You Don’t Feel That Way: Minimizing Women’s Experiences

My husband’s cousin posted a link to an op-ed in The New York Times by Ross Douthat entitled, “The Unborn Paradox.” In the article, Douthat juxtaposes the trials of a couple facing infertility with those of a couple choosing to end a pregnancy. I was somewhat disappointed in his article (I thought he could have delved more deeply into why it is infertile couples are spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments rather than adopting children from women who might otherwise choose abortion), but it is an opinion piece, and I guess I can’t expect as much as from a full-on researched article.

The thing that struck me in his article is his description of an MTV reality show which features young mother Markai Durham and her boyfriend choosing to end a pregnancy through abortion.

On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just “pregnancy tissue.” After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: “If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.” Instead, “think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.”

It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she begins to cry when he calls the embryo a “thing.” Gesturing to their infant daughter, she says, “A ‘thing’ can turn out like that. That’s what I remember … ‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.”

When people tell Durham that what she had removed was just a piece of tissue, they’re asking her to deny her own interpretation of her experience and her feelings around it. She knows what she’s given up. Even if she chose to use their words, her body would still experience the loss of a pregnancy. She must grieve this loss. How can she grieve it if she’s not even allowed to acknowledge it? And why is she being discouraged from grieving at all? It’s a difficult choice, one that would result in grief regardless of which path Durham chose. Grieving doesn’t make the right choice any less right; it’s just what happens when someone makes a difficult choice.

People usually bring up this type of language as an example of the fleecing of women that goes along with the practice of abortion. This use of language in Durham’s case may well have been for the purpose of sanctioning the practice of abortion, both in Durham’s mind and in the minds of those who’ve used the language. But this minimizes what is actually a larger issue: the repeated way that people on all sides of an issue use women as pawns in an ideological argument. Both those who think she’s wrong for having had an abortion and those who think she’s right are using her as an example to support their opinion at the expense of Durham’s own experience and feelings. Her individual experience and feelings are being discounted and denied for the sake of the ideological arguments of those around her.

This denial of women’s experience is not in the least restricted to abortion. It surrounds all aspects of a woman’s reproductive life. Rather than encouraging women to find and bring to fullness their own meaning, they are constantly being told how to see their experiences.

From menarche to pregnancy to birth to breastfeeding to menopause, there is a course of action each of us is expected to take (take oral contraceptives, go to a surgeon for non-surgical needs, get an epidural, quit nursing by X months, take hormone therapies and get a hysterectomy when the ovaries stop producing eggs). There’s not much support or encouragement for us to find our own meaning and our own path. If our experience differs from the prescribed experience, our experience is ignored or discounted or discouraged or pathologized and medicated. The important thing to those around us is that their view of the world and their opinions remain intact. They often don’t even remotely consider the experience of the individual woman. They frame our experience to fit their world view, then, to help legitimize their view, they try to get us to accept this framework as well.

All of our lives, society tells us what meaning to take from our experiences. Self-doubt is almost certain to arise when the ways we’re told to feel aren’t the ways that we actually do feel. How often does this need to happen until we can’t even recognize what we really feel?

What needs to change for women’s experience and the significance we derive from it to be our own? When do we stop being pawns in someone else’s argument?