Actual people with personalities, characters, wishes


A striking thing that Gilliel said in a comment on Greta’s post Having a Reasonable Debate About Abortion yesterday:

And here’s another thing that’s been driving my blood pressure up and I will bold the beginning so that people

READ THIS:

I have been pregnant three times which resulted in two kids. My first pregnancy turned Wahoonie-shaped around week ten and I needed an abortion (which is never counted as an abortion-abortion, but as a reasonable medical intervention because reasons. Probably because I suffered enough since I actually wanted to be pregnant very much). I had two wonderful kids afterwards.

To act as if the death of that embryo was somewhat comparable to one of my children, actual people with personalities, characters, wishes, likes, dislikes, a central nervous system, even breaking a bone, let alone dying is so deeply fucked-up and beyond belief offensive that I hardly have words for it.

Surely that’s right.

Parents mourn miscarriages of wanted pregnancies, of course, but they’re mourning a potential, not an actual, and there is a difference.

Comments

  1. mildlymagnificent says

    I’m with Giliell here. I’ve always regretted my first pregnancy ending in a miscarriage. (Brought back vividly a few years ago when one of my daughters confessed that she’d always wanted an older brother.)

    But whatever that pregnancy might have resulted in had the pregnancy gone full term, its loss is absolutely nothing to the shivering terror of taking that 12 year old daughter for a scan to determine whether her health problem of the time was or wasn’t a brain tumour. The prospect of losing the real, living her was a completely different feeling to the reality of losing a 13 week pregnancy. (What we really had to deal with was a few years and many 1000s of $$$ of orthodontist work to realign her jaw.)

  2. opposablethumbs says

    Yes. And it beggars belief that there are people who would solemnly argue otherwise. In fact I think they are outright lying (including to themselves): not even the most dyed-in-the-wool forced-birther would really save the petri-dish containing half-a-dozen fertilised human eggs while leaving the terrified, crying five-year-old child to die in the proverbial catastrophe from which they are unable to save both.

Trackbacks

  1. […] Actual people with personalities, characters, wishes–”My first pregnancy turned Wahoonie-shaped around week ten and I needed an abortion (which is never counted as an abortion-abortion, but as a reasonable medical intervention because reasons. Probably because I suffered enough since I actually wanted to be pregnant very much).” […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *