Fight Like A Girl

by Clementine Ford

  But in their heart of hearts, in the deep well that traps our secrets in whispers and keeps them safe from ears that would not understand, they may sometimes wish they’d been supported to make a different choice. To put their own lives first, and move on without regret. If I hadn’t been raised to believe so fiercely in my right to choose, if I hadn’t had parents who would drive me to the clinic and wait to wrap me in a blanket of love afterwards, if I hadn’t lived in a place where these choices were accessible and straightforward, I would be that woman. I would love my child, but I would regret them too.

  That isn’t the life I wanted, for me or the person I would have otherwise brought into the world. No one should be resented while their mother wonders what else might have been. With the best of intentions, pro-choice advocates come up with all manner of reasons besides self-interest to justify the act of abortion. We hear lines like ‘It’s the hardest decision a woman will ever make’ and ‘Nobody makes the choice to have an abortion lightly’.

  But these things aren’t always true either. They’re said as a way of sanitising women’s realities and offering apology for our actions. Worse, they play right into the myth of the nurturer, a woman whose greatest primal instinct is to create a life that she can then protect. We need to be more honest about the fact that, while having an abortion is certainly not something anyone looks forward to or enjoys, for many women the choice to have one is actually very easy. More importantly, let’s stop using the word ‘selfish’ like it’s always a bad thing (particularly in women), as if considering yourself worthy of prioritising automatically strips you of emotional complexity and feeling.

  I was too selfish to have a child before I was ready for one, and there’s no shame in admitting that. Women should be selfish about our choices, for as long as we have the privilege of being selfish. Selfishness in women isn’t the great crime that people like to pretend it is. We are as entitled as men to prioritise ourselves and our desires, and we are as capable as men of knowing what’s best for us. Why is everyone so pathologically terrified of selfish women? The word is thrown around like an insult, as if the worst thing a woman could possibly do (aside from being fat, having sex with whomever she pleases and whenever, swearing, having an abortion, drinking alcohol, standing up for herself and being a working mother) is to decide that her life matters.

  But women are allowed to be selfish. It shouldn’t be considered a ‘privilege’ to be able to control our own bodies nor should it be treated like a favour done to us by the state. It’s a right that, by and large, has been stolen from us and used to keep us in thrall to a paternalistic body that pretends to know what’s best for us but is really only interested in maintaining the order that has proved best for them.

  I use words like ‘lucky’ and ‘fortunate’ to describe the ease with which the state legislature of South Australia enabled me to seek out an abortion. I use these words even though they imply that what should be enshrined in law is something we should feel grateful to be granted. But when women are being imprisoned all over the world for reproductive-related ‘crimes’ such as having a miscarriage (like Purvi Patel of Indiana, sentenced to twenty years in prison for ‘foeticide’ after her pregnancy ended in utero, or rape survivor Guadalupe Vasquez, sentenced to thirty years in El Salvador for a miscarriage resulting in stillbirth), and when women are being left to die instead of being given life-saving abortions (like Savita Halappanavar, who died of septicaemia at Ireland’s Galway University Hospital after doctors refused to abort the seventeen-week-old foetus that had begun miscarrying, triggering the infection in the first place), it is still prudent to refer to myself as lucky.

  But this doesn’t mean there aren’t things about the situation that have made me sad. When I told my boyfriend I was pregnant the first time, his response was to pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t really have any way to tell you what it feels like to have the man you’ve let inside you explain that he won’t be accompanying you to your abortion because Holly Throsby’s playing a gig that night and he missed her the last time she was in town. It feels utterly shithouse, that’s how it feels. Or how months later, after you’ve made your peace with him and you find yourself unexpectedly pregnant again (because it appears all you need to do is sit next to each other to have fertilisation occur), he’ll disappoint you again when he tells you over the phone from the conservation site he’s working on 3000 kilometres away that the reason he didn’t call after your abortion appointment to see if you were okay is because he forgot it was happening. This time, instead of just feeling utterly shithouse, you’ll also feel unbearably stupid and foolish.

  But forgetting or ignoring the impact of pregnancy and abortion is the luxury some men have, and that’s what makes it so infuriating that they also happen to be the ones who are predominantly making decisions about whether or not women are allowed to have them. For these cisgender men, pregnancy is a theoretical concept. They have no appreciation or understanding of the incredible intrusion it is upon one’s body, nor do they understand how easily feelings about it can shift between happiness and despair. Even leaving aside for a moment the massive responsibility that comes later on with actually raising a child, the pregnancy itself carries many layers of trauma that cannot and should not just be dismissed as inconsequential.

  As I write this, I’m about five weeks shy of giving birth. For almost three quarters of my pregnancy (thirty-two weeks to be precise), my mornings were spent bent over the toilet and vomiting bile. When I say ‘bent over the toilet’, what I really mean is that I was sitting on it in the normal fashion while spewing violently into the wastepaper bin. It turns out that pregnancy hormones will cause your morning dump to move from normal ‘Gosh, can’t my body produce interesting smells!’ territory to ‘I am literally carrying around the Bog of Eternal Stench in my bowels and now that I know this and have to smell the evidence of it, I will never stop puking ever again’.

  Once the vomiting subsides, it isn’t all tickety-boo prancing through meadows lit up by the glow of your pregnancy. No, what they don’t tell you about morning sickness is that even when you stop vomiting, you can still spend the rest of the day feeling like you’re about to vomit. This is most noticeable in the hours when you’re awake, which will be three times longer than you’d like because the first trimester makes you bone-tired to the point where even walking a few hundred metres will leave you breathless and in need of a lie-down, and the third trimester brings with it bodies that need a million pillows to rest comfortably in beds that pregnancy insomnia prevents you from falling asleep in.

  Do you know why you get so tired during your pregnancy? BECAUSE YOU’RE GROWING A FUCKING HUMAN IN YOUR UTERUS, AND IT’S FUCKING HARD WORK.

  Leaving aside for a moment those who’ve gone through the whole experience and thus absorbed the post-birth hormones which cause them to forget how horrendous the whole thing was (Mother Nature is a cruel mistress), do the people who speak blithely about babies and nurturing and pregnancy actually believe they have any fucking idea what they’re talking about? For the most part, they seem to think that baby-growing is an external process that just happens to be attached to a woman’s body. It’s as if the only effect they think it has on us is that our stomachs protrude further out from our bodies (not too far out, though – pregnancy might be the only time in her life that a woman is permitted to have a round tummy, but she should still try not to be disgusting about it) and thus the only thing we really need to deal with is a shift in our perception of gravity.

  This mythology around the relative ease of pregnancy has become especially clear to me since becoming happily ‘with child’. When I compare this experience with both my previous pregnancies, the only thing that seems truly different to me is my own desire to greet what comes afterwards. I endured all of the same physical symptoms during my first pregnancy – the sickness, the dizziness, the soul-deep exhaustion. And while I ended the second one before those symptoms could appear, I didn�
��t miss out on the hormones that have, with all three pregnancies, rendered me almost incapacitated by mood swings, anxiety and long stretches of being torn between wanting to weep and yet feeling completely unable to connect with my emotional self.

  The wanting of a pregnancy and the projection of future life onto both the child and the you who will be charged with caring for it is what makes all of that stress and trauma bearable. It is a physical, emotional and mental strain to share your body with a developing foetus, and everyone capable of doing it should be granted the respect of being able to choose that course of action when and if they see fit. Because even when you want a child, it isn’t all luminous cheeks and lustrous hair. Despite being very happy about the prospect of parenthood, there have been moments in this pregnancy where I’ve been unexpectedly overcome by the fear and anxiety of what this invasion means.

  Sometime into the second trimester, I lay on the couch thinking about the foetal growth patterns I’d read about on a mobile pregnancy app I have on my phone. At sixteen weeks, it will be the size of an avocado. At eighteen weeks, the size of a capsicum. Out of nowhere, I was struck by the entirely unpleasant thought that I didn’t want to have something the size of a capsicum lodged in my lower abdomen. Waves of panic started to wash over me. My skin became clammy. I felt like throwing up, but it wasn’t because of the nausea that had become the backdrop of my days. I had a visceral sense of that thing floating around inside me, a lumpy creature that I would suddenly be able to feel and sense and yet be completely unable to separate myself from. It then occurred to me that this capsicum was in me already, but much smaller and even stranger-looking. I had seen it a few days earlier, stretching its arms and legs on an ultrasound screen. It was magical to witness, and I had wept. Later, JB and I grinned like fools and talked excitedly about how it had danced for us.

  Lying on the couch that evening, the thought of that same thing wriggling around in me suddenly became horrifying. Any sense of connection I’d had to it seemed to disappear. The tiny being I had been thinking of with care and kindness, the thing that I had just days before felt such a rush of love for, had become foreign and alien. Somewhere inside, I heard a voice screaming to get it out of me. Gripped by anxiety, I imagined myself plunging a knife into my belly, forcing the thing that lived there to drain itself away from me and leave me in peace. Fortunately, there was still some semblance of a rational person operating in my brain who reassured me that these thoughts were not real and that they would pass. I focused all my energy on that rational voice. I’ve been in states of panic before, and I know that the light returns when the clouds have been blown away.

  The claustrophobic feeling returned again at week twenty-three, except this time it didn’t go away within a few minutes. It didn’t even go away within a few days. Instead, I spent the next eight weeks consumed by anxiety and fear. As the capsicum grew bigger, it started to thrash around inside me like an eel in a bucket and reminded me how desperately out of control I felt. Every day started with me vomiting and each night saw me lying in the bath, thinking about killing myself.

  Perhaps these examples shock you, but these temporary moments of insanity are far more common in people’s pregnancies than you’d think. My guess is that women don’t talk about them for all the same reasons we don’t talk about other things that mark us as difficult, complicated miscreants – shame, fear, embarrassment and the mistaken belief that there’s something wrong or broken about us. But think about it. Almost the only representation we have of pregnancy is a fantastical one built on Hollywood ideals and a distinct lack of medical insight. Pregnant women are rarely allowed to be anything other than grateful for the opportunity we’ve been given to become mothers. When the irrational side of pregnancy is explored, it’s almost always in superficial ways. Women are shown having ‘cute’ meltdowns, or sending their partners out to fetch different food items so they can create incomprehensibly disgusting snacks (newsflash: I can only speak for myself, but I haven’t had a single urge to eat ice-cream with a spoon fashioned from a pickle).

  The birth itself is equally absurd in its depiction. We see stunning actresses whose body shapes (which in Hollywood typically means somewhere between an Australian size 4 and an 8) are unchanged but for the bowling ball nestled under their dress. Suddenly, a geyser bursts from between their legs. This is recognised in movie land to be the universal sign for ‘Rush me to a hospital before this baby’s born on our expensive-looking beige carpet!’ From there, the excruciatingly long process of labour takes around twenty minutes with about two minutes of pushing tacked on at the end. And, voila – we have a baby. The newly anointed Vision of Motherhood dons her skinny jeans once more. Ain’t pregnancy grand?

  Of course, the reality is very different. We should know this, because most of our mothers have guilt-tripped us at least once in our lives with the news they laboured for hours and hours. My friend Ben Law’s mother, Jenny, is so well known for talking about the damage her five kids did to her vagina that it’s been immortalised in print, television and popular legend.

  Pregnancy is a trial in a multitude of ways. The hormonal rollercoaster is horrendous. So is the puking, the gassiness, the exhaustion, the painful breasts, the extra chin hairs, the stretch marks, the bodily expansion, the sense of being taken over both physically and mentally, the extreme infantilisation some women suffer at the hands of the medical community. There is the fear that you will be the kind of terrible, irresponsible parent who feeds their child the wrong foods and doesn’t pay close enough attention to whether or not they’re sticking forks into electricity sockets. But even worse than the fear of being hopeless is the terror that you’ll just be . . . uninterested. Because what happens if this baby comes along and, try as you might, you just can’t bring yourself to care about it beyond ensuring it’s clothed, fed and given a warm place to sleep? Generation after generation sees girls being indoctrinated from childhood into thinking that our primary purpose is to bring other children into the world. Failing to do so means failing to live properly and missing out on some vital part of human existence.

  But what if motherhood just isn’t for us? What if pregnancy is something some of us go through because we think we should or because we’re pressured to or because we haven’t properly thought about what comes afterwards? What if pregnancy is something some of us go through because we’re told we have to, that we have no option, that to put ourselves first is to become a murderer and she-beast?

  Abortion is not the act of a thoughtless, irresponsible woman with homicide on her mind and a cavalier attitude towards poor, innocent babies. Abortion is a choice that millions of women make every year because, astonishingly, we are more equipped than anybody else to know what’s best for our bodies, our futures and our lives. Abortion is not the ‘easy way out’, as some anti-choice and anti-women banana brains like to claim. Rather, it is a procedure that all people capable of carrying a pregnancy should be supported to access both legislatively and socially. The state cannot and should not be able to force anyone to give their body over to medicine for any purpose – just as a person cannot be forced to donate a kidney to someone who will otherwise die, nor should a woman be forced to provide nine months of shared living space to a foetus she does not want to keep or care for.

  This is why we need to keep fighting to take back complete control over our reproductive health rights. It isn’t just for the women who are being criminalised because they had miscarriages, stillbirths and, yes, consciously chosen abortions. It isn’t just for the women left to die because the archaic patriarchal views of their state decree that between their life and that of a weeks-old foetus, they are the expendable one. And it isn’t just for the women all around the world and stretching all the way back through history who have sought out dangerous methods to end pregnancies they’ve determined to be detrimental to their own lives and health. All of these women are reasons to continue the battle to control our own reproductive systems – but the greatest reason of
all is because it is our unequivocal right to do so.

  This position is practical as well as philosophical. The people who suffer most as a result of anti-abortion legislation and limited maternal healthcare resources are women who are poor and/or living in remote areas with little access to medical facilities. Every year 47,000 women die worldwide as a result of unsafe abortions. Conversely, research shows that when you give women the ability to control the size of their families, the entire community benefits as a result. The most obvious explanation for this is that having fewer babies (especially in low income/healthcare areas) lowers a woman’s risk of maternal mortality, which in turn prevents her children from losing their primary caregiver, thereby giving them a higher chance of staying healthy, clothed, fed and in school. Who’d have thunk it?

  This is why movements like #ShoutYourAbortion (started by American feminists in response to government efforts to defund Planned Parenthood) – in which women openly and unashamedly share their abortion experiences on social media – are so important. Women are the ones who overwhelmingly experience pregnancy and abortion, and it’s vital that we wrest back control of the narratives of both. We have been silent and compliant for too long. In many ways, it’s an analogy for women’s rights in their entirety. Don’t speak too loudly lest they turn your microphone down again. Don’t agitate for too much lest they take away what little we already have. Don’t be too bolshy or they’ll put us back in the cage. Don’t talk about what your abortions actually meant to you because then you might not be able to have one at all.

  Part of ‘fighting like a girl’ is owning your own choices and decisions. If you’ve had an abortion and you recognise that it was the best option for you at the time, own that choice. Be empowered by that choice. Tell anyone who disagrees with that choice that you don’t fucking care what they think. I know this isn’t always an easy thing to do, and there are some days when we don’t have the strength to deal with people’s hostility. But trust me – the more we stand up for ourselves and defend our rights, the easier it is to shrug off all that toxic noise.