A Tale of Two Pregnancies
May 7, 2022
The scenario:
Our protagonist, Jane, is a 23-year-old woman who recently moved from her hometown to a nearby big city, and now works in some kind of office job that can’t (or won’t) let her work remotely very often. Even though she went to an “affordable” college, she still has about 10 more years (if she’s lucky) before she’ll be able to pay off her student loans. Since a big chunk of her net income is funneled to the predatory lending class via her student loan payments, she can only afford rent in a third-floor walk-up apartment, which she shares with two hard-partying roommates who are friends-of-friends—people she lives with out of convenience rather than any real friendship.
One weekend, Jane meets Joe, a charming, charismatic guy from the neighborhood who works at an Amazon warehouse. Jane and Joe start dating, but after a month or so, Jane starts to have doubts—Joe sometimes snaps at her out of nowhere, and gets borderline violent when he’s drunk. But he apologizes afterward, so she continues the relationship for a little while longer.
Jane had discontinued her prescription for birth control pills after she and her last long-term boyfriend had broken up about six months earlier. (Even with her employer-based insurance, the birth control pill was too expensive for her on her limited income, especially when she wasn’t having sex regularly.) When she starts dating Joe, Jane responsibly makes an appointment to see her gynecologist, but she isn’t able to schedule anything for another two months. In the meantime, Jane and Joe use condoms when they have sex. Until one night when they don’t. After having a few drinks at the local bar, Jane and Joe go back to Jane’s apartment. Since Joe is out of condoms, he promises he’ll pull out. Aside from the fact that she’s a little buzzed, Jane trusts him, and also thinks that since her last period had ended not too long before, it’s probably a “safe” day.
The next week when Jane doesn’t return Joe’s phone call right away, he gets angry and possessive and screams at her. Jane decides she doesn’t want Joe or his anger issues, so she breaks up with him. This sends Joe into a range, as he thinks Jane is his possession, so for the next few weeks he stalks and harasses her outside her apartment and her office, once even grabbing her and shoving her. At that point, Jane files a restraining order against him. Joe continues to seethe and send harassing text messages until Jane blocks his number. He doesn’t confront her again.
The next month flies by for Jane, since she’s busy with work deadlines, often working 55-hour weeks. After a while she starts wondering when her last period was (she was never entirely regular). It was AFTER she and Joe broke up, right? Right??? Panicked, she takes a pregnancy test, which confirms her worst fears. And now that it’s finally time for her gynecologist appointment, her doctor confirms that she is six weeks pregnant.
Jane knows that she’s on her own—Joe is a toxic, narcissistic, violent person she wants out of her life forever. Her parents can’t help her—maybe she isn’t all that close to them, or maybe her parents are also struggling to make ends meet in a one-bedroom apartment themselves, drowning in a mountain of medical debt from an unexpected illness. Or maybe her parents are actually the worst kind of people, judgmental “Christians” who might take her in, but who would psychologically torture her and her child for the rest of her life in exchange. At any rate, going home to her parents is not feasible.
So what should Jane be able to do?
Jane’s “Happily Ever After” in a liberal world
Jane tells her gynecologist that she absolutely wants an abortion, and her doctor is able to offer her guidance. Jane is able to schedule a safe, legal abortion within the next week (when the embryo is the size of a small blueberry), and goes on to live her life.
A few months after the quick abortion procedure, Jane signs up for a co-ed volleyball league in the city, where she meets the love of her life. They get to have their “happily ever after” by doing things the “right” way—dating for a year, being engaged and living together for two years while they save for a down payment for a house, getting married, buying a house, and then ultimately having three children by the time Jane is in her early 30s.
In this more ideal “liberal” world, Jane can continue to work and move ahead with her career even though she has young children, because affordable day care is something all Americans can enjoy. With two climbing incomes, Jane and her husband are able to live modestly but comfortably, and can afford to take their family on vacations and support their children’s extracurricular interests. (Note, in truly ideal liberal world, it would only take one income to achieve this kind of stability, but this story is trying to stay within some semblance of what might be realistic in the U.S.)
Meanwhile, after a dark period, Joe’s life also takes a turn for the better. After becoming enraged at his next girlfriend, Joe tries to buy a handgun, but he is denied because a background check reveals the restraining order that Jane had placed on him. Some of his friends/relatives start to worry about him after reading some of his dark, disturbing posts on Facebook, so they reach out to him to help. Joe is then able to seek easily accessible and affordable psychiatric help for his anger and substance issues and go on a successful path to mental wellness. Also, since in this ideal liberal world, Jeff Bezos and Amazon pay Joe an actual living wage, so he no longer has the financial insecurity/frustration to trigger his anger and depression. Now that he is a better, more stable person, he’s able to enter a healthy relationship that leads to marriage and children of his own.
Jane’s “Happily Ever After” in a forced-birth conservative world
After confirming Jane’s pregnancy, Jane’s gynecologist is compelled by law to enter this information into a government database to track her pregnancy and make sure she carries to term. Even if Jane naturally suffers a miscarriage, she will be subjected to interrogation and possibly jail time.
After desperately searching for non-legal abortions, but not being able to find anyone to help her, Jane has no choice but to accept that society is forcing her to carry the child to term. She briefly considers adoption, but knows that by the time the embryo grows into a baby, she will have bonded with it and felt it kicking, so she wouldn’t be able to just had it over to strangers. The Supreme Court’s Justice Serena Joy (Barrett) may have glibly suggested adoption as an easy solution for women facing unwanted pregnancies, but…aside from the gut-wrenching trauma, it’s not exactly a practical option for the average woman.
Although the psychological trauma of giving a child up for adoption would be the most difficult part, the public shaming aspect of it isn’t inconsequential either. It’s almost as if Justice Barrett is so pampered, she believes that every woman has the option to take off five months from work, no questions asked, to head to a birthing spa, and then breezily return to work afterward as if nothing had happened. That is so out of touch with regular women’s lives that she may as well have suggested that, if women don’t want to raise a baby, they should just have the governess assume most of the parenting duties until the child is old enough for boarding school.
How would Jane explain to her co-workers that they shouldn’t give her a baby shower? How many of them would on some level judge her as an irresponsible slut who couldn’t take care of her own mistake? (Meanwhile, her twentysomething-year-old male co-worker who impregnated multiple women during one-night-stands on vacations and work-trips after plying women with alcohol would be celebrated as a pillar of responsibility and move up the corporate ladder accordingly.) Would Jane’s company support her and reward her for giving up her child so she could continue working long hours for them? Probably not…most likely they’d find some excuse to fire her as soon as they could after she gave birth (which, in an ideal Republican world, would be immediately—companies should be able to fire people whenever they’d like!). Since the industry in which she worked is small (they all are), Jane knows she would never be able to escape the stigma of being an “irresponsible” adult who gave up her child.
Jane looks at her living surroundings. She can’t possibly remain in her 3rd floor walk-up apartment with two hard-partying roommates once she has a baby. With no savings, she’s forced to take on credit card debt to cover moving expenses to relocate herself to a small studio apartment even farther away from the city center, which will bring her total commuting time to 3 hours every day. She has to take on even more credit card debt for all of the supplies a newborn baby needs.
Jane has the baby, a boy, and tries to go back to work a few weeks afterward, but the only nearby daycare costs nearly as much as her rent, which means that, even if food stamps are still available (in a truly ideal Republican world they wouldn’t be), she has to go into even more debt just to survive. Plus, now that it takes Jane an hour and a half to get home from work every day, she frequently has to pay the day care fines for picking up her son late when her bus home from the office is delayed, or when her boss demands that she works a little late. It’s now no longer even financially feasible for her to go to work, so Jane quits her job and tries to pick up some remote freelance work here and there…and maybe a part-time waitressing or retail job. She no longer has to pay for as much daycare, but her reduced wages mean that she still doesn’t have enough to make ends meet.
Soon Jane can’t afford to pay the minimum interest payments on all the debt she has assumed, so she declares bankruptcy. Unfortunately, since bankruptcy doesn’t cover student loan debt, a big chunk of Jane’s net pay still has to be funneled to the predatory lending class…so people like Betsy DeVos can add yet another floating mansion to their fleet of yachts.
Jane only has one option left at this point—to turn to Joe for child support. Upon having his already meager warehouse wages garnished, Joe becomes further enraged. Even though a DNA test proves he’s the father (and even though he may have intentionally not pulled out in time, sensing that Jane wanted to break up with him and wanting to control her through pregnancy), he insists that HE is the one being trapped. “That bitch” Jane is stopping him from ever getting ahead! Since Joe is paying child support, he insists on visitation, and creates a toxic, potentially violent environment whenever he arrives for visits over the course of the next few years. Eventually this turns into actual violence again, and Jane takes out another restraining order on Joe, which causes him to become even more enraged.
Blaming Jane and the child for everything that is wrong in his life, Joe goes to a gun show, where he picks up an AR-15 (or another military-caliber weapon of mass murder). The murder-weapon dealer neither knows nor cares about Joe’s violent past/active restraining order. Joe then takes this weapon, and follows Jane to the kindergarten where she’s dropping off their son. Joe steps out of the shadows, points his weapon and sprays the kindergarten entryway with bullets, killing Jane, their son, a teacher, and one other kindergarten child. Hearing the noise, an armed guard charges to the site within a minute, where he shoots and kills Joe just as Joe is starting to point the gun at his own head to kill himself.
Gun-obsessed Republicans then get to cheer this is a happy-ending. After all, it doesn’t really matter if four innocent people were killed first, as long as the good guy with a gun made the final kill of the bad guy, right? And then the godly white-haired politicians can offer their thoughts and prayers to the murder victims. Isn’t that good of them? An obviously immoral unwed mother should be grateful that such moral, godly men offer sympathy over her dead body, right? And, the child of an unwed mother living in a bad neighborhood probably was only going to grow into a drain on society anyway, according to these “Christians.” So the corpses should be thrilled to receive such benevolent prayers of their “Christian” superiors! And, actually, according to this worldview, it’s all Jane’s fault in the first place—after all, it was very insubordinate of her not to immediately submit to being fully under Joe’s control the moment she discovered she was pregnant!
Further Analysis
Is this hypothetical scenario melodramatic? Probably. Obviously most forced-birth situations don’t end in a bloody massacre. (Even though that would be the true wet dream of Wayne LaPierre and other “pro-life” members of the gun lobby, who presumably cream their pants every time innocent people are slaughtered at a school, theater, church, concert, or marketplace, knowing how much more wealth they’re going to acquire when the country’s ammosexuals then immediately stock up on even more military-caliber weapons of mass murder.) It’s true that this hypothetical “conservative” happy ending scenario conveniently kills off the child, and the liberal world results in MORE (happy, financially cared for, wanted) children. It doesn’t really matter whether or not Jane ultimately has children—a woman’s worth and right to self-determination isn’t supposed to be tied to the number of children she births. And also, to be clear, the “Joe” character doesn’t really have to be an unhinged sociopath for Jane not to want to be forcibly chained to him for at least 18 years. But the hypothetical scenario was obviously constructed to point out how hypocritical the “pro-life” movement is when applied to most real-life scenarios.
In a less melodramatic situation in which Jane and Joe’s child isn’t slaughtered by a spray of gunfire from his deranged father’s AR-15, and he goes on to live any kind of life…the life of a derelict that the white-haired “pro-life” conservative men might dismissively presume he would have based on his lowly beginnings raised by a single mother, or an average life, or an above-average life…that doesn’t mean that, in the weeks after Joe and Jane’s sperm and egg combined, he was something that HAD to be. Had Jane been able to easily access affordable, effective birth control as soon as she and Joe started dating (as she would have in a truly ideal liberal world), this particular child also never would’ve been conceived or born. Most people—even “pro-lifers”—aren’t opposed to birth control, but the effect is the same—this particular individual is not born.
“BUt fERtLiZAtiOn cReATes uNIqUe DNA!” the “pro-lifers” shout. True, but we all know in our guts that a clump of DNA isn’t REALLY a person. The philosophical question that I’ve seen online (I’m not sure where it originated), asks: what would you do if you were walking past a fertility clinic that was on fire, and in the room to the left, there was a newborn baby in a crib, and in the room to the right, there was a cooler clearly marked as containing 100 embryos, ready to implant. Assuming there’s only time to make one rescue, which way do you turn?
I can’t imagine even the most “pro-life” people I know choosing to grab the cooler of petri dishes while letting the ACTUAL baby scream in pain while burning in an inferno. We all inherently know the difference between an actual baby and clumps of DNA cells. (Then again, a deciding factor in this scenario for some misogynists might be how wanted these embryos actually are—if they think those embryos are scheduled to be forcibly implanted into women who don’t want and can’t afford them, these forced-birthers would probably be MORE inclined to save the blastocysts and leave the actual baby to an excruciating death in the flames. After all, by being pro-fetus instead of pro-child, this is what most conservative legislation figuratively achieves.)
Even though we all inherently understand the difference between blastocysts and live babies, oligarchs and their right-wing media mouthpieces have spent the last half-century twisting the good in people—a love of babies—into a weird fetus fetish. Yes, it’s a “fetus fetish.” What else would you call it when people are convinced to figuratively stick their noses in the private parts of strangers? When people are obsessed about the post-coital bodily functions of people they don’t know?
In writing this “tale of two pregnancies,” I intentionally created a hypothetical pregnancy scenario that involved an adult woman who had consensual sex, because that’s more typical of abortions than the instance of a 12-year-old raped and impregnated by her uncle—even though that horrific situation does happen. But the forced-birth propaganda machine has no qualms about almost exclusively depicting healthy, rosy-cheeked 8lb babies as the “victims” of abortion—a macabre piece of fiction that never, ever, ever, ever happens. But nonetheless, this cynical right-wing propaganda campaign has successfully convinced otherwise intelligent people that white-haired “Christian” men should be the ones who control women’s bodies to save these flaky, irresponsible 9-months-pregnant women from suddenly deciding “on a whim” to go to a doctor to have their healthy, cherubic 8-lb babies murdered in the womb moments before birth— something that only happens in the most bizarre fever dream of the extremist right wing.
This is a cynical distraction to keep people from fighting for legislation that would actually reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions. Progressive/pro-child policies provide access to healthcare and birth control that would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. And progressive/pro-child policies would allow women who want to have children to continue to work and provide for their children, creating an environment in which they have self-determination and the self-respect that comes from working and still paying taxes and contributing to society rather than being condescendingly dismissed as a drain society if they end up needing government “handouts.” Can you imagine what a game-changer universal day care and Pre-K would be for women who might want to be mothers, but who know that pregnancy and motherhood would mean job loss and financial ruin?
Because, maybe there’s a reality in which the hypothetical Jane character has always been baby-crazy and wanted lots of kids. Or maybe Jane is actually 37 years old instead of 23, and has been unlucky in love but has always wanted a child and knows that biologically, her time is running out. Either way, if Jane WANTS to have Joe’s baby, progressive/pro-child policies would give her the resources to do so without becoming financially destitute.
If anyone is truly “pro-life”, and their motivations are to make sure every blastocyst grows into a human rather than to punish women for sexuality, they should be LIVID with Joe Manchin and every Republican senator for failing to pass Biden’s Build Back Better program. Those who insist that they don’t want their tax dollars going to support unwed mothers again just prove that (as with nearly all “conservative” policies) the cruelty is the point. Logically, it would make more fiscal sense to spend tax dollars on universal day care and Pre-K, which would enable women to continue their careers while still paying taxes (and which would also help two-parent families in which both parents need to work), instead of forcing them into a situation where they indefinitely need government “handouts” like food stamps/welfare/homeless shelters. But tax dollars going to daycare would help women remain independent, which is the worst outcome misogynists can imagine. Many “pro-lifers” even want to get rid of social safety nets (even if those safety nets also help them), apparently wanting people in desperate situations—like financially insecure women forced to have babies—to have to beg on the streets so that the “pro-life” crowd can feel like morally superior “Christians” if they condescend to toss the destitute person a nickel.
(“Les Miserables” has always been one of my favorite musicals. But I never imagined that a society like that could actually be considered aspirational to people in the U.S. Yet here we are—conservatives would prefer a world in which an unwed mother is ostracized and forced into prostitution to pay for the care of her daughter because they’d rather enjoy a sense of smug superiority than live in a more equitable world that provides enough support to get a woman back on her feet so she and her child can live a more healthy and productive life. Alito’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade condescendingly sneers at single mothers while simultaneously forcing more women into that role.)
Unfortunately, the extremist right-wing propaganda machine continues to dangle the imaginary healthy, cherubic, pink-cheeked 8 lb “abortion victim” in front otherwise well-meaning people to distract them from seeing the logic of being pro-child instead of pro-fetus. And in so doing, they’re condemning the real people in situations like Jane’s—and like 12-year-old rape victims—and like women whose wanted pregnancies go wrong and threaten their health—to poverty, suffering, humiliation, and yes, even death. All in the name of being “pro-life.”
