Being Pregnant Made Me Even More Pro-Choice

The more I know about pregnancy, the more strongly I believe nobody should be forced to do this.

This isn't normally a political newsletter, but it's hard to be a human woman just going about her daily business in this country without something you do, eventually, being considered a political act. Today, that political activity is "having a uterus."

With the Supreme Court's disturbing failure to block a Texas law that outlaws all abortions after six weeks' gestation, I'm reminded again that there are politicians who have made entire careers out of being elbow deep in my guts. Frankly, it's creepy.

Today, an anti-abortion group I won't link to celebrated the Supreme Court's inaction with a Tweet that read "This is a baby at 7 weeks old. This is who Texas’ law protects." The illustration accompanying the tweet wasn't actually of a 7-week-old baby. How do I know that? Because there's no such thing as a "7-week-old baby;" at seven weeks old, it's not even medically classified as a fetus (it's an embryo). Further, the illustration looked like it summers in R'lyeh, was several times larger than an actual 7-week-old fetus (which is 5/16 of an inch long, about the size of a pea) and had a fully formed foot with toes (7-week-old embryos don't even have arms and legs; just buds).

The image did not make me feel a need to protect whatever creature was pictured in the accompanying photo. It just made me angry at how stupid anti-choice groups think women must be.

It's an old tactic, shoving medical misinformation into our faces and thinking we'll fall for it.

A little over a decade ago in my home state of Wisconsin, an anti-choice group put up some billboards that made passing motorists stop and say “Wait, huh?”

The billboards featured an illustration of an ultrasound with a tiny little sonogram halo, implying, I guess, that this was how an ultrasound of Jesus would have looked, and because baby Jesus would have appeared on an ultrasound, all abortion is wrong? (If you wanted to read further into it, you could also conclude that this particular graphic designer believes that halos are made of a dense material like bone instead of an airy material like lung tissue, which doesn't show up on ultrasounds.)

I thought about that billboard earlier this summer when I read about a revelation during a Q&A with a few key people from the 1996 film Fargo, one of the greatest movies of all time. (Apparently, it's been 25 years since the year 1996, which doesn't seem like it should be correct.) In it, Frances McDormand plays Marge Gunderson, a small-town Minnesota police officer who is drawn into a complicated murder investigation while extremely pregnant. Marge's pregnancy, while silently ubiquitous in her scenes, doesn't have much bearing on the plot beyond heightening the brutality and bizarreness of the film's central crimes by juxtaposing pedestrian wholesomeness with violence. But, in one version of the script, the pregnancy drove at least one scene.

McDormand looked at [director Joel] Coen and asked, “Is it outing you to ask you to tell them the scene that I read first? Do you remember?” She then reminded Coen that in an earlier draft of the script, another friend of Marge’s brought her to Minneapolis for a completely different reason.

“Her friend invited her to a right to life protest,” McDormand said. “Oh, my god. Can you imagine?”

Coen said the idea was inspired by the “big population in northern parts of Minnesota that were very conservative,” but that the scene ultimately didn’t provide what they needed.

"Can you imagine?" is a great question. I can absolutely imagine a friend of Marge Gunderson's making assumptions about her views on abortion based on her pregnancy. I grew up not that far from where much of the fictional Fargo bloodshed occurred, in a part of the country where people talk with that goofy accent, and to this day, I am made fun of for the way I say "boat;" I spent my formative years surrounded the northern Great Lakes social conservatives Coen mentions.

Women being convinced of the error of their ways by medical facts about pregnancy seems to be a sticky trope. In 2007's Juno, the titular character is convinced to carry her pregnancy to term by a clinic protester holding a sign and chanting "All babies want to get borned!"

The subtext of Marge Gunderson's imagined attendance at an anti-abortion rally, the silly ultrasound halo Christmas abortion billboard, Juno's change of heart, and the many, many other “pro-life” propaganda starring ultrasound images seems to be: being reminded of what pregnancy is makes people anti-abortion. Anti-abortion lawmakers seem to buy this, too, passing law after law requiring doctors to show women seeking abortions to look at ultrasounds or listen to fetal vital signs before terminating their pregnancies. If only we knew what actually went on during pregnancy, conventional wisdom goes, none of us would choose to terminate.

That's simply not the case.

I've been pro-choice for my entire adult life-- all aspects of reproductive choice. I believe that the state should not force anybody to carry a pregnancy to term, I believe the state should not be complicit in creating conditions that make it economically impossible for people to have the families they want to have--the cost of day care or health care or the inability to take family leave should not force families to have one kid instead of two, or zero kids instead of one. Women who want to be sterilized at age 25 should be able to do so without doctors denying them that choice on the grounds that they might change their minds; it's also immoral in almost all circumstances to coerce a person into taking birth control they don't want to take. I'm pro-paid family leave, pro-comprehensive sex ed, anti-waiting periods for abortion, pro-telemedicine, pro-Plan B, pro-insurance-that-helps-cover-infertility-treatments, pro-adoption. Choice means that decisions around having or not having children should be made freely.

I have chosen abortion in the past, because it was the right choice for me given my circumstances at the time. I've been a confidant for friends who have chosen to terminate.

My planned, wanted pregnancy has made me even more pro-choice, somehow. I couldn't be more excited to become a mother, but going through it myself has made me believe even more steadfastly that nobody should be forced to do this if they don't really want to. Forcing somebody to go through pregnancy and childbirth against their will is a form of state-sanctioned torture. It's inhumane. It's unacceptable. I cannot believe we're here.

Some people have an easy time of pregnancy-- and good for them. But for most women, pregnancy is a long uncomfortable affair where most of the emotional and physical outlets available to the general population are only available with asterisks-- Mocktails! Sparkling grape juice! "Low-impact" exercise. Instead of eating these delicious Malpaque oysters, try looking at them. Did you used to smoke pot for nausea and/or anxiety? Too bad. In pain? One Tylenol should do the trick for the next few months. Love coffee? Hope you don't love it too much! How about a nice relaxing soak in a hot bath? Nope! You'll break your baby's brain! Lukewarm only, sis! Love clothes? They don't fit! Here, try this expensive maternity clothing! It's awful!

Even a pregnancy without complications-- a normal, boring, run-of-the-mill everyday miracle--requires months of sacrifice and discomfort on the part of the mother and a commitment of time and resources to seek necessary medical care. I have spent hours and hours waiting in traffic on the way to the doctor, sitting in waiting rooms, trying to make heads or tails of test results. I pay $900 per month out-of-pocket for "good" insurance; when you total the cost of insurance plus what I owe out-of-pocket for visits and labs, prenatal care has cost us about $6000 so far-- and haven't even gotten to the really expensive part yet where the baby comes out. And I consider myself extremely lucky. With complications, pregnancy can be a traumatic ordeal for an entire family, a woman can be prescribed bedrest and be unable to work, and medical bills can soar to six figures. How on earth is anybody comfortable with laws that force anybody to go through this?

[By the way: "If you don't want to carry a pregnancy to term and push or have a human being cut from your body, then don't have sex!" is not a serious anti-abortion argument. It's as stupid as advocating for denying medical care to a person who was in car wreck because "If you don't want to bleed to death from head trauma, you shouldn't drive." Forcing people to suffer unnecessary "consequences" from sexual activity simply because they have functioning ovaries is psychotic. If the cost of heterosexual intercourse is this steep and falls this squarely on one party, it's no wonder young Americans are having so little sex. Making childbirth a consequence of hetero sex is a great way to convince women to stop having sex with men, because, frankly, for a lot of young women, it's just not worth it.]

But let's get back to Texas, Marge Gunderson, Juno, and the ultrasound halo.

Does being reminded of what pregnancy is convince women that abortion should be illegal for everybody else? Nope.

Research has shown that women who are reminded of their own pregnancies are more likely to express pro-choice views in questions about public policy. Earlier this year, the Washington Post conducted a survey that asked women about their views on abortion right alongside questions about their experience with pregnancy. Here's what the Post found:

When asked about their pregnancy histories first, women were eight percentage points more likely to support abortion under any circumstance than the women who were asked about their pregnancy histories after answering questions about abortion, by 59 percent compared with 51 percent. Women asked first about their pregnancy histories were nine percentage points more likely to support Roe v. Wade, by 79 percent to 70 percent.

Further, research from the Guttmacher Institute has found that 59% of women who terminate pregnancies have already had children. We can safely assume that those women know what pregnancy is and choose to terminate anyway, because, while adoption is an alternative to parenting, it is not an alternative to pregnancy and childbirth. Abortion is.

So, if reminding people of pregnancy can make people more pro-choice, then what's the point of all the ultrasound billboards and draconian "heartbeat laws" coming from red states like Texas? Why continue to bark up the wrong tree? My guess is that it's not about changing minds at all.

And if Marge Gunderson had attended that right-to-life rally, she probably would have hated it, and not just because of its political purpose. Who asks a woman that pregnant to go that long without sitting?

Thank you all for lasting all the way to the end of this. Promise we'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming of talking about how weird and cool this whole (chosen) experience can be next time.

Image via Fargo/ MGM