Embryos and Choice

A friend of mine shared with me over the phone the other day that when she received the message I wrote her about my pregnancy, her first thought wasn't "Oh I'm so happy for Katie," It was "I love those babies!" She said, "I mean I don't want to get all weird and pro-life on you, but I just felt like I fell in love with them as soon as I know they existed." I was taken aback, and have since been mulling on this. For I am pro-choice, always have been, and yet I have loved the little beings inside me all seven times I've been pregnant from the moment I knew they existed, maybe even before, and that has never threatened my belief in a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy.

I believe in the right to choose. I believe I asserted a piece of this right when I chose IVF. I asserted it again when we genetically tested the 12 embryos and donated the 9 that were chromosomally abnormal to the clinic to calibrate their machines. We will at some point make a choice about the one embryo that sits in a freezer at our clinic. Do I believe that all of those embryos were babies? Do I believe that in the five miscarriages I endured I passed dead babies? No. and Yet, they weren't just a tiny collection of cells without meaning, without import.

The embryos from which my twins grew, six days after conception.

Those little pinpricks of light, about the size of a head of a pin, carry much potential. In them are the codes for life! Human life. But it is just that, potential. There are many steps that occur between conception and birth that create a child. I wanted each of those potential babies so badly, and I felt each time that there was a baby spirit with me. I borrow from many other teachers and traditions in the idea I am about to put forth: I don't believe that the spirits that came to visit me with each of those pregnancies were fully inside their bodies. Liliana Barzola Read described it to me as a thin golden chord that connects the spirit to those early embryos, almost the way you feel connected to your partner or parent, and that as an embryo grows the chord grows thicker and stronger until sometime near birth the spirit fully inhabits the body. Peggy Orenstein in Waiting for Daisy describes a Japanese idea that we are all from the water, and that our spirits sort of gradually emerge from the water, entering our bodies more and more fully as the embryos develop, as children grow. In this tradition, the spirit doesn't fully step out of those primordial waters and fully stay in the body until about age 7 or 8. In these ideas there is not one clear moment in which "life begins." It is a gradually unfolding process of leaving heaven for earth. This idea feels right to me. Each time I lost a pregnancy, I felt like I had lost a baby, because for me, I had. I had lost, again, the child I hoped to have, and it was devastating. The physical miscarriages, although varying in intensity and gruesomeness, never matched up to the catastrophe of my emotional suffering. And each time I would try in the blood and ropes of uterine lining to find the embryo, and I never could- it was too small. I do not think the journey those spirit babies made was traumatic for them- I believe they stuck a toe out of the primordial waters, and said, hmmm, no thanks. It was me who suffered, but I do not blame them.

A private ceremony to honor one of my first trimester losses.

Do I believe that people who choose abortion are baby killers? No. Do I believe that life begins at conception? Yes, I do. Some glimmering esoteric piece of life begins at conception- possibly even before, but I do not believe that means that a woman who is not ready is obligated to nurture that speck of possibility into a child. To carry a child to term- to be pregnant for 10 months, to give birth, is a public, irrevocably life changing journey, whether or not that mother decides to keep that baby or give it up for adoption. I would argue that abortion should also carry weight, as I do see it as terminating life, but it is a private event, and small. Just as my first trimester losses cannot be compared to second trimester losses, stillbirth, or SIDs, early abortions cannot be compared to infanticide, and it is a leap of imagination to call women who choose early abortion baby killers.

I don't think there will ever be consensus on the abortion debate, but I do think that if we on the pro-choice side don't acknowledge that there is magic, potential, spirit involved in the conception of child, we are doing everyone a disservice. No one who believes that life begins at conception will ever be convinced otherwise, but perhaps there is room to talk about the life of the mother, to talk about the impossible fragility of early pregnancy, to talk the quality of life that child would have if brought into the world.

I believe that there is a way to honor an early pregnancy, and let it go. I believe that it is a woman's right to choose whether or not she wants to carry a baby to term, keep that baby and raise it as her own, or give it to another in adoption. I believe that all of those decisions are monumental and life altering and should not be taken lightly. I believe that each woman deserves the right to make decisions regarding her own body and her own reproductive future.

In looking at the Guttmacher Institute's Fact sheet on abortion (http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html), there is much that stands out to me. 89% of all abortions in the United States occur before 12 weeks gestation and greater than 60% occur before 8 weeks gestation. According to Baby Center, at 8 weeks an embryo is about the size of a kidney bean (http://www.babycenter.com/6_your-pregnancy-8-weeks_1097.bc) and weighs about four hundredths of an ounce. This is a far cry from a baby. 33% of abortions occur before seven weeks, and this number includes people who choose plan B, so it may or may not have been an actual abortion as this occurs before a pregnancy is confirmed. 42% of women seeking abortion have incomes below the federal poverty line, and 61% of women seeking abortion already have one or more children. I can imagine that giving a baby up for adoption would be near impossible when you already have children who would be cognisant of a sibling, and are you going to be the one to tell that mom she HAS to have another kid? The good news is that Instances of abortion are currently at their lowest since 1973, which is thought to be attributable to better access to and education about contraception (Go Planned Parenthood!). 

I know that there are families who desperately want children, and find it hard to stomach that other people would choose to terminate pregnancies that could result in live children. I was there, for many, many years. But even so, I would never have insisted that another woman must unwillingly give her body over to pregnancy and childbirth because I couldn't. We all have our own journey, with our own struggles, and it doesn't come out tit for tat. I know that it is better for our society that the children who come into this world be wanted and well cared for, born to women who willingly bore them, whether to parent them or give them up for adoption. There is nothing to be gained by forcing women to continue pregnancies they do not want to see to fruition. I know that some argue, adoption, adoption, adoption, but when you step back and think about what that means for a birth mother, is that truly something to force upon someone unwillingly? 

And I come back to the notion of choice. Because in the end it isn't so much a matter of wrong vs right, but a matter of giving women agency over their own bodies and futures. I am so grateful for the technology and choices available to me that gave me these two squiggly 20 week old babies moving all around inside me. I think that all women should have access to the health care they need to make choices about their reproductive future, whether that be to enable them to have children, or to prevent them from doing so. We all deserve to have a choice.

19 weeks with twins.