You Should Have Been an Abortion

No!! Not you! You’re obviously lovely and know a good thing when you see it. I decided to title this essay in the most click-baitey way I could conceive because I’m sharing some things that I think are important for people to understand.

Obviously, it worked because here you are. Welcome!

Hello! My name is Stacy. I’d like to share a brief sliver of my world with you. Go grab a cup of tea or a large whiskey.

I’ll warm up my introduction as I wait.

I’m a writer, known for humorous writing from the heart and Content Writing on Aruba (my home away from home). I’ve shared some incredibly painful memories in various blogs. This essay is, by far, the most personal and painful. I feel physically unwell, writing these words, because they bring back some of the worst of my life’s experiences. 

“You should have been an abortion!”

Those words were hurled at me, for the first time, during a very low point in my mother’s battle with mental health. Over the course of my tumultuous teenage years, I lost count of how many times I heard my mother tell me she wished she’d aborted me. My use of the word ‘tell’ in this context is very kind. That very first time, I was 13 years old and cowering in the corner, sniveling and silently praying for a miraculous cure for my mother's intermittent episodes of psychotic rage.

It was just a few years after I learned what an abortion was - in the cruelest possible way: Catholic school style. Those events of that day in eighth grade, during religion class, will be forever imprinted on my cerebral cortex. The anti-abortion video my class was shown was graphic and horrifying. The tools of abortion were shown, as were fetuses that seemed to be in pain. Tiny, human hands pressed, for a moment, against an amniotic sack before being ruthlessly sucked away.

In many ways I was a sheltered child. The only television I was permitted to watch were early morning, 1980's Saturday cartoons (which dealt less with the topic of abortion then the origin story of the water-based Smurfs - go, Snorks!) and PBS (which probably does deal with abortion - but way after my childhood bedtime, no doubt).

After watching the video, I absolutely lost my sh*t and humiliated myself by bawling in front of my classmates - a spectacularly uncool thing to do in eighth grade. It was so, so bad, you guys. If it hadn't already been the end of the school day, I'm sure they would have sent me home.

I became staunchly pro-life at that moment and I remain pro-life to this day. It is my personal choice - based on my personal beliefs. The manner in which abortion was presented to me is a large contributing factor to those personal beliefs.

In the Catholic community, the belief is that a fetus (regardless of its ability to survive independently) has a soul. However, that same soul has been cursed with original sin because sex created said soul (and sex is bad, m’kay?).

Therefore, if the body housing the soul dies before the soul is baptized, the soul will not make it to heaven and be damned to hell, forced to live in fiery misery for committing the grievous offense of not being born and sprinkled with Holy Water. 

Those of you who are Catholic might be nodding reverently right now. The rest of you are, no doubt, staring at your screen with an ‘I just sucked a lemon’ face. Seriously… don’t overthink it. The whole thing completely falls apart under basic logical scrutiny. Amen.

Most of my twenties were spent believing that devastating fallacy that polycystic ovarian syndrome would prevent me from ever having a child. The day I discovered I was pregnant with my son was a real mixed bag of emotion. 

I was in a bad situation and didn't know how I was going to manage to take care of a child. But I'd always wanted to be a mom. As far as I was concerned, I finally got a miracle. I had faith that it would all work out. Never considered having an abortion for a second… I wanted my baby so desperately.

That being said, if I could go back in time to the mid 1970s and have a conversation with my mother. I would encourage her to abort myself.

How's that for a paradox?

The reason I would tell my sweet, emotionally unstable mother to abort her child is because she was absolutely not prepared to be a mother. She didn't have the emotional support or the ability to financially care for me herself. She also believed that divorcing her abusive husband would score her a satanic dance partner for all of eternity.

I’m sure you can understand why I consider myself a lapsed Catholic at this point. I believe in God with all my heart - but I cast a vote of no confidence in the archaic doctrine of the Church itself. If this brands me a heretic, then that will have to be my cross to bear.

When my mother found out that she was pregnant with me she was horrified. I was not conceived of love or even passion. I was an anchor that bound my mother to a man who was incapable of properly loving her. I was the literal death of her dreams. I never once felt like that on her good days. However, on the bad days that came with more frequency and intensity as I entered puberty, I knew (in no uncertain terms) that my existence was the primary source of my mother’s misery. Sometimes when her rage faded and she mellowed back into general malaise, she’d sadly tell me about all those youthful dreams of hers… you know, all the ones I killed.

She was not well. I can’t stress this enough. My heart is full of love and compassion for my beautiful mother, but these days I can call a spade a spade. You can be a decent person and a terrible parent. Another one of life’s lovely paradoxes.

My mom was more than decent, she was a lovely woman. People who knew her casually will be shocked by these revelations, but those who knew her well are familiar with her temper. It was the stuff of legends.  

As I've mentioned, she struggled with her mental health. Significant, debilitating struggles that were never properly addressed. Early in my infancy, she suffered such severe postpartum depression that she was institutionalized against her will. This was in 1977, when psychiatry was also in its infancy. That forcible institutionalization was an ordeal from which she never recovered. After being locked-up in a psych hospital my mom’s big take away was that there would be no help for her - only punishment.

In a devastating turn of events, years later when I was in my very early twenties, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and put on antidepressants, which helped her dramatically. As she was dying she became the mother that she always could have been - had the stars aligned differently for her.

So, she spent the remainder of her marriage (which she only escaped in death) leveraging her behavior with financial support. It was a disastrous marriage which deteriorated over the years to the point of hatred. My parents learned to loathe each other and loathed the parts of me that reminded them of the other. 

My paternal family valued strength (even if it was an illusion) above anything else and kept any (so many) unsavory activities covered under a blanket of 'family secrets'. I was taught to be secretive  - a lesson I learned so well, I hid my own anxiety disorder from myself for most of my life. 

It wasn't until I quit smoking cigarettes cold turkey in 2018 that I realized the extent of the damage my parents inflicted on me. My inner voice is not kind to me. She calls me a liar, a cheat, lazy, slutty, self indulgent, weak, burdensome…the list goes on. I have to make a concerted effort to speak kindly to myself. Luckily, I don’t have to make that same effort to speak kindly to my son. He is loved and wanted more than he’ll ever know. 

I’m undergoing huge life changes right now because of circumstances that were beyond my control. I'm doing the best I can but still feel like an absolute failure for not being better. I will never be as mentally strong as I could have been if I had parents who genuinely wanted to be parents and loved me unconditionally. 

I’m going to wrap this up because my eyes are blurring with tears for the unwanted little girl I was. It has been tremendously difficult for me to write this. I feel such shame - shame all emotionally abused children understand too well. Admitting all of this, for the first time in such a public forum, also casts ripples on a deep well of pride I carry. I feel weak and vulnerable - two of my least favorite feelings (aside from hunger and damp). 

The reason that I'm sharing this today is because I'm deeply worried about the Supreme Court's recent decision to take away a woman's ability to choose when she is capable of being an effective mother. If we allow multitudes of unwanted children into our society, many of them will grow up like me. I was very fortunate to come from a solidly middle class background. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if my parents had to struggle for money on top of everything else. 

I understand religious indoctrination very well. I know it's very tempting to say Jesus doesn't want us to be a country of baby killers. But I highly doubt Jesus wants an entire generation of America tainted with the self-loathing that I will carry to my grave. I know I have a soul and if my mother had aborted me, my soul would have gone back to soul storage and had a chance for a stable childhood where it would have thrived.

You, dear reader, can have any opinion about abortion that you want. 

What you can’t do is allow a generation of unwanted children to grow up hearing that they should have been an abortion. You can trust me when I tell you, they’d be better off not born.