The Psychologist: Being Taboo

While I don’t plan on making everything public that I talk to the psychologist about (I’m paying her for her to help ME, not ya’ll), I think I can share some of the more fine-tuned items that make utter and complete sense. Such as societal taboos.

Something that really got to me over the past few weeks is the difference in abortion vs. miscarriage.

Aside from a few privileged friends (four), my mom and stepdad, and my husband, everyone else in the world believes my pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. 7 people know that I ended this on my own terms. Why couldn’t I let everyone know that I chose to end it? Why couldn’t I let people know that I wasn’t comfortable bringing a life into the world?

For the same reason that I don’t respond to friends and acquaintances on Facebook when they post messages condemning abortion as hateful and a crime, I guess.. no one will understand my reasoning aside from me. They don’t have to live with my choice… only I do. And I don’t want to take their criticisms as well. Believe me, with regards to this? I’m my own worst critic. No one is going to be harder on me than I have been the last few months.

So why do I lie to people, and tell them that miscarriage was the answer? Why is it somehow better that my body aborted the pregnancy itself, rather than my intervention? Either way, the outcome is the same. Shouldn’t those people be equally angry about miscarriages? I somehow doubt that would ever be the case. But isn’t that wrong? They would be OK with the miscarriage because….How can you condemn someone for not being able to do something?

I’m not able to raise a child the way I want to. Isn’t that similar? I’m not able to do something. But I guess when it’s my CHOICE to end a life, it’s different.

Why do so many people care about my choices? Why is my choice making me lie to everyone? And because I’m lying, I feel like I’m guilty. And I shouldn’t be… Because of the state I live in, and my inalienable rights, I am able to choose to abort my embryo if I want to. Tax payer money and insurance didn’t even come into play here. I paid cash for the procedure.

But regardless, I’m still afraid.

I won’t go into the morality of everything in this scenario, but I will at least say this…. the decision to abort was the hardest one I’ve ever had to face. I can’t imagine what could be harder to a mother. I’m still suffering from the mental ramifications of this. I agonized for weeks about this. I literally waited until the very last minute to take the pills. I was ok with taking the pills, because that dot on the screen meant nothing to me at the time. And there was a 97% chance that the pills would take care of everything. I was opposed to the surgical removal. At that point, it meant that the embryo was too far developed for the pills to work. And in my head, I was personally having a hard time thinking of abortion as an answer to something that far along. It wasn’t worth it to me to undergo surgery for this. Babies are generally happy things.

And then it happened… I was part of the 3% that the pills didn’t work for. After all the pain I went through. And the hellish night at home with my husband on the phone with various doctors. And me floating between passing out, throwing up, and bleeding everywhere… I found out I was still pregnant and needed the surgical option.

You know what? Erase my last thought. THIS was now the hardest part. Knowing that even though I was still pregnant, I couldn’t carry to full term if I wanted to. That I would have already caused the embryo too much harm. Try telling yourself over and over again that it was still your choice to do this… when you are nearing your 2nd trimester, and a doc knocks you out and you’re lying naked, unconscious on a table when someone surgically removes the embryo from your manually dilated uterus.

I regret my decision now. And likely always will until I forgive myself. I wonder if, when I forgive myself, I’ll start calling this whole thing for what it was: an abortion. Until then, I’ll try to understand my choices, and try to continually tell myself my choice was still the right one.

But it’s hard to fit the broken pieces together. I feel like there’s still some missing.

~ by shespeakstruth on December 31, 2012.