To Be a (M)other: A Feminist Performative Autoethnography of Abortion

At 22, I find myself unexpectedly pregnant. I sit on the bathroom floor staring at two tiny pink lines, perpendicular to one another and crossed at the center to form a perfect plus sign. Two pink lines which lay inconspicuously on my bathroom counter, capturing my gaze but numbing my mind as the pressure of a reality I have never wanted begins to set in. My thoughts move too quickly and not quickly enough, my consciousness chasing an elusive desire for calm and understanding. I feel myself falling, as in a dream, from a ledge I did not know I was on. I feel myself shaking and heaving and sweating and hyperventilating and wanting to scream, but not remembering how. I feel betrayed by my body.

I find myself in the passenger seat of a close friend’s car for one hundred and one and seven tenths miles to the nearest abortion clinic. I find myself walking up to a building guarded by flimsy pamphlets and cardboard signs and a “mobile crisis pregnancy center”—an oversized white ultrasound van anti-abortion groups use in attempts to lure patients away from abortion clinics—and protesters who tell me I am making a mistake. That I am a monster, a sinner, a whore, immoral, and inhuman. A lost woman who does not have to kill her baby, who needs the Church, the Bible, the guiding hand of God. An inevitable mother with a helpless unborn child—a child who needs me.

These words pierce my skin for an infinite 4 minutes while the security officer checks me in. Each voice silences mine until my mind and tear ducts are overwhelmed. They tell stories of who I am, of what my responsibilities and desires are, of what my decisions about my body mean, of the needs of a possible life I carry. They say nothing—ask nothing—of my needs.

I learn I do not control my body the way I once thought I did.

***

I come to writing through my body, the same way I come to performance, and feminism. I imagine many folks also interested in writing and performance and feminism may say the same (Bell, 1995; Carver, 1998; Diamond, 1996; Madison, 1993, 1999; McMillan, 2015; Pineau, 2000; Spry, 2009, 2011) That’s the thing about bodies—they’re with us wherever we go, marked and bruised and bleeding, dreaming and desiring and laughing, overflowing with memory and sense and time. More specifically, I should say, I come to each of these—writing, performance, feminism—through my abortion, an experience my body carries in its folds as part of its unfolding history. This is not to say I never wrote, or performed, or considered myself a feminist before my abortion, but that my abortion has taught me to think about those practices in new ways—a paradigm shift, a sharpening of an image, a thought which upon conception cannot be unthought. Perhaps this is because my abortion continues to teach me so much about my body.

My abortion teaches me my body has the power to create. My abortion teaches me about “personal responsibility” and “sexual deviancy” and “dealing with consequences.” My abortion teaches me about choice. My abortion teaches me about life, about whose life. My abortion teaches me about sex education (Boonstra, 2010). My abortion teaches me about mental health (Biggs, Upadhyay, McCulloch, & Foster, 2017). My abortion teaches me I should be hanged as punishment for premeditated homicide (Jacobson, 2014). My abortion teaches me about love, about self-love. My abortion teaches me about sin. My abortion teaches me about faith, and religion, and White capitalist Jesus. My abortion teaches me about stigma—that my body “defies long-held ideals of subordination to community needs” and “may challenge a moral order” (Kumar, Hessini, & Mitchell, 2009, p. 628). My abortion teaches me about medical racism and the myth of abortion as Black genocide (Dobbins-Harris, 2017). My abortion teaches me about disability, about reproductive justice for disabled bodies (Jarman, 2015). My abortion teaches me about politics—the official 2016 Republican platform uses the word abortion 35 times, while it appears in the 2016 Democratic Party platform 6 times. My abortion teaches me about legislature—19 states adopted 63 new restrictions on abortion rights and access in 2017 (Nash, Gold, Mohammed, Ansari-Thomas, & Cappello, 2018). My abortion teaches me about relationships, about which relationships can withstand the truth of my body. My abortion teaches me I have personal agency to make a “controversial” decision about my body because it is my prerogative to do so, and no one else’s. My abortion teaches me I am not alone—that one in four cis women will have one by age 45 (Guttmacher Institute, 2018). My abortion teaches me cis women are not alone—that reproductive justice is not just cis women’s justice; it is trans and queer justice, too (Light, Wang, Zeymo, & Gomez-Lobo, 2018; Nixon, 2013).

My abortion teaches me about motherhood: how certain gendered bodies, including my own, come to inhabit a “compulsory orientation” toward motherhood as a “happy object,” and how abortion strays from that reproductive line (Ahmed, 2006, 2010). My body is meant to strive for motherhood, to reproduce the family line through its reproductive capabilities, and to find happiness in this reproduction. But as Scarth (2004) argues, “A mother, in taking on the responsibility of the relationship with that free other, the child, must also be a free subject who can help shape the situation that the child will enter” (p. 147). In this recognition of motherhood as engagement, a (cis) woman “cannot be a mother without endeavoring to play a role in the economic, political, and social life of the times” (de Beauvoir, as quoted in Scarth, 2004, p. 147). As a purposeful disengagement, abortion symbolizes both a rejection of institutional motherhood and a betrayal of a woman’s presumed maternal body, rendering her an Other not only within dominant cultures—but within herself.

My abortion teaches me what it means to be a (m)other, to live in/as a body colliding with internal and external expectations, to inhabit a cultural space between motherhood and not. From this liminal position, I turn to feminist auto-epistemologies and body-writing practices to disrupt the functionality of the U.S. American abortion debate through somatic reclamation of my experience from the semantic constrictions of highly medicalized, politicized, and individualized hegemonic discourses. Engaging a feminist performative autoethnographic praxis informed by écriture feminine, I center my body as a site of epistemological value to story my abortion experience between constricting, conflicting, and dichotomized “Life” versus “Choice” discourses. I am taking back my body’s story.

Scholars have engaged with autoethnographic inquiry to illuminate “the liminal space between life and being alive” within reproductive experiences (Mingé & Silverman, 2016), interrogate the neoliberal discourse of the “war on women” (Arellano, 2013), offer insight into institutions which frame abortion experiences (Coon Sells, 2013), and highlight the complexity of abortion storytelling within historical and cultural silences (Boon, 2017). Attending to the epistemic and aesthetic axes of autoethnographic inquiry, performative autoethnography offers critical/creative potentials for writing within the discursive in-between of dichotomized “Life” versus “Choice” discourses. As Spry (2009) notes, “If autoethnography is epistemic, then the evidence of how we know what we know must reside in the aesthetic crafting of critical reflexion upon the body as evidence” (p. 583). Thus, performative autoethnography “is forged with the ontological tension” (p. 584) between the aesthetic/epistemic double bind (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2005; Peterson & Langellier, 1982). Engaging a “performative-I disposition,” performative autoethnography disrupts the “linear path from self to other, theory to practice, [and] emotion to craft” within “a dialogic space where experience and text affect and are affected by one another in a textualizing body” (Spry, 2011, p. 12). In short, performative autoethnography is a method for writing our epistemic/aesthetic, material/social, personal/political bodies.

Such body-writing practices have been a fundamental element of feminist theory/praxis for decades. From Moraga and Anzaldúa’s (1981) radical anthology of “Third World women’s writings,” to Anzaldúa’s (1987, 2000) mestiza consciousness and autohistoria-teoría, to Lorde’s (1982) biomythography, to French poststructural écriture feminine (Cixous, 1976; Irigaray, 1985; Kristeva, 1984), feminist embodied auto-epistemologies have established a rich textual tradition of writing the body. Gannon (2006) explores the connections between French poststructural theory and autoethnography, recognizing the “(im)possibility” of writing poststructural bodies as “(self)knowledge can only ever be tentative, contingent, and situated” (p. 474). A performative autoethnographic approach informed by feminist auto-epistemologies, such as écriture feminine, offers potentials to play within the im/possibility of this double bind through body-writing while “experimenting with how we might tell stories differently rather than simply telling different stories” (Hemmings, 2011, p. 16).

Cixous’ (1976) notion of écriture feminine, as conceptualized in the formative essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” arises as a call for women to write (from) their bodies:

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies . . . Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. (p. 875)

Like Spry’s articulation of performative autoethnography, Cixous’ elaboration of écriture feminine privileges nonlinear, cyclical structure and poetic, embodied language. Such strategies embody a rhetorical subversion of dominant masculine logics through performative reclamation of “feminine” textual eroticism. Cixous metaphorically frames this reclamation as a disruption of the Medusa/Abyss dichotomization of mythic femininity, conjuring laughter as a redemptive force of pleasure: “You only have to look Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (p. 885).

***

The phone rings 3 times before a friendly woman’s voice greets me and asks how she may be of help to me. I tell her I need to make an appointment to terminate a pregnancy. She tells me that she can help me and asks how far along I am. I tell her I don’t know. She asks if I’ve been to the doctor to take a test, as home tests aren’t always reliable. I tell her I have, and it was positive, but I wasn’t sure of the date I gave my doctor. She tells me that’s okay, because they will have to perform an ultrasound at the beginning of my appointment to verify the length of the pregnancy anyways. I’m quiet for a moment; it makes sense medically, I suppose, but I just hadn’t thought about that part yet. She reassures me this is standard procedure and tells me it won’t take long. “Besides,” she says, “you don’t have to look.”

*

The Fall semester after my abortion, I am listening to my students’ first round of speeches in my morning section of Communication Studies 101. The first speeches are always my favorite; listening to their narratives (in this instance, about their successes) helps me get to know them a little better. The second to last speaker of the day is, for all intents and purposes, a “good” student—she is present and attentive, takes notes during class, and turns in quality work in a timely manner. But she is also quiet. I’ve been looking forward to hearing her voice in class.

She begins her speech with all of the “right” elements of a good introduction: a catchy opening statement, some pertinent background information, a thesis statement connecting her story to the prompt, and a clear preview of what’s to come. With all of her precise signaling, I know almost immediately that one of her greatest accomplishments was participating in a Bound4Life ¹ anti-abortion rally.

I feel my cheeks redden with something between anger and shame and embarrassment and humility and I focus my gaze downward on my feedback sheet, looking up just once every minute to check her eye contact. I try to listen to the organizational structure, but between transitions I hear sound bites all too familiar to ignore: “Protect the unborn; Overturn Roe; Fight for life; Sexual responsibility.” I scribble some notes about her vocal projection and use of space and keep my eyes fixated on the paper in front of me as the class applauds.

She walks over to me to give me her outline and I hear the kind receptionist’s voice in my head: “You don’t have to look.”

When she hands it to me, I turn to look at her, smile, and say “Thank you.”

*

You don’t have to look.

*

On July 30, 1994, just below 50 miles from my hometown, domestic terrorist and convicted murderer Paul Jennings Hill sprayed shotgun fire at point-blank range outside of an abortion clinic, killing physician Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard, James Barrett, and injuring Barrett’s wife, June. Britton was an abortion provider in Pensacola, Florida, who flew in weekly to perform abortions at the local clinic after the murder of a previous Pensacola physician, Dr. David Gunn, 1 year prior. The 2016 Planned Parenthood terrorist Robert Dear cited Hill as an inspiration, claiming he was “somebody [Dear] thought very highly of” (Barbash & Wang, 2016). Hill credited inspiration to Gunn’s murderer, Michael Frederick Griffin, who yelled “Don’t kill any more babies” before shooting him 3 times at point-blank range. Griffin’s act of terror prompted him to issue the First Defensive Action Statement, signed by 30 national anti-abortion leaders, which “justifies” the murder of abortion providers (The Southern Poverty Law Center, 1998).

In similar scapegoat fashion, Griffin’s legal defense team claimed he had been brainwashed by Northwest Florida regional director of anti-abortion group Rescue America, John Burt. Burt, an ex-marine and former Klu Klux Klan member, called himself a “spiritual advisor” to anti-abortion extremists, aided in clinic bombings, invaded a clinic with intent to damage equipment and assaulted two women, and has been convicted of molestation of a 15-year-old girl who had been staying at his “Christian Women’s Shelter,” Our Father’s House.

In the unedited version Hill’s (2003) book written in prison, Mix My Blood with the Blood of the Unborn, he writes the following:

I realized that many important things would be accomplished by my shooting another abortionist in Pensacola. This would put the pro-life rhetoric about defending born and unborn children equally into practice. It would also help people to decide whether to join the battle on the side of those defending abortionists, or the side of those defending the unborn. (p. 9)

Hill was executed by lethal injection on September 3, 2003, 3 weeks before my 11th birthday. Burt died in prison in 2013, having served nine of his 18-year sentence. Griffin, though, is still alive, serving his life sentence at Okaloosa County Correctional Institution in Crestview, Florida, just about 10 miles from where I grew up. On November 1, 2017, the State denied his request for parole, for which he will be considered again in 2024.

*

You don’t have to look.

*

I lay faceup on an examination table, my shirt lifted just under my breasts to expose my bloated belly. The ultrasound technician squeezes a clear jelly substance on my skin, warning me it would be a little chilly. Shivers shoot up my back to the nape of my neck; I never was one for cold. I feel the slight pressure of the transducer as she rubs it around my abdomen trying to find its way around my swollen uterus.

“You don’t have to watch during this part if you don’t want to,” she reminds me. I think for a moment about staring at the screen head-on, willing myself to prove to the people gathered outside that I was as informed as anyone could possibly be—that I saw the grape on the sonogram and indeed, it was not a human life, but the beginnings of a potential for one. And then I nod at her gently, breathe deep, and close my eyes.

I don’t have to look. Not in this moment, anyways. There will be plenty else to see and hear later—that I’ll have to see and hear. This particular image, this small moment, I could choose not to bear witness.

Ironically, this is the first choice I’ve felt empowered in making all day. The nurse told me afterward that many women make the same choice. Whether they looked or they didn’t, and whether they felt any particular way they felt because they did or didn’t look, I’m proud of them. Women who have abortions don’t get to choose the culture of stigma surrounding abortion experiences in the United States. We don’t choose to bear witness to anti-abortion violence and dwindling access to health care and the public regulation of our reproductive bodies.

We have to look.

It’s about time others do, too.

***

Dear Noelle, ²

I’m not sure if you remember me. We haven’t spoken in more than 10 years—and even then, we didn’t speak much outside of school. We took Home Economics class together in the eighth grade, with the nice teacher with white-blonde hair whose name I can’t remember. I think you and I made pancakes together once.

Even though we haven’t talked, I saw you recently. I think you may have seen me, too—we locked eyes for just long enough to feel a hint of recognition. Or at least it seemed that way to me. I was nervous that day, and a little shaken at that moment, so I could have just been paranoid. I don’t know.

Now that I think about it, perhaps we did speak. Maybe I asked you where I should sit, or to whom I should give my form, or where I could find the bathroom. If we did, I know you were pleasant and kind. Even though I can’t remember all of the details from that day, I do remember moments, a series of disjointed images paired with intense feelings. Sometimes I can piece them together, but mostly I can’t. I remember your shirt was pink, but not baby pink—it was a deeper shade, maybe almost like magenta. I remember your hair was pulled back into a ponytail, which I liked because I remember that’s how you wore it most often in middle school. I remember you walked up to the desk, and I was standing by the column waiting to ask about the forms or the bathrooms or waiting rooms or whatever I might have asked about to you or one of the other nice women at the reception counter, and the phone rang. You reached to pick it up but looked at me and smiled as you began to speak softly to whomever was on the other line. I hope I smiled back.

I refocused my attention elsewhere, as to not eavesdrop, and wondered about your smile—if it emerged from vague remembrance or cordial acknowledgment or someplace in between. Either way, I want to thank you for it. It meant a lot to me that day.

Before I saw you at the desk, before the elevator and entryway and security office, another woman smiled at me, but it didn’t feel the same. Her smile was slight and sad, or looked like it was supposed to be sad, in the way strangers smiled at me after I gave the eulogy at my grandfather’s funeral. It came with a coy “God bless you” and a pamphlet advertising the ultrasound van parked out front. I didn’t take it, but I knew what it said.

There were other protestors, too. Most seemed particularly interested in women walking toward the clinic door from the parking lot, surely trying to lure them into their van (I realize “lure” sounds creepy and gross, but it’s the word that comes to mind when I think about crisis pregnancy centers). Most were women who looked to be about my mother’s age. Some were timid like the woman who smiled at me, whereas others were more aggressive, praying loudly at us, and pleading with us to go into their van to “see our babies” and talk to them about fetal pain and breast cancer and the joys of motherhood and God. The group next to the fence opposite the security booth were particularly vocal; they seemed to care a lot about the growth in my womb (an embryo the size of a grape, according to a chart on one of their signs), and my soul. They told me I would become a murderer by walking in the front door. They said my baby would be beautiful and innocent and love me unconditionally. They said Jesus would, too. They told me I could save myself.

I know they meant I needed saving from the “sins” they believed would damn my future life to guilt-driven self-loathing and my eternal soul to the special depth of hell reserved for mothers who murder their unborn children. The truth is, I felt like I did need saving, just not in the way they thought. I needed saving from that woman’s sad smile and the gruesome photographs of bloody stillborn babies the protestors said are actually aborted fetuses and most of all, the grape in my womb.

The quiet, yet pleasant white-coated doctor, and the nurses with gentle hands, and the counselor who chatted with me about my studies for a few extra minutes because she felt my nervousness, and the clinic escort in the purple vest who held my back gently as they walked me to the door, saved me. You did, too. So much of that day was clouded with uncertainty for me. It may seem strange, as we’re practically strangers, but your presence made me more comfortable. Like I was okay because you were there and may have remembered you knew me once and smiled at me as if to say, “I support you. You’re safe here.”

Before I sat down to write this letter, I searched your name on Facebook. We’re still “friends,” even after 10 years. I know in the context of Facebook that means we see each other’s photos scrolling through our newsfeeds and casually “like” one another’s witty statuses from time to time. But I want you to know you were a friend to me that day, in the truest sense of the word.

The official website for your clinic says they perform about 3,000 procedures per year. ³ I was (and continue to be) grateful for your friendly face the day I had mine. But I’m also grateful knowing you were one for all of the other people you saw who had one or more of the other 2,999 abortions, whom you may or may not have known once and may or may not have smiled at when they asked about bathrooms and waiting rooms and forms.

When I told my best friend I saw a middle school classmate working at the abortion clinic, she said it was a strange coincidence. I don’t believe in fate or luck or divinely determined destiny, but I would say it felt like the universe bared a brief moment of serendipity.

I know you know this, because you have to know it to be able to do it, but your work is admirable and important. You are admirable and important. Thank you, and everyone in your clinic, for offering me a space of salvation.

***

Dear (m)others,

What if we became women when we learned our first word?

What if we entered womanhood head first? What if,

everything our grandmothers taught us, about gardening and our grandfathers and God (what if it was all a lie?)

What if their tongues were baptized

in the Myths of their Mothers,

and of their Mothers, before them?

What if we trusted our Daughters as we do our Sons,

and cautioned our Sons as our Daughters?

    What if

we spoke the language of our (m)other tongue(s)?

What if we bore the marks of their bodies;

their Names, their Histories, inscribed on our skin?

And what if our Fathers and Brothers wore them, too?

    What if the Government subsidized tampons, abortion, and stories of women?

What if our Textbooks told tales of Amina ⁴ and Godasyio ⁵ and Nzinga Mbande? ⁶

What if the stars spilled from Aphrodite’s blood? And what if they

flow through our veins, pump our hearts, wet our thighs, too?

    What if we named our womanhood Becoming,

    instead of inheriting our paternal Became;

and what if we let our hair ⁷ grow

    —wildly; unruly—

and nest serpents to sing new Siren Songs?

And what if we tattooed them on our lips ⁸ so when our mouths open

a hisssssssssss comes out with our words?

    What if we looked Medusa in the eye and told her She Is Beautiful. ⁹

    (what if She laughs in our face?)

But what if, What if,

we laughed along with her, let our Rage erupt Joy, let the roars of our pleasure be heard

‘round the world?

What if our Confessions were absolved by Witches,

and Goddesses answered our prayers?

    What if Law was written as Poetry? and what if it was written in our Hand?

What if “writing is communion” and wafers are Words

    —“no longer waiting for them to be placed in my mouth by man” ¹⁰ —

and we washed them down with the Blood of our Bodies, a Eucharist of our own flesh?

And what if we decided to let it all overflow;

to let Language collect in our earwax, let Pleasure drip from our honey-dipped tongues;

let our bodies take up as much space as they need

and let Desire seep like sweat from our pores?

    What if jouissance lived in our laughter, and our laughter lived in our pain,

    and what if our pain is the ache of feminine:

    of childbirth; of creation; of destruction; of Love;

    of our pens dipped in milky white ink. ¹¹

Dear (m)others:

Reach for what touches you,

the equivoice that affects you,

fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches

your force; the rhythm that laughs you;

the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible

and desirable; body (body? bodies?),

no more describable than

god,

the soul,

or the Other;

that part of you that leaves a space open

between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language

your Woman’s style.

In women there is always more or less of the Mother

who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation;

a force that will not be cut

off but will knock the wind

out of the codes. ¹²

    And when you find it—grab it.

Take everything that is yours.

To (m)others With Love: Together,

We will rethink womankind

beginning with every form

and every period.

of her body. ¹³

***

I’m going to tell you a few secrets, confess some things good writers shouldn’t tell their readers, things good researchers shouldn’t tell their peers, things “proper ladies” shouldn’t say at all—the tidbits meant to live in the white space between letters, in scenes that happen offstage, in the privacy of one’s mind. The grime in the cracks of my story I refuse to sanitize. I’m going to tell you because to not tell you would be to obfuscate my truth. Because if I don’t, I’m following broken formulas, becoming part of the problem. Most of all, I’m going to tell you because I want to.

First: Writing. Hurts. Specifically, writing this hurts. See (and this is another thing I shouldn’t tell you), I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And the thing about PTSD, or at least how I experience it, is that it’s not really one thing but a web of different things, expanding and contracting like hyperventilating lungs. Psychiatrists call it “comorbidity of psychiatric disorders” (see Brady, Killeen, Brewerton, & Lucerini, 2000) the coexistence and concurrence of multiple psychological conditions. For me, this means what I call “PTSD” is actually also general anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). All. At. Once.

Wrangling language through/with/in this web is no easy task. It’s like spending every morning for 3 weeks watching a spider weave intricate cobwebs across the far corners of your porch window through your cigarette smoke, only to see the wasp it catches wriggle free before you take the next drag, breaking tiny silk threads as it escapes. Each thought is easily wisped awry in the wings of flashbacks and lucid dreams and that nagging voice in the back of your head reminding you that word in that sentence written that way probably sounds like a complete crock of shit. My body fights itself to write, or as Gingrich-Philbrook (2001) says, “Body with body’s hand over body’s mouth” (p. 3).

And that’s how this whole writing thing goes for me: good intention, healthy stress, short sensitive time window of productivity, debilitating anxiety, insomnia, depression, lather, rinse, repeat. If it’s true that “My body makes language. It makes language like hair” (Gingrich-Philbrook, 2001, p. 3), then this project is the tangled, 3-day unwashed nest on my head that I could probably tame if I could just muster up the energy to brush it.

I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you that either.

I’m not supposed to tell you that writing is hard and painful, and I haven’t washed my hair in 3 days because I’m not supposed to tell you I have PTSD. After all, I don’t look like PTSD. I’ve never seen a war zone—at least in the literal sense. But even if it had been okay to tell you in the first place, and even if you did believe me, you might assume my PTSD is “from” my abortion. And you’d be kind of right and kind of wrong, but it’s more complicated than that. I’m not supposed to tell you that my PTSD is kind of related to my abortion because saying so would make me a bad Pro-Choicer; it’s the Lifers who push the mental health risk narrative, and I am not one of their flawed statistics (Sifferlin, 2012).

My abortion did not cause me trauma, but violent discourses surrounding abortion resurfaced traumas already living in my body. My PTSD symptoms worsened after my abortion, leading me to seek therapy and treatment, but I’ve experienced panic attacks and anxiety and depression for years (This is something I should tell you: One of the major flaws in the studies which illustrate a correlation between abortion and psychological disorders is that they didn’t account for preexisting psychological traumas or mental health conditions.). So, no, my abortion did not cause my PTSD; I just didn’t have anything to call it until the moment a nice doctor in a cornflower blue tie gave it a name when I went to him after my abortion. But here lies the predicament of nomenclature, other people know its name, too. And those people aren’t just people; they’re also bodies, inter/con/textualized in culture, with their own histories and subjectivities and hair.

I’ve struggled with the deterministic risk of clinical psychological diagnostic practices (see Pickersgill, 2013 for a thorough critical analysis of this debate). Each tiny (and not-so-tiny) blue and yellow and white capsule is a daily reminder of that struggle, yet even in moments of hesitation—Do I really need all of these just to get through the day?—I swallow. I don’t like to claim my PTSD. That’s why I haven’t told you about it until now; it’s absence from my narrative marks my will to deem it irrelevant, to hide it away in the plastic blue pillbox in the back corner of my bedside table drawer. But I have to tell you, even if I shouldn’t, because my PTSD isn’t just part of my body, it is my body; insomnia sleeps in between throbbing joints, compulsions congeal in cracked cuticles, panic breathes through wheezing lungs, depression pumps through veins as synthetic serotonin singing Siren songs to serenade subnormal neurotransmitters.

I think of Gingrich-Philbrook (2001) description and reflection of biting his tongue during seizures:

Sometimes I say, “this isn’t something I am; this is something that happens to me.” But it is something I am. “Happens” is “am.” I am a paying of too much attention. I am a popping. I am a biting and a getting bitten. I am a beginning of a dream. I do not have a seizure; I am a seizure. (p. 2, emphasis in original)

If I am PTSD (or rather, the collection of embodied experiences I’ve come to call PTSD), and I truly live “language-body-language-body” (p. 3), then isn’t the language my body performs itself a performance of PTSD? Isn’t this account about my reproductive body, storied in fleeting moments of creative productivity between cycles of anxiety, also an embodied account of my mental health—even if it’s told in the negative space? And if I take all of this about bodies/language to be true, and I do, does that not also mean I am my abortion?

Go ahead. Pause. Look away. Take a breather if you need it. But when you come back, the words will be here waiting: I am my abortion.

Here’s another secret for you: that can be a good thing if we let it. I’m not supposed to say my abortion empowers me; it’s something I’m meant to apologize for, to overcome and transcend. I’m not supposed to tell you the drugs felt good, or that I laughed at the grotesque absurdity of the protestors’ signs on the car ride home from the clinic, or that I cried when the doctor turned on the suction aspirator and I heard a symphony in its melodic mechanic hum. I’m not supposed to want to be my abortion. I’m not supposed to want to claim it, to call it mine, to let it bleed into my I.

The “acceptable” abortion is bred from necessity, “not as a choice freely made but as a ‘forced choice’—one she makes because she feels she has no other option” (Settles & Furgerson, 2015, p. 25). Thus, the “ideal” abortion patient is the glowing soon-to-be mother who learns of a fatal fetal condition when she’s already painted the nursery; the 14-year-old girl raped by a neighbor or father or friend; the first-generation college student working two jobs with stars in her eyes and pennies in her pocket; the chronically ill woman; the abused woman; the abandoned woman; the alcoholic. The poster child for abortion is ashamed, apologetic, and most importantly, a victim of circumstance.

I don’t want to be the victim. To be victimized by my abortion is to say I am less than, because my body is made for births I don’t want to labor. It’s to say my abortion is not a part of my womanhood because to be a woman is to be a mother and to terminate a pregnancy is to violate the sacred maternal realm of womanly experience. I don’t want to justify how and why my birth control failed, or my tumultuous relationship with him, or all of the good I’ve done with the freedom and responsibility of non-parenthood. I don’t want to elicit sympathy or pity or the uncomfortable mixture of both in the smiles of strangers offering empty blessings in brochures about God. I don’t want to sterilize my body with antiseptic language. I won’t. I want to welcome my abortion with loving arms spread wide, to nurse it from my breast. I want to embrace the power of my body to create and destroy, to “burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune” (Cixous, 1976, p. 876).

I want to pick my body’s flower and let it bathe in the sun.

I want to stare into the eyes of Medusa and laugh.