Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. Thousands of families across the nation will light candles for babies who were born dead, died shortly after birth, or whose births would have killed their mothers, necessitating a medical termination.
I am one of them. My daughter, Ember, died of fatal birth defects.
What people who have not survived this experience may not know is that the line between pregnancy and infant loss and abortion is a blurry one. It’s because sometimes when a baby dies, an abortion is the only way to save the mother. Sometimes the only way anyone survives the pregnancy is through the doors of an abortion clinic. In our community of baby loss, we have a lot of women who aborted babies they had named, loved, sacrificed for. That grief is indistinct from the grief anyone feels after the death of a baby. But Republican anti-choicers continue to make a mockery of that grief. They continue to abuse and even attempt to criminalize women whose “choice” wasn’t a choice at all.
Those of us who have lived through losing a baby know how cruel people can be. There’s actual scientific research on how insensitive people are in the wake of infant death. Women across the globe report a near-universal response of silence, of being urged to get over it, being told to stop grieving their children.
So it comes as no surprise to me that an awareness day has transformed into a day of brutality. I’ve watched conservatives attack John Legend and Chrissy Teigen for taking photos of their stillborn baby because, I guess, you’re not supposed to love or want to remember a child who dies at or shortly after birth. I’ve watched the loved ones of Facebook friends compare their child’s death to an early miscarriage or urge them to get over it.
Victim blaming creates a feeling of safety where none exists. If we can blame others for their pain, we can separate ourselves from them. If we dismiss that pain, then we don’t have to realize that we live in a world where such pain is possible, where it is random, where it can happen to anyone—even good people. We all need to believe bad things can’t happen to us because we are somehow better, capable of choosing our way out of tragedy.
For many of us in the infant loss community, today has been especially brutal because we have, in addition to the usual victim-blaming, also had to think about Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. We have had to listen to Republicans call women like us murderers. We have listened to endless falsehoods about late-term abortion, about selfish women who choose to murder their babies.
Less than 2% of abortions occur in late pregnancy, and less than 0.2% of abortions occur after 24 weeks. My friend and colleague Ann Rose calls these mercy abortions. If the Republican men who would take away choice, who would force women to die for babies doomed not to live, could see such an abortion, they wouldn’t see brutality.
They would see a doctor removing an already dead baby from a woman’s uterus so she doesn’t die. If they live in some states, they might see parents fighting to get access to such surgeries, because state laws are so restrictive that some hospitals will force a woman to continue carrying a dead baby.
They would witness parents learning that mom has cancer, and she can choose between dying and leaving behind an orphaned baby, or terminating the pregnancy and sticking around to be a mother to her other children.
They would watch parents learn that the baby is dying and mom is hemorrhaging, and the only way to save either of them is to terminate the pregnancy.
They would learn about babies with unsurvivable birth defects, whose parents choose to terminate the pregnancy to spare the baby a few moments of suffering before dying shortly after birth.
They would learn that a medical termination might be the only way a woman might ever be able to hold her baby.
They would learn that parents decide what to do about dying and severely ill babies and mothers in a country that offers almost no support to severely disabled children and few rights for disabled adults. Perhaps in a world where a brief hospital stay doesn’t bankrupt families, it might make sense for a woman to give birth to a baby who lives only a few hours. But the anti-choicers who claim to care so very much about human life don’t support any policy that actually enables better lives for babies or their families.
The overwhelming majority of Americans know abortion is crucial to women’s health. Eighty-six percent think abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances. Republicans are determined to ignore this knowledge, ignore the popular will, to force women to carry babies to term no matter what. Terminally ill babies will still die. The only thing that will change is that their mothers may soon have to die with them—of hemorrhages, of uterine infections, of illnesses doctors can’t legally treat as long as the woman is pregnant.
Today, I will honor my daughter by casting my absentee ballot before I light a candle in her memory. I will honor my living daughter by working for a world where she will never have to worry about being forced to die for a baby who cannot survive. Because the United States still has the worst maternal mortality rate in the developed world, and no one can claim to be pro-life who isn’t doing something about that.
Abortion is mercy.
Abortion saves lives.
Sometimes loving your baby means never getting to hold them alive.