We Need to Admit that Pregnancy is Hard

I want to talk about a couple of important articles I read recently, and the backlash they got, and what it has to do with pregnancy and defending life.

My friend Rebecca Bratten Weiss recently wrote a really good article for U. S. Catholic, where she laid out the case that Kamala Harris, while certainly not pro-life, has a policy approach that is in better alignment with a consistent life ethic than the Republican platform. And remember, I insist that nobody is in sin for disagreeing on who to vote for. Neither Rebecca nor anyone who disagrees with her are promoting the one true Catholic position. But she is promoting a Catholic position, and it’s one I agree with. I especially want you to read her story about having a miscarriage and needing a lifesaving D and C procedure after the baby died.

The comment section wasn’t very nice to Rebecca, at least on the cesspool known as Twitter. People were calling her crazy and not really a Catholic. Someone said she was as Catholic as Nazis are Jewish: a very nasty slur considering that Rebecca herself is Jewish.

In another really good article, my friend Melinda Ribnek calls out the pro-life movement for insisting on a false dichotomy between women and their babies. She says that a really pro-life position would care for maternal health and never sacrifice a mother for the sake of her unborn child. She tells a harrowing story of how she hemorrhaged and nearly died because she had to wait several days for a D and C after a miscarriage, even though the baby was certainly dead but nobody trusted her judgement. Her state’s abortion ban nearly killed a mom of eight who desperately wanted to carry her pregnancy to term, for the sake of a corpse. That’s not exactly pro-life of them.

And Melinda, too, faced a backlash. People thought she was maligning the pro-life movement unjustly. I saw a parish priest pooh-poohing her claiming that pregnancy “subjugates” a woman’s body, even though, of course, it does. He and the other naysayers seemed to be coming from a position that pregnancy is always a healthy and happy thing, and only wicked rebellious feminists want to lie that pregnancy is dangerous.

I don’t share Melinda and Rebecca’s tragic experiences.  I’m not going to downplay their pain and trauma by saying I understand.

I’ve never had a real miscarriage, just infertility and amenorrhea from PCOS, including a bout of amenorrhea followed by a heavy bleed that I mistakenly thought was a pregnancy and miscarriage. But I sure understand that pregnancy is hard. My at-home childbirth disaster could have killed both me and Adrienne. And one of the reasons I got into that fiasco in the first place, instead of having a better birth plan at a hospital, was that devout Catholics like my mother-in-law and brother-in-law kept insisting that doctors and hospitals were dangerous and would force me to get my tubes tied or something like that. There was a notion that pregnancy and childbirth are easy, and only evil lying liberals in the medical field claim they’re hard in order to trick us into birth control and abortions. I fell for that. And I paid for it, because pregnancy and childbirth aren’t easy.

That’s the position I’m bringing to this conversation. I’m not somebody who understands what it’s like to almost die from a miscarriage, but I’ve also been put in severe danger by a pregnancy. And I have often observed a strain of American Catholic thought, that assumes that pregnancy and childbirth are relatively easy things and that people who insist they aren’t are just a cabal trying to stop us from practicing our faith. I keep seeing people who call themselves pro-life, gaslighting women like Rebecca and Melinda and me who point out that pregnancy can actually be difficult and dangerous.

And I think that these people imagine they’re helping encourage women to have babies and great big happy Catholic families by doing this. There’s a notion that admitting pregnancy is hard, would be denigrating pregnancy and the family. I’ve even been told that I shouldn’t share my birth story because it would discourage a culture of life.  But that’s the furthest thing from the truth.

If you want to create a culture of life, you have to be honest about what bringing life into the world entails.

If you want to honor and encourage motherhood, you ought to have a proper understanding and reverence for the sacrifices pregnant women make, and the risks we take.

If you really, honestly, actually believed what I was always taught was the case: that men and women are equal but different, that women have the august gift of giving physical life while some men have been given the gift to impart spiritual life through the sacraments– then you would not gaslight women about pregnancy being an easy task. You’d have the same reverence for their vocation, that you do for the vocation to the priesthood.

If you actually believed that being open to life, sacrificing your personal wants for the sake of others, and living as holy Catholic families was an important vocation, you would never downplay that vocation by pretending it’s a light thing.

If you truly thought that it was important that families live by the rules of the Church, you’d be doing reams of research into obstetric care to educate yourself, and you would be demanding that your representatives legislated affordable access to the most lavish medical care for pregnant women that they could. You’d be taking pro-life talking heads to task and demanding that they reconcile their claims to actual science, so that women could get pregnant and carry the baby in safety. You would make sure that if women were faced with the horror of a miscarriage, they wouldn’t be trapped in a nightmare situation where they couldn’t access care for fear it might somehow accidentally be an abortion. You certainly wouldn’t be spreading lies that doctors are against Catholic teaching and secretly trying to trick people into abortion.

Our faith is based on what we’ve been given and what our hands have received. Our God is real, and we are supposed to find Him in our real lives. Looking at what actually happens in the real world, instead of insisting that what you’d like to imagine is true, is not an affront to the Faith. It’s the way we are supposed to figure out how to live our faith.

One of the reasons I keep calling the pro-life movement a confidence game, is that they refuse to dialogue with women who have been in dangerous pregnancies and obstetricians who have dealt with that danger, but keep imagining that they know everything about pregnancy.

The way out of this is to be honest.

And honestly, pregnancy is hard.