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'...
So many important ideas in this but the idea of the ‘child in mind’ particularly strikes a chord. I really struggle with what I think of as the ‘legitimacy’ of the losses I’ve experienced. I mean this in the sense that it is hard to grieve, or for others to understand your grief, when there is no shared history to hold onto, no memories to look back on. The idea of the child in mind captures so beautifully the loss of that potential shared future that is so much part of pregnancy loss.
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'...
So many important ideas in this but the idea of the ‘child in mind’ particularly strikes a chord. I really struggle with what I think of as the ‘legitimacy’ of the losses I’ve experienced. I mean this in the sense that it is hard to grieve, or for others to understand your grief, when there is no shared history to hold onto, no memories to look back on. The idea of the child in mind captures so beautifully the loss of that potential shared future that is so much part of pregnancy loss.