Thread by @salstrange

Let’s talk about what having body autonomy can mean to a woman’s life. I want to share something my mom didn’t tell me until I was almost 40.

My mom was 20 when she had me. She wasn’t an assertive young woman. Unlike me, she mostly deferred to authority, especially her own doctors.

She hadn’t planned to get pregnant with me. She didn’t plan any of her pregnancies, in fact, but she was unaware that her birth control was frequently being rendered ineffective by medication she was prescribed for a chronic problem at that phase of her life.

Her pregnancy with me was utterly miserable. She actually lost weight while pregnant. The delivery was problematic and she had to stay in the hospital for a long time after I was born. I was actually ready to go home before she was, but they kept me there until she was released.

Afterward, my mother was convinced she didn’t ever want to go through that again. She was exhausted, depressed, and terrified. She asked her (Catholic, old, white male) doctor if she could get her tubes tied.

Her doctor yelled at her for her selfishness at wanting to deny my father future children — especially a son — and shamed her for even thinking about not wanting more children when she should be “embracing her new role in life as a mother.”

He also added that her pregnancy might not have been so stressful if she’d stopped working entirely.

My mother was so ashamed by how her doctor made her feel that she didn’t tell my father or my grandmother or her best friend about any of it. This complicated her depression.

I’m not going to get into how this affected her support relationships or parental bonding. But it did.

Over the next five years my mother was pregnant three more times. Two were horrific miscarriages that caused her a great deal of pain and emotional and physical trauma. The third resulted in my brother.

For my brother’s delivery, her regular doctor was on vacation. A younger doctor filled in for her (again, stressful and difficult) delivery. The younger doctor was much more sympathetic and supportive.

Following my brother’s birth, she mustered the courage to ask him about having a tubal ligation again. She did so in absolute fear for her life convinced her next pregnancy might actually kill her.

Thankfully, the new doctor was not just appalled at how her concerns had been regarded, but also recognized she needed help with her depression and other issues.

It was only at this point — after two children, two miscarriages, and five years of life-threatening trauma, terror, and shame, that she was able to have her choice over her own body respected.

Her first doctor used his authority to put her life in danger, to weaken the bonds she formed with me, to make her fear being intimate with my father, and to shame her into not confiding in her support system.

He did this out of what he considered her best interest.

How this one man’s arrogance and indifference to my mother’s body autonomy influenced my entire primary family unit cannot be overstated.

We have no idea how many other women he exercised such influence over.

So when old white men disguise their pathetic misogyny as concern for unborn children, I think of my mother at 20, sobbing alone in shame and depression and helplessness and terror while dealing with the stress of being a new mother.

And when I hear smug right wing women spew their toxic bile about how it “infantilizes women” to recognize not every young woman can say no to male authority, all I hear is that they’d be okay with my mother facing a death sentence for acquiescing to the authority of her doctor.

But here’s the most horrific footnote. Before my mother was deemed healthy enough to have her tubal litigation surgery she got pregnant again (that’s number five and she’s been on birth control the whole time because no one’s bothered to tell her that her meds negate the pill).

Mercifully, my father and grandmother, aware of what was happening with her at this point, fully supported her terminating. She and my father just stopped sex entirely until she was well enough for the final surgery because who the hell knew anymore.

I like being alive. Love my family and friends. Love my brother. And I believe my mother had every right to never have me and should never have had that choice made for her.

Too many women live through her kind of shame and terror. Too many more have it worse. Still others have to deal with additional horrors like spousal or date rape when facing the biggest health altering choices of their (often too young) lives.

In closing, fuck every arrogant forced birth pontificator that walks the earth and thinks they get to rule over someone else’s body autonomy.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.