I remember vividly the feeling the first time I found out I was pregnant: the magic of it all, trying to comprehend that what was there inside me was the beginnings of a new life, the beginnings of what could become our firstborn, half me and half him. One loss and two unfathomably amazing children later, I sit here trying to imagine the feeling of finding out now: the panic of it all, knowing full well what that teeny, tiny thing inside would be the beginnings of and how life-changing it would be.
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because I don’t think ‘life’ is that simple.
I remember vividly the moment everything changed – a sonographer’s silence as she turned the screen away from us. I had experienced grief before and immediately recognised it: a black curtain that closes in front of your eyes, forever shutting out the world as you once knew it. He kicked furiously inside me. “It’s good that it’s happening to us,” I kept telling myself. “We’re strong – we can get through this.”
Along with the sadness I feel when I think about our firstborn, there is a deep, deep sense of gratitude. The care we received was so utterly dignified, the consultant so objectively professional yet supportive, the midwives so warm and caring that we spent weeks talking about them afterwards. It was the definition of ‘care’. I hate the memory of those Whittington corridors, the feeling of walking down the hill from Highgate in leafy north London. But the NHS will always have a special place in my heart, because at a time of numbing grief, we were treated with nothing but respect.
Life isn’t black and white. It comes in full colour, full of bright highs and all different shades of tough, indiscernible grey. There’s no such thing as sheer existence – we feel it, we try to make sense of it, we make decisions and move on. And therein lies the power of it all: we can’t choose what will happen to us, but we can choose how to deal with it – provided our jurisdiction trusts us to.
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, about the need to voice the interests of the voiceless. I’m marching on Saturday because I’m not convinced they can.
We trust pregnant people to mind themselves throughout the sometimes tumultuous experience of a pregnancy, to prepare for the arrival of a new human being who will need their complete attention every moment of every day for years to come, to deal with all the difficult decisions and choices they’ll face as they rise to the challenge of being a parent. How can we decide for their unborn children that sheer existence, the idea of life as absolute, is the best thing for them – no matter how their mother feels, no matter the challenges she’s facing or her feelings of doubt?
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life. I’m marching on Saturday because most of the time, it sounds more like they’re talking about the right to birth – the right to arrive into this world no matter the cost, no matter the implications for their siblings, no matter how suicidal their mother is or if she’s been absolutely certain her entire life that motherhood is not for her; indeed no matter the experience of the pregnant person facing months of answering well-intended questions about due dates and plans, knowing that the baby is slowly but surely dying and there will be no such thing as a life at the end of it.
We hear the anti-choice campaign talk about the right to life, and I’m growing really, really tired of it. I’m marching on Saturday because all too often, people tell me they’re pro-life but that what we went through was different – and that’s got nothing to do with life, nor does it have anything to do with choice. That’s telling me that my choice was allowed because I grieved, and that next time, maybe, if they can’t put themselves in my shoes, they’ll deem me a criminal. It’s draining life of all its rich, challenging colour, leaving a watered-down version seeping with shame and fear.
I’m marching on Saturday because I want real care and real respect, and the way things stand, Ireland gives me none of it.
This was written for and originally published by the Abortion Rights Campaign.
