What abortion bans mean for our bodies

The Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Texas six week abortion ban to stand, at least for now, and the predictable rash of red state bans following in its wake, have raised the expected cries of anguish—about invasions of privacy, curtailing of women’s equality and opportunity, and the psychological and economic effects of right wing zealots denying people control over our own bodies. But there is another element to this travesty that largely goes undiscussed: exactly what women and girls and other pregnant people must physically endure when forced to continue unwanted pregnancies. The extreme physical suffering that often accompanies pregnancy and birth are not beside the point.

I’m one of those people whose perspective on abortion changed after I had a child. I don’t mean that I was pro-choice and the miracle of birth made me anti-choice. I mean that while I was pro-choice before, the reasons I support abortion rights changed after going through pregnancy and childbirth.

Pro-choice arguments usually center on a woman’s right to choose whether or not she wants to be a mother. Legally, it’s been framed as a matter of privacy. The Supreme Court determined in Roe v. Wade that a state cannot dictate how a woman uses her reproductive organs because it’s an intrusion into her intimate life, much like prohibitions on the use of birth control. Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued abortion rights should instead be viewed through the lens of equal protection and equality.

I agree with these arguments, but after my own pregnancy, I also understand that forcing people to go through unwanted pregnancies can also be a form of physical torture.

I unexpectedly became pregnant at age 38, after thinking for years that I was infertile. I wanted the baby and was willing to suffer in order to bring the pregnancy to term, and suffer I did. I quickly developed nausea so severe that I couldn’t get out of bed other than to go to the bathroom. It lasted for almost three months. All I could do was lay flat and pray for sleep, but when sleep came I was nauseous in my dreams. It was every minute of every day, without relief of any kind. I was too nauseous to think. I had to eat but had trouble doing so. I unable to work, and because I was paid on an hourly basis I did not have paid sick time.  

In my second trimester the nausea subsided. I wasn’t comfortable, but I was able to stand up, leave the house, and go to work. That was short-lived. In my third trimester I got so large that I had trouble walking and needed help getting out of bed, up from a chair and, yes, off the toilet. I was again unable to work. My baby was large and I had extra amniotic fluid and gained 50% of my body weight. Looking at me, people assumed I was carrying twins or triplets. Needless to say, I could not get to my job. I was short of breath walking even a few feet, could not fit behind a steering wheel, and did not feel able to ask colleagues to pull me off the toilet. 

Then, because of the large size of the baby and the amount of amniotic fluid, the doctors induced labor– which lasted almost three days. The baby was in the wrong position and I had excruciating back labor. An epidural made me unable to get out of bed but did not control the pain, so narcotics were added, and even then the pain was all-consuming. On the third day, the pain became blinding while I pushed for hours, screaming at the top of my lungs and sure that I was about to pass out. I had tunnel vision and could not hear, see, or understand what was going on around me, as various people stuck their arms inside me trying to turn the baby. Eventually I was wheeled in for a C-section.

That night I tried to get out of bed in the hospital to attend to the crying baby, and had trouble standing upright because my abdominal muscles had been severed; once I was out of bed, what seemed like buckets worth of blood poured out of me onto the floor. It took me three months to recover from the surgery.

That still wasn’t the end of the gruesome physical toll of the pregnancy. I got a vaginal infection and the antibiotics I was given caused painful yeast infections on my breasts and nipples. My C-section scar eventually adhered to my intestines, causing a partial blockage that was excruciating and left me barely able to eat for weeks. The trauma and exhaustion from the whole ordeal knocked my immune system so low that a latent Lyme Disease infection took over my body, disabling me to the point that I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I’m now on disability and haven’t been able to work for years. 

While the specifics of my story may sound unusual, extreme hardship and suffering in pregnancy and childbirth are not. A friend of mine had hyperemesis and could not hold down food or water for the first five months of her pregnancy, much of which she spent hospitalized on IV nutrition and lost rather than gained weight. Two other friends developed life-threatening high blood pressure in their third trimesters. A relative’s vagina was so shredded by the birth process that she had to get it surgically reconstructed. 

And it’s not just about suffering; it’s also about death. Out of every 100,000 births in the U.S., 24 women die, often due to lack of sufficient health care. Black women die at three times the rate of white women.  In my own state of New Jersey, Black women die at the rate of 102 deaths per 100,000 live births. 

At its most fundamental level, the right to abortion is about not being forced to endure physical suffering and death. Someone who wants to have a baby and submits to this suffering voluntarily is in a very different position than someone forced to do so against their will. The degree to which we can handle physical suffering, and the amount that it traumatizes us, depends to a great degree on whether we submit to it voluntarily. Joining the Navy is different than being impressed into service by pirates; signing up for a boxing match is different than being held down and beaten. Choosing to donate a kidney or bone marrow is different than having them forcibly removed or being farmed for them. Participating in a Sun Dance for spiritual reasons is different than the government forcibly driving hooks under your skin. And I think most male politicians would agree that electing to undergo circumcision as an adult for religious reasons is quite different than the government forcing them to get their foreskin, or any other part of their penis, ripped off. Even with an epidural.

Pregnancy and birth need to be understood in this context. A government forcing any person to endure the physical pain, incapacity, and risk of disfiguration and death associated with pregnancy and birth, when safer and less painful options are medically available, should be understood as torture. And the government not torturing its citizens should be the bare minimum that we expect from a democracy.