Posts Tagged ‘choice’

Like many readers, I’ve followed this week’s front-page News & Observer series with mixed emotions. If you haven’t read the piece, in short, it features one woman’s choice to continue with her pregnancy despite knowing that the developing baby had a fatal illness and faced certain death. 

Nineteen weeks into a second pregnancy, Shannon and Kip Brooks found out through an ultrasound that their developing baby had anencephaly, which meant she would be born without a brain and die soon thereafter. Having been happily pregnant twice and filled with joy to see ultrasounds of my healthy developing babies at around the same gestational age, I can only imagine their shock and pain.

Like most women who find themselves happily pregnant, I’m sure Shannon Brooks had already fallen in love with her child. Since this was her second, I’m sure she imagined how her first born would love his sibling. I’m sure she dreamt of what the baby would look like, thought about her due date being so close to the holidays and picked out a perfect name. In essence, she’d fallen in love with a dream child yet born.

In this way, Shannon Brooks is no different from the thousands of women who lose their much wanted pregnancies each year through miscarriage. While most women understand there is a possibility of miscarriage, few think it will happen to them until it does. That’s when they are likely to find out how common the experience is and how many of their family and friends have gone through it.

Before my beautiful boys were born, I lost a much wanted pregnancy. While I was only seven weeks along, my thoughts were of an April baby seven months from then. What he or she would look like, the name we’d choose and how our lives would be forever changed. Even though I worked in the field of women’s health, I was totally shocked. And, I wanted the world to know.

I volunteered to train social workers on bereavement counseling. I told my story to everyone who would listen. I wanted recognition of my loss, I wanted mourning and I wanted everyone to know what I’d been through.

So I understand Shannon Brooks’ decision to continue her pregnancy. She wanted to make sense of it in some way. She didn’t want to give up on this dream child and, in the end, by donating what she could of the baby’s organs, she made a difference.

The discomfort I have with this story is the idea that this woman’s choice is somehow more courageous or moral than any other woman’s choice would be. Just because Shannon chose to maintain her pregnancy, doesn’t mean she loved the child any more than any other woman, who faced with the same tragic outcome, would choose to end the pregnancy.

The experience of pregnancy is as diverse as the women who become pregnant. Lifting up one woman’s tragic pregnancy story rarely does anything to advance our understanding of the complexity of life.

And, news stories about reproductive decisions are almost always lopsided. Couldn’t the N&O reporter have simply written that Shannon Brooks and her husband decided that continuing the pregnancy was the right decision for them?

Why did she feel compelled to say in every single article of the series that Shannon refused to have an abortion? Why pit women’s lives against each other?

No newspaper follows the woman who ends an unwanted pregnancy and, years later, goes on to have children whom she adores and parents well. No one features the young woman who chooses abortion because she and her parents believe her life holds more promise than being a teenage mom

I’m not saying the media should pursue these stories. I’m simply saying that one woman’s choice is just that—her choice. And, I wish her story could be told without providing fodder to the politicians who think they are better suited than women to make these deeply personal and private decisions.

My heart goes out to this family and to every other woman who has ever faced this tragic situation—regardless of the choice she made.

It was enough to stop me in my tracks. Opening the mailbox yesterday to find Sarah Palin on the cover of Newsweek with a glowing halo radiating from her head and the words “Saint Sarah” inscribed below.

I searched the cover for clues, trying to figure out why anyone would call Palin a saint. Then I saw “feminism” in smaller print. Please, no, not another story about a woman being a feminist simply by virtue of her gender. 

In a masochistic move, I flipped to the cover story. I didn’t think it could be worse than “Saint Sarah,” but there it was. The story began with Palin’s recounting of the night she found out she was pregnant with her fifth child. Already the governor of Alaska and mother of four children, Palin wrestled alone in a hotel with the mixed emotions of an unplanned pregnancy. She admits to thinking about her alternatives. 

Then the story fast-forwards to Palin’s son Trig, “the best thing that ever happened to [her] family.” Yes, it worked out for Sarah. Shortly after giving birth, she was catapulted into the national political scene and subsequently made millions. A tidy ending to a story that Palin shares to inspire evangelical women across the country.

The story of Trig is Palin’s parable. She uses it to connect with women and teach a lesson. Like a typical woman in America, she faced an unintended pregnancy. Roughly half of the pregnancies in the US are not planned. Palin considered her options and chose to continue the pregnancy.

Apparently, at this point in the tale, ballrooms filled with evangelical women burst into clapping, stomping and whooping it up. Saint Sarah did the right thing. She’s their heroine, strong and strong willed, their “feminist” role model if only they could stomach the word. 

Sarah Palin’s heartfelt recounting of wrestling alone in a hotel with the mixed emotions of an unplanned pregnancy exemplifies what feminists have been saying for decades. Reproductive health decisions are deeply personal and a woman should be able to make them in accordance with her life and values, which is exactly what Palin did.

For those of us who believe in women’s real equality, Palin’s parable reads a little differently. Her refusal to trust other women to make reproductive health decisions for themselves shows that Palin is no saint much less a feminist.