A Woman’s Body Is Her Own

Thank you so much for posting on this topic! In addition to women having autonomy over whether to have a child or not, I’ll add to that on autonomy over how to proceed through a miscarriage. I’ve had three. The first one was only at six weeks and the doctor told me to let it pass naturally. The second was at 12 weeks and the doctor said I needed to have a D&E. It was a sad time, but it was a much easier physical process. When I knew we lost our third at 10 weeks, I asked the doctor if we could do another D&E, and he said absolutely. With the legal issues in some states around abortion, these procedures would be illegal as well.

When religion affects the way the State and the Law operate, then you know a society is in deep trouble. I am a married woman to a wonderful man who has reproductive problems, which means we cannot have children. I still think that a woman’s body, its reproductive functions, and the woman’s sometimes impossible circumstances (personal, emotional, financial, health-related) should be treated with the utmost respect. Going ahead with a pregnancy (often when the partner is absent or abusive) or terminating it, is never an easy decision and it always takes a toll on the woman. Abortions are as old as childbirth itself, they will not magically disappear just by making them illegal or impossible to have. Providing the option and the choice of having a *safe* abortion is the bare minimum the Law can offer a woman. Pseudo-morality sermons have no place in this debate. A woman is not merely a baby-making machine. She should be afforded the right to choose whether and when to have a baby. Having a safe abortion overseen by a qualified health-practitioner, as opposed to some shady hack at the back of an alley will ensure she can have a healthy baby later on in life, if she so chooses. We must stop judging others based on our own individual circumstances. Not everyone has the support, the means or the mental stamina to have a baby. We should respect that.

Thank you for this. It’s real and heartfelt and so, so important.

I have been reading here forever and a day and I want to thank Joanna and her team for unapologetically sharing their views on issues so critical to women and birthing folks’ lives. I have never seen CoJ shy away from a myriad of issues that so many others avoid for fear of alienating readers. This is a major reason why I love Cup of Jo and why it’s the only blog I have followed faithfully for 10+ years. I also want to thank Abigail (and Joanna in the comments) for sharing their personal stories. So much of the abortion debate takes place on the level of abstraction. And yet these issues only truly play out in the details of our lived experiences. Only through these stories can we see how much of our humanity is on the line.

Much of my viewpoint as a staunchly pro-choice/pro-abortion advocate has been stated elsewhere in the comments. But I wanted to offer another view as a prospective adoptive parent: Adoption is not the opposite of abortion (the opposite of placement is parenting). Let me say it again: The opposite of abortion is not adoption. Anti-abortion folks commonly cite adoption as a panacea for unplanned pregnancy. For the reasons articulated by Abigail and others, carrying and birthing a child is enormously challenging and placing at the end of it cannot and will not erase the very real and lasting impact of that experience. Another fact anti-abortion/pro-adoption folks often leave out: adoption is hard, for everyone involved. It also doesn’t end at the time of placement. It’s a decision with lifelong consequences and responsibilities. But most of all, it is deeply unfair to adopted people to be put in the middle of a debate that cynically uses them to advance a particular religious/political agenda. By all accounts, adopted people have enough to wade through without having their lives reduced to triumphs over abortion.

As others have said, if the goal is to help those who want to parent to be able to do so, then we need to support policies for universal healthcare, a living wage, paid parental leave, affordable housing, free childcare and other solutions that make parenting possible. Anti-abortion policies have never and will never improve the material conditions of the lives of women and birthing folks or children.

I cannot thank COJ enough for adding content of this kind! Women must have full autonomy over their bodies. Please consider supporting this amazing organization, as well as the ones in the link after the article, AidAccess is from those that brought us Women on Waves (a Dutch group that understood the need for family planning, education, and abortion care for countries where is was illegal so they got a ship and flew the Dutch flag in international waters outside each of these countries and provided legal services for the women coming on board – amazing work!!) They have since added this organization AidAccess specifically for the USA because they saw the rising tide on women’s rights in this country. https://aidaccess.org/en/page/561/who-are-we

Thanks for writing such a beautiful, honest essay. You said many things that many mothers (myself included sometimes!) don’t have the courage to say out loud.

I am currently 11 weeks pregnant with my third baby. My first, a girl we named Georgia, was diagnosed with a fatal condition during our 20 week scan. We were blindsided and beyond devastated. I had a “medically indicated” abortion a few weeks later. It was awful, but it was my right choice (between two terrible options) for myself and my daughter. I went on to have a perfectly healthy second daughter, Lou, in 2020. Now I’m in the crawl towards a third anatomy scan. The waiting to find out if we’re on the wrong side of the statistics again. It happens. I could be faced with the same decision, again. The very idea that the trauma and reality of a fatal diagnosis could be made even more awful by pro-life politics and policies is sick and sickening.

Motherhood sometimes feels like an all-consuming responsibility, even under the best of circumstances. I cannot imagine being forced to be a parent, the HARDEST job, to a human I did not willingly choose to grow, birth, and raise.

I decided early on in adulthood that I never wanted to become pregnant. And I am deeply grateful that I never did (though there was an awful 36 hours of my life after a false positive from a home pregnancy test). The thought during my child-bearing years of being forced to carry a pregnancy used to haunt me. I’m now happily on the other side of menopause and it is such a profound relief. My heart breaks for younger women who are facing this Kafka-esque change on the horizon. I’ll keep fighting for you.

I am coming a bit late to this conversation, but it is a topic dear to my heart so I will weigh in. This is both a tremendously personal and societal topic and one on which it is difficult for most of us to hear nuance and disagreement. That is why it is so important to do so, and Jo, you have a forum where, although your readers are not representative as they tend to lean in one direction (on a topic where nationally women are extremely split), interactions are mostly polite. This is not the case in many places.

I do think there are more areas of agreement than we realize. The general press seeks clicks and eyeballs and that is gotten by catering to extremes. For example, I see many women here who recognize that a fetus has its own DNA, and is its own creation while acknowledging that it is dependent on the mother for a time. They recognize abortion as a sad choice. I believe that they are appalled when they see an actress or activist boast that she is going to get pregnant in order to have an abortion to prove that it is her right. May I suggest that it is incumbent for those pro-choice women to speak up and protest that she is not representing their position?

On the other side, I fall in the pro-life camp, but I am appalled at the Texas bill as I understand it. My ideas are formed by my religion that posits that the fetus/baby needs to be seen as a budding person, but that if two lives conflict—that of the mother and that of the baby—so only one can live, the mother gets priority. I think it is incumbent on me to speak up against the TX bill because it doesn’t represent my position.

Don’t women on both sides agree that a 13-year-old impregnated by her mother’s boyfriend needs help? Whether or not that help includes an abortion, no women’s health provider should send her back to that situation. My understanding is that there are PP clinics where she receives the further help she needs but there are also those where the focus is solely on the abortion.

I encourage anyone who sees the two sides of the issue as good and evil to do some research and become more nuanced. I see a few claims in this thread that posit that pro-lifers care nothing about anything except stopping abortion since many of them (not all) aren’t in favor of, let’s say, universal health care. Arthur Brooks did a study that he thought would show how much kinder and generous liberals/Democrats were. He was shocked, and it changed his life when he discovered that whether it is donating blood or giving money, conservatives and Republicans give more. There are many churches and right-leaning organizations that take in pregnant teens, that buy diapers and supplies for poor mothers and do so much more. It’s not that they don’t help, they just find government the wrong venue for helping in its inefficiency, unintended consequences and bloated bureaucracy that makes rich elites without helping those for whom the help is promised. That’s a whole different topic, but (naively) believing that those with different ideas from you are bad people isn’t a way to move forward.

Back to abortion, don’t we all agree that abortion should not be a sacred cow with clinics escaping scrutiny? Look up Dr. Gosnell who is in jail for murder (of women who came to him for abortions) but whose clinic ran for years without any government oversight because he did abortions rather than, shall we say, breast reductions?

My point is that we can find common ground and we can make this country a better and safer place even while acknowledging that we will reach a point where we will still disagree.

Really heartened to see all the support in these comments, but also can’t help but remember the comments in past articles about women making the choice not to have a child without having been pregnant first, and the extreme contrast between the tone here and there. I’d love for the power to choose to be enthusiastically extended to all women regardless of whether they’ve had to make the choice to get an abortion.

Love, love, love you for your understanding that children are our most precious asset and we must do all in our political and societal power to make their lives whole and richly full. Women know how to make the decision to bring another life into the world.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

This is fundamentally a conversion about sex: you know where all babies (of the surprise or unwanted variety) come from, about control and about society. I am a 35 year old women who marvels at power of sex to bind us, destroy us and most importantly create us. We always enter this conversation talking about precious human life and babies and women and god. And never penises, and sperm and 24/7 fertility. I refuse to enter a deliberately half assed, thin veiled demonization of women who have not put motherhood before self. There is something at once insidious and ignorant about a mindset that says your life is worth life less than your body’s ability to create life for others. There are no both sides. Only my own. Only your own. You were not consulted in my bedroom, you will not be consulted in my doctors office and most importantly should there be a god who takes issue with my choice, you will not be present for that conversation either. If you disagree so desperately with a woman’s right to forgo; pain, nausea, nerve damage, heart damage, major surgery, bed rest, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, confusion, the ability to sit, stand, sleep or walk, and countless other “perfectly normal” pregnancy complications, plus labor and THEN go home to raise a human being… please just continue to send thoughts and prayers like you always do when you have no answers.

People… women do not choose motherhood to hold babies, those who enter willingly, go knowing that they are responsible for preparing these tiny beings to function and succeed in society. It’s why we agonize over schools, and nutrition and health insurance and backyards and extra curriculars. There are so many well resourced and loving mothers in these comments being honest about how difficult it all is. How we sometimes fail even under the best circumstances and the dissenters are still here sprinkling the “everything will work itself out” pixie dust on very real people with real lives and real problems. You were not given any divine nor legal right to demand suffering of another. Mother or unwanted child. There are NO resources to help a mother love a child she did not want! I repeat there are no interventions possible to help a woman love a child did not want! Family support, food stamps, childcare, health insurance are resources all parents need but they do not in any way address love. Society as a whole loses when we try to absorb the fallout of decisions we had no right to be making in the first place. We all lose when mothers die trying not to add more mouths to their grocery bill. We all lose when brilliant young women drop out of college because of gaps in childcare. We all lose when young women take their own lives faced with a choice they did not understand when they made it. We all lose when mothers neglect and abuse children they were never prepared for. We all lose when dads skip out. We all lose when women go missing because proof of infidelity grows in their wombs.

Life finds a way. It is our responsibility to ensure safe passage for reality.

I’m in my early 20s. I had an abortion at 6 weeks in Texas last year after my trusted IUD unexpectedly failed me. It was a no brainer and absolutely the right decision for me, and the only pain I felt about it was a result of a judgmental and misunderstanding society that’s intent on shaming women into submission. The backlash against abortion is the direct result of a society that sees women as a lesser class meant for birth and nothing more– they can’t stand when we make sovereign decisions that will enable us to have better and more fulfilled lives that are in line with our intuition. They can keep crying about it. I have zero shame about my abortion, and will fight to keep it safe and legal.

I just got in late last night from a flight. On the plane, I was consistently sat next to babies. They were all so surprisingly well-behaved and quiet, much to the relief of the parents as well as the other passengers, I’m sure! I’m about eight months into my own marriage, two years in from initially dating my now-husband. Sat next to those babes recently in flight also had me thinking of motherhood, and the concept of what is “too quick” in deciding to try for a child. I don’t foresee us having children for at LEAST a year, unless God steps in and has other plans for us. My husband, whilst in college, got a girl he was seeing pregnant and despite his preference, she chose to terminate the pregnancy. Despite me being on the pill, if him and I did get pregnant before “trying to,” I would be nervous, but happy because I know I am graduated and stable and we are committed to one another. But I’m not sure what I would have done in his ex’s shoes in that time of life. My twin sister got unintentionally pregnant at that age and ended up miscarrying. It is a heavy subject, indeed.

What does it take to make my body truly my own? What proof do they need?

How many ways can you say: I am human, too.

I am. I am. I am. – These are beautiful words. I wish people apply them to the vaccine mandates, too.

Thank you for your beautiful essay. Thank you for sharing. This is so important. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this. I often wondered, before I had kids, if my pro-choice views would change at all after going through pregnancy and childbirth. They did, indeed, change, to be even more fiercely, completely, definitively pro-choice than I thought possible. For the reasons you so beautifully describe here, I cannot fathom how women are forced to birth babies they do not want. Thank you for telling your story.

I’m convinced that abortion should be accessible and surrounded by good care, and I’m happy to live in a country where this is no point of ideological debate. This allows us to talk about it in a nuanced way that I hope one day will be normal in the US too. I’ve met women who had an abortion and think of it as surgery to stop an unwanted biological process – just that. I’ve also talked to women who, years later, still call their aborted embryo their first child. One of them wears two rings to commemorate her two aborted children, and has their estimated birth dates tattooed on her skin. One of them has a puppet in her display case that she secretly cherishes as a little memorial for her aborted first child. These women are no less grateful that they could get an abortion, they don’t regret it (though there must be other women who do). And it’s so liberating to be able to talk about all that. About how they processed it, and what it meant to them on a personal and spiritual level, with no need to weigh in on a political controversy.
I had these conversations for a story I wrote as a journalist, at a time when I myself was mourning a series of early miscarriages. Although I didn’t mention my bereavement in the interviews, I felt deeply connected to these women who, just like me, had learnt that not just their bodies were their own, but also their stories. The only way forward for us was to relate to our pregnancies in a way that felt true to us. Finally calling my embryos my children – if only in my deepest thoughts, and in therapy – turned out to be vital in reclaiming my story after the clinical, fairly despiritualized IVF and miscarriage procedures had left me completely lost and lonely.
I’m wishing all of you this freedom. To talk and write about your personal experience with your clumps of cells, without the burden to make it sound poltically effective.

Thank you for opening this dialogue. I’m preparing to start trying for a baby, after 2 decades thinking I was infertile after a misleading diagnosis as a teenager and after a divorce, where I thought I missed my last chance to have one (I!!). I am unlearning and relearning a lot to prepare, and finding the implicit value system created by those who don’t think women have control over their bodies is so much more insidious than just the decision to keep a pregnancy:
– We’re told pregnancy is mysterious and fickle–not taught how ovulation, temperatures and fluids work to understand the mechanism
– We’re taught PMS, pain, etc. is just something to deal with — not taught how nutrition, minerals, and vitamins and functional care can directly improve our female health
– We’re told the birth control pill is a miracle — not taught how hormonal birth control (especially when young) can affect your body far beyond your uterus and have lasting implications after stopping
– We’re told miscarriages happen all the time yet told to be quiet about them — we’re not taught to share our experiences and certainly not taught what kind of prenatal care can reduce the likelihood of some causes (e.g., healthy thyroid and progesterone)
When you’re raised in this paradigm of mystery and obedience, rather than empowerment and knowledge, it’s easy to believe an unwanted pregnancy is somehow more “important” than the birth mother’s wishes, but given our knowledge now of how babies are created, that excuse is just infuriating at this point. I think to effect real change we have to overhaul our system for better education more broadly, and a piece of that is sharing nuanced stories of emotion, so thank you for sharing :)

Thank you for this piece. It is so sad that we live in a world where some people will let kids die in schools because they care more about guns, but they will also let people with people with wombs die before hurting a fetus. They are certainly as far from “pro-life” as one can get. I pray for them.

What happened to the bylines on the front page, mobile? It helps me decide whether to read. Thanks!

I am a type I diabetic. I needed to meticulously plan both of my pregnancies in order to conceive and deliver healthy children and remain healthy myself. I live in a country with free healthcare but I still spent a lot of money on extra medical services that are not included in order to do so.
The pregnancies took a huge toll on me physically and mentally and I don’t think I could go through an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy should my birth control fail. I find taking the choice of what to do with our bodies and LIVEs away from us is inhumane and cruel. How can this still happen in a supposedly free country? Where is the freedom in that? It makes me so angry it literally takes my breath away.

A woman’s body is her own. A baby’s body is his or her own. I understand this essay addresses the early stages of pregnancy. Yet at some point during pregnancy most people recognize the “clump of cells” is a baby. When is that line? When a woman goes into labor? A day before birth? A month before birth? When it can feel pain? When it has a heartbeat? When it has human DNA?
I guess I felt compelled to comment to say that as a supporter of human rights and an advocate for nonviolence, I believe we should err on the side of protecting human life at all stages and resist destroying it at any stage.
I appreciate the opportunity to comment.

I have a daughter I birthed, and the entire experience of “matrescence,” has been one of being completely broken into a million pieces and reassembled into a new me. I would take credit for this metaphor, but I believe its from some Rachel Cusk I read on a transatlantic flight with a sleeping infant in my lap.

After much consideration, I am open to try to have a second. My husband spent many years asking and sometimes pushing for a second kid. I told him it wasn’t up to him. I am the decider, because I am the one who will be reassembled anew, bodily and psychically. He didn’t love this, but he did get quieter. Finally, with some of our life circumstances changing for the better, I woke up one morning and said to myself “Ok, I am open to trying.” I knew. It wasn’t rational. But I knew I had an open heart to be reassembled again, should I get pregnant and give birth again.

What a luxury:

to control my body
to take birth control that nobody else can control
to be able to “defy” my lovely partner until I was ready
to have had an abortion when I was much younger and not ready

I’m so so lucky.

A coda. The lady who cleans my house was late a few weeks ago. Sorry, she said, my roomate just had a baby. We laughed about how babies keep everyone up. She was raped, she added, as an aside. She didn’t want this baby. So we are all trying to help her with the little girl, because it isn’t her fault. (We aren’t living a country where birth control, EC, abortion are accessible.)

How fucking lucky I am.

Thank you for this piece. I am a mother now, a choice I made in my 30s when I was in a safe relationship with a loving partner and had the resources and support to decide it was time to have a child. In my early 20s, I was in an abusive relationship with an older man who told me he had a vasectomy. I found myself pregnant and terrified, not just of being pregnant, but of what it would mean to be permanently tethered to this man if I gave birth. I had an abortion and never told a soul. Many months later, I found myself in a court room explaining to a judge why I was seeking a protective order from this man, who tried to kill me-twice on the highway with a moving vehicle, and once on a boat. It took months, good police work, and incredible support from family and friends for me to regain any semblance of safety. While the effectiveness of protective orders in domestic abuse cases is another conversation, it’s linked to this conversation as many abused women find themselves pregnant by their abusers. Not only do states not protect women, they do not protect children. I wish pro-lifers would take their advocacy and point it toward that issue rather than holding images and yelling outside medical buildings.

In the decades since I survived abuse, I have never once regretted the decision to terminate a pregnancy. In fact, I have felt such intense relief that I had the wisdom to make that choice, the resources, and that I live in a state where my health insurance covered the procedure. I cannot imagine I would have lived if I had not made that choice–surely he would have killed me and the laws of my state would have made it inexplicably more difficult to separate from him if I had his baby.