In an opening scene in an episode from the final season of Girls, Hannah – who has recently discovered she is pregnant – peers at a lentil on the tip of her forefinger. The next shot reveals her open laptop, and a Google results page explaining that this lentil is the same size as the embryo currently developing inside of her.
This scene came to mind, following the news that Alabama’s Supreme Court has ruled that the destruction of embryos amounts to the wrongful death of a minor – in other words, an embryo has the same legal rights as a child; an actual person.
In the Girls scene, shot close-up, the lentil is the only thing in focus at first, before the depth of field shifts and we see Hannah’s face more clearly: her eyebrows, the pores of her skin, the smudgy lipliner around her mouth. She contemplates the lentil for several seconds, then – as if irritated with herself, or unable to bear the thought of it any longer – she flicks it aside. We hear it skitter across the table.
I love this scene. Partly because it makes fun of our culture’s obsession with comparing gestational stages with edible objects. But also, because it shows the vast discrepancy between this living, breathing human woman and the lifeform inside her.
It cuts pregnancy down to size, while also showing its immense magnitude: something so life-changing, from something so tiny.
And at the same time: You are nothing without me. I could swallow you whole.
As I try to settle into writing about the news out of Alabama, there are two competing voices in my head.
One wants to shout and attack; the narrative equivalent of a balled-fist. WTAF. If you care about embryos so much, where the fuck is the fucking research into pregnancy loss you fucking hypocritical fucks. If you think these embryos are literally children, why are you condemning them to a life on ice, forever unparented?
The other voice is less solid, more liquid. What it wants to say won’t stay still long enough. It slips and flows into the gaps in what I believe, know, and think. It pools around my anger, submerging its true edges.
This water-voice haltingly wants to ask: Have I unwittingly played into the narrative that led us here?
In a time of embryonic personhood, does it still feel safe to describe what I’ve lost – at 8, 10, and 12 weeks of pregnancy – as a baby?
How do I continue to write about my chosen subjects – pregnancy loss, early miscarriage – in such an age, when so much is at stake?
This is something I used to worry about a lot when I first started writing about miscarriage. If I used the word ‘baby’ or ‘child’ to describe what I lost, I worried about the ways I might be misunderstood. Or, worse, misappropriated in service of a ‘pro-life’ cause I don’t believe in.
Gradually, over time, as I read more, and heard more about other women’s experience of pregnancy and baby loss, including termination for medical reasons, I felt more confident that these emotions and rights are not in conflict. I would also discover while writing my book that the history of infertility medicine and miscarriage are deeply entwined with the history of access to abortion.
Even so, this past fortnight, it has felt unsettling to have to question all of this, all over again.
The psychotherapist Julia Bueno, author of The Brink Of Being: Talking About Miscarriage, has a very useful phrase: ‘the child in mind’. It helps, I think, to grasp an important aspect of early pregnancy loss: the slippage between the figurative and the literal.
I didn’t lose a child. I also didn’t not lose a child.
The ‘child in mind’: It’s as good as anything I have come across to conceptualise this thing that is as enormous and profound as anything in the known universe – and yet as small as a lentil. Smaller.
A child in mind, but – crucially – not a child in law.
The temptation when faced with the anti-IVF, anti-abortion, anti-contraception movement and its argument that ‘life begins at conception’ – a theological reasoning that seems to underpin the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling – is to clapback simply: NO. IT. DOESN’T.
Already, memes describing embryos as a ‘clump of cells in a petri dish’ and ‘basically just a popsicle’ have proliferated from people trying to make the feminist counter-case; trying to find humour in this desperate new reality.
But ‘just a bunch of cells’ is such an old – and limited – argument with which to counter anti-choice extremism.
A truly progressive, inclusive, effective pro-choice movement needs to stubbornly and determinedly untangle itself from the question of when life begins.
Foetal – and now embryonic – personhood is a profoundly inhumane, unworkable concept. (For reasons I won’t rehash here, but this is a good summary of the Alabama situation). When life begins? Well, that’s infinitely more complicated, vexed, and personal.
And, ultimately, it’s beside the point.
Within 24 hours of the Alabama news, another significant announcement was made here in the UK, albeit an altogether more positive one: official government certificates to record any pregnancy lost before 24 weeks are now available for people to apply for.
What do these two things have to do with each other? Nothing – and, perhaps, everything. To my mind, these baby loss certificates show how it is possible to recognise the complex meanings of pregnancy to individuals, without impinging on reproductive rights.
The certificates exemplify how it is possible to hold many seemingly disparate positions and needs together – in mind, in law – at once.
The UK’s baby loss certificates are not a legal document. The consultation that led to their implementation made it very clear from the outset that this issue was to be considered separately from the law on abortion, which was to remain unchanged – off limits.
The certificates are also not mandatory. In the UK Women’s Health Strategy, which first announced that these certificates would be introduced, it’s stated that:
‘When a pregnancy ends before 24 weeks’ gestation, there is no formal process for parents to legally register their baby. Some bereaved parents find this to be distressing, although some parents may find it equally distressing if they were required to legally register the loss when they did not wish to do so.’
Acknowledging this level of difference – emotional nuance of a kind I think many of us come to understand implicitly – feels radical in an official policy. It also feels like the way forward: a possible antidote to extremist absolutes.
After Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote a piece titled ‘We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse’. As she puts it:
‘We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization — of pregnant women certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth.’
In Alabama, we can now add to that list anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a frozen embryo.
Tolentino’s conclusion as to how we fightback is that ‘we should demand more’.
Here, then, is what I want: I want to live in a world where the grief people can feel over an unsuccessful IVF cycle or an early miscarriage is recognised and understood. I also want to live in a world where abortion is healthcare, not a potential crime; not policed, but regulated with all the nuance and sophistication that medical best-practice allows.
I want to live in a world where someone can terminate their pregnancy if they need to. I also want the same person to be to apply for an official document that recognises that pregnancy - its loss, its existence - should they wish.
I want to live in a world where women feel free to put keepsakes from their IVF transfers – photos, scan images, artwork of their embryos – in frames on their walls, like any other childhood memento. I also want it understood that this is not the same as wanting embryos to have the legal rights of literal children.
The anti-abortion movement will try to convince people that these things are incompatible; dissonant. We mustn’t let them.
Thank you so much for tackling this subject. I've been thinking a lot about this, too, since that ruling came down. I tried to make a similar call to action in my own essay this week but I feel like you've captured it all much more thoughtfully and articulately! To be honest, I've been uneasy and unsure about writing my perspective, but you've given me confidence to go ahead and just hit publish, haha. It's also SO nice to see I'm not the only one looking for more inclusivity along with pro-choice. I remember when I had my first miscarriage and was deep in pain afterwards, it made me think: wait a minute, does this mean I'm pro-life? I felt like I was going crazy. It's been a huge hurdle working through that over this last year or so.
I've struggled in the past too with saying 'baby' due to a hard-core pro-choice background. One thing that really helped me was reading posts from *pro-life* people on how their pregnancy losses were treated in their communities and realised that the same problems exist everywhere: pregnancy losses are dismissed, silenced, overlooked, minimised. See for example https://stillstandingmag.com/2019/04/12/if-you-are-pro-life-then-my-baby-mattered-too/ and I remember when this article https://filterfreeparents.com/why-miscarriage-matters-when-youre-pro-life/ was on still standing mag and had just thousands of comments of women from the same community experiencing the same...it was just so eye-opening and made me realise these issues go far beyond pro-choice and pro-life and helped me get over my fears of using the the word 'baby'...