On loss

The past week was an unlucky mess of reproductive doom in my wide-flung social network. One friend is flying a thousand miles to the nearest free abortion clinic. One friend lost her very wanted very first pregnancy in the first trimester. Another at five months, making it technically an inter-partum death. The last doesn’t know what to do but knows abortion isn’t it, and every day she wakes with blood on the sheets.

When I was a little girl, younger than six, we visited a neighbour at the Chalmer’s hospital after she miscarried. Her permed hair was soggy around her pillow and her eyes coloured in black from exhaustion and grief. Maybe that’s a bit young to learn about reproductive loss, but I think I was in the hospital with pneumonia and my mother and I happened to walk by her room and isn’t that just always the underhanded way we discover our cruel and gruesome femininity.

The first time a friend went to the Morgentaler clinic I stayed up all night sobbing. I was not mourning the potential baby, I was actually thinking about my barely employed friend having to ask her parents for the money, having a scorching love affair end so painfully, and feeling regret at using inadequate contraception. There was also the introductory bitch slap of the body betraying. We’d only been having sex for a few years and it was the dreamiest thing, until it cost you half a semester’s tuition and came with two days of wretched cramping.

Abortion in my cohort became pretty routine, a large minority of my friends had one or two as we figured out love and trust and that grapefruit diets and training for a marathon can screw up the pill’s effectiveness. Common or not, I still get pissed about how much it costs and travel issues and the gamut of access restrictions. In this paradoxical era of daily regulatory assaults on reproductive freedom while Jamie Lynn and adolescent America shift teenage pregnancy stats into a growth industry, mostly I share the gratitude that this medical service is available legally and that my friends are all secure enough to ask for and afford it.

But I am a bit older now. I am at the age that the medical workforce wishes would get pregnant. The age of glowy dewy healthy tabloid-pretty pregnancy. I am Nicole Ritchie’s age. Christina Aguilera’s age. Yeah, Britney’s age. I go to weddings pretty frequently and buy housewarming gifts of pottery salad bowls. And my friends are starting to wish to be pregnant.

And they are starting to experience great disappointment.

The transition from anathema fertility to maternal instinct is instinctual. No philosophical adjustment comes with that, it is a literal swelling of the gut. I don’t feel it yet but I figure and am regularly warned it is a matter of time, and I do feel uncharacteristic awe at the announcements of others.

Lately, as often as births, there are miscarriages and inter-partum deaths and still births.

In the one on one conversation there isn’t a loss for words. I am not at all restrained in saying how much life is a bitch and statistics show these losses as far from anomalous and hopefully next time it will be better.

But public discussion about mourning pregnancy loss is awkward because I do not ever want to be shuffled into the mob of mostly middle-aged zealotous anti-choice protesters outside the Brunswick street clinic on Tuesday am, flapping their grotesque placards and playing cats cradle with garlands of rosary beads. Mourning a lost pregnancy that was chosen and wanted and nurtured has to be clearly compartmentalized from threatening taunts of post-abortion syndromes and such. We need to talk about reproductive loss because pregnancy is not always the pink-cheeked cover of People. We just don’t seem to know how to talk about it.

I ask because we have to, and not just with our friends. At the very least, women have to get time off work for a D&C. They have to ask for that time and as employers and employees can we get our mouths around that conversation? Women have to wonder if something is wrong with them and if this will ever work and if so at what cost. Men share those worries. We all get a bit worried about declining fertility, and these worries confront the reactive discourses of xenophobia, patronizing medical regulation, and anti-feminist ageism.

Not only is this conversation uncomfortable because the last thing vulnerable abortion access needs is more focus on the fetus, but because pregnancy is so often a secret and a surprise. It is not like most loss, where what is loss was once known. Cultural empathy has to extend to discretion as much as it scratches at suppression, protecting women’s secrets while formulating compassion for a deeply gendered grief.