. I can't sing. I can't talk for an extended period of time. I can't do cardio. I can't walk to shul.

In the end, I was induced because my placenta wasn't nourishing my baby sufficiently. Vaginal birth tore my body apart. The night after I gave birth, I cried on the toilet while a nurse held me. I was in too much pain to pee.

I am 5 months postpartum and I'm still in pain. My body will always carry the scars.

Tell me stories of my foremothers and their struggles with pregnancy and childbirth. Don't talk to me about halacha. Don't talk to me about my own body in hypothetical terms. It's not hypothetical for me.

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I'll never forget the look of panic in my OBs face when I showed up for my first pregnancy visit in week 23

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I'll never forget the look of panic in my OBs face when I showed up for my first pregnancy visit in week 23

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I thought she was just being overly cautious and an anxious Nelly. Really, she was worried that all the scans I hadn't had would suddenly show something awful and the choice I would have to make would be that much worse. Every time I read an article these days that mentions the tough place doctors find themselves in, I just see her eyes now. Panic.

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(1986) Society says having a baby when young and not married will ruin your life. Having an abortion ruined a part of my life. I was always pro-life. And then I got pregnant at 19. The brain of a 19 year old doesn’t consider consequences. They are reactive instead of proactive. I partied. I was drunk. I wasn’t thinking that if I went to a boy’s  (yes, only a boy at 20 years old) room to get  high, sex would be part of the package. I could have said no. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be the cool chick. So, I went along. That made me feel accepted. I knew the next morning I was pregnant. It was instinctual. I felt it. Some friends told me to tell him. We were acquaintances, not friends. I was scared. What if he denied sleeping with me? What if he called me a 🤬 and told me to prove it was his baby? What if he would want me to have it?

What if I wanted to have it? I was a sophomore n college. I was financially dependent on my parents. How would I support myself and a child? It would make my life hard. I was sacred. I believed in the sanctity of life. In debates about abortion in high school I vowed I’d never have an abortion. Now I was 19, pregnant and with no skills. Society said young ladies don’t have babies on their own. The message I heard was having a baby at this time in my life would ruin my life. So I had an abortion. Then I feel into a deep depression. My heart broke for the child I would never meet. Several months later I attempted suicide. I couldn’t live with my self. I hated myself. I got therapy and learned to live with my decision. Many said I did the right thing. I never felt it was right. Life went on.

Years later I couldn’t get pregnant.  The old “what ifs” came back. The old feelings of wanting to meet my child. I yearned to be a mother. Abortion took that away from me. I’ve struggled with depression since then. I am grateful for me life. I have many blessing. I have more than most. The one thing I’ll never be is a mother. Abortion took that from me.

This isn’t a pro-life statement. I write these words to say that you can and should do what is right for you. Don’t let society get in your head. Have the baby even if they tell you it will be hard. Don’t compromise your value just because the task is difficult. You can do hard things. If you really don’t be want to be a mother, then get the abortion. You do have a right to choose no matter what. I caution you to live your values even when that’s hard. No one has the right to tell you what is too hard for you. I wish I had believed in myself.

Lessons: You can always say no. It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t like you. Know you’re worth. Babies won’t ruin your life but may make it more difficult. You can do hard things.

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I am pretty over hearing people talk about what should and shouldn't be done when it will never apply to them. If you have the capacity to conceive a child, I want to hear from you. I hope that other people have space to work through their feelings, which are complex I'm sure, especially when partnered with someone seeking abortion, but I've had it with men taking the mic.

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Where is the Torah that says what I did was not WRONG?

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Where is the Torah that says what I did was not WRONG?

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I want everyone to learn the Torah that says that those who choose to terminate pregnancies are not wrong. That this was not a BAD choice, but a choice of total compassion and love. That this is the absolutely correct and humane and kind and best parenting choice made when you're making a HORRIBLE choice -- one you never ever wanted to be making in the first place.

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I want the Torah to remind me that I am a full human.

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I want the Torah to remind me that I am a full human.

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I am furious. I want to know that the Torah values my life more than that of an unborn fetus. That my life has value. I want Torah that sees me as more than a baby-making machine!

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Even in our talk about "medical abortions"... we forget how hard even that is...

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Even in our talk about "medical abortions"... we forget how hard even that is...

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A medical abortion or "The Pill" isn't easy. It can be terrifying. And painful. And take days and days. This attack on womens healthcare is painful on every level. None of this is easy. Even a Plan B pill can leave a woman out of commission and in pain and distress for days on end. So much so, that when I needed to remove my miscarried pregnancy, my OB recommended a D&C instead of the medical abortion because she knew that a more controlled removal would be better for me as a patient and with my life circumstances. I can't fathom a physician not having all tools available to them. It is terrifying.

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I want to hear the Torah voices of women right now. 

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I want to hear the Torah voices of women right now. 

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I want strong womens voices of confident leadership — reminding me that this is not the way things are supposed to be. Reminding me that womens lives matter just as much as a life of the next generation. Remind me that my faith reinforces my humanity. Remind me about nuance. Show me the Torah that affirms my value as a human, not just a tool of reproduction.