"My Foetus"
Abortion Language is Powerful
Medical terminology maintains the clinicalness of the procedure effectively distancing the person from the deeper reality and wider impacts.
The documentary "My Foetus" screened on TV One (7th September 2004) attempted to lift a veil of secrecy, and perhaps succeeded in terms of presenting some of the medical facts about abortion. Because the abortion issue is full of emotional contradictions the presenter, Julia Black, wanted to strip away the emotion and deal with the facts. Yet, emotions are part of what make us human and when considering the complexity of the physical, emotional, spiritual, relational...processes of pregnancy and abortion, you cannot ignore a persons emotions and spirit - if you do, you do so at a cost.
Pregnancy and abortion language does much to support the reasoned or rationalized clinical choice and the disconnection from the emotional and spiritual reality. The terms e.g. foetus, products of conception, tissue, the pregnancy, often used with pregnant mothers, especially those ambivalent about keeping the baby, effectively depersonalizes the situation, aids avoidance of an emotional attachment or connection to the life growing inside, distances them from the abortion experience.
Most women with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy face a crisis time and decision making period , in which they might focus on the various options - to continue with the pregnancy, or to have an abortion or opt for adoption - all emotionally charged options. A woman may experience a whole range of sometimes mixed and conflicting thoughts and emotions, pressures and fears - it can be a time of huge anguish for her (and her husband or partner). A medical solution to such a complex, multilayered and deep issue is limited and fraught with hidden and often unanticipated psycho-spiritual sequelae.
It is interesting that many who support women for abortions and many women who go for abortions refrain from using the ordinary terminology accepted when a woman is pregnant - the reality of having a baby is subtly and often not so subtly, denied or ignored. The presenter of My Foetus acknowledged how hard it is to use the word foetus when looking at the 3D Images for it looks very much like a baby - yet she was unable to, or deliberately did not refer to her abortion in terms of an unborn baby that died, nor her current pregnancy as my baby. Julia Black said she found it hard to reflect on the foetus she destroyed. She had had a scan with her first pregnancy at 8 weeks but did not want to think of it as a healthy 8 week foetus, and admitted to blocking it out of my mind. The blocking out mechanism, disconnection between head and heart or denial is often employed to enable a woman to proceed with the surgical procedure to terminate the pregnancy and so avoid facing the deeper reality of what is happening to her baby and herself with abortion as a death event.
Women may cope afterwards by maintaining the sense of its not a baby. One woman said that holding onto a belief that it was not a baby, from the time before her abortion until now, had enabled her to frame up the abortion in a reasonable (able to be reasoned) way and enabled her to cope with it, until she came to the realization it was her baby she lost, and then everything began to cave in on her, and the grief and guilt that surfaced soon gave way to despair.
For many women who come for healing afterwards, their perception at the time of the abortion, later changes, when they come to view things differently as they mature, and new learning or a trigger event uncovers the truth they denied and feelings they suppressed sometimes long ago. It is when head knowledge and heart (emotional and spiritual) knowledge meet that the connection happens and realization dawns.
Julia Black, the presenter of My Foetus, was herself fully pregnant with her second foetus at the time of making the documentary and later is seen playing with her growing child, having aborted her first foetus as a lifestyle choice. She was more curious now pregnant for the second time about the whole abortion issue, and wondered if she could still be pro-choice knowing the reality of what abortion is and does. After her dispassionate research and doing the documentary she held to a womans right to choose and she herself having no regrets over her abortion. Is there a level of denial still present? It would be interesting to see where she is at in another 20 years in her thinking and feeling around her abortion.
Sadly, the whole area of the possible aftermath was not even mentioned on the programme My Foetus. Women can suffer depression, unresolved anger, feelings of guilt and impacted grief. Today women are permitted to grieve after normal miscarriage, but the grief attendant on an intentional miscarriage is neither societally recognized nor accepted - it remains hidden beneath a pall of public silence, thus also silencing women who hurt and suffer alone, and those whose grief cannot be acknowledged even to themselves. Who will speak out for these women, or how can these women be empowered to share their experiences and lift another of the veils of secrecy around abortion?
This article is re-printed from P.A.T.H.S. Post Abortion Trauma Healing Service, Newsletter Issue 10: September 2004. With Permission kindly given by Carolina Gnad, Chairperson.
