Perils of pregnancy

“I’ve come from the chiropractor,” writes 78-year-old Honor Moore in her lyrical memoir on abortion, A Termination (A Public Space Books, 112 pp.). “Right after the appointment it hurts to walk. It didn’t hurt like that after the abortion, even though something had been taken from inside me. I didn’t walk differently.”

Moore’s abortion at 23 in a pre-Roe New York City may not have altered her gait—but it lingers in her imagination even as an old woman. “I have always believed I would have had a son,” she writes. “Fifty-two years old by now, a physicist or a famous oncologist.” She thanks the psychiatrist who gave her the referral that made the operation legal. He allowed her to escape motherhood, opening the door to decades of creative independence and feminist writing. She says he saved her life.

The irony of this explicit, sad, and often beautiful book: It doesn’t feel like Moore’s life has been saved. Her tone around “termination” (for her, not so much aborting the life of her son but terminating the lifestyle of motherhood) is frank with occasional forays into spite. The overwhelming feeling is not one of victorious independence but of loss.

No amount of personal and political contextualizing makes the abortion narrative work—though another new release, I’m Sorry for My Loss (Sourcebooks, 496 pp.), tries with all its might. Authors Rebecca Little and Colleen Long make the following points: Abortion should be universally legal for the sake of women in medical crisis; pro-life portrayals of sonogram images are “puppetry”; pregnancy termination is a right as old as time; Dobbs will endanger women and nearly criminalize miscarriage; and culture, not God, conveys personhood, so an unborn baby’s humanity is determined by how we feel about it. By the end of this book, your brain will cramp from being bombarded with so many logical fallacies.

I’m Sorry for My Loss tells the stories of women who want their babies but choose abortion because of dire medical straits. Arguing that not every patient who gets a medical abortion wants her pregnancy to end, Little and Long conflate abortion and miscarriage. Pro-lifers can applaud their call for hospitals to treat birth “more like a life event than a medical disability,” but this modicum of truth hardly makes up for the book’s false claims, including that “pregnancy is more deadly than abortion.” Deadly for whom?

These authors get one thing right: We’re often afraid to talk about just how hard pregnancy can be. News of pregnancy can go off like a bomb in an already unsteady life. And then there’s pregnancy loss, which remains terribly common. Little and Long write that women they interviewed “weren’t screened for depression … weren’t told about depression or anxiety as a side effect of miscarriage or stillbirth, and they weren’t clear on what to do if they felt depressed.”

Loss aside, depression and anxiety run rampant in pregnancy. It’s here Christians can advocate for care—and another new book can help: Your Brain on Pregnancy (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp.) by neonatal ICU nurse, researcher, and mental health clinician Dawn Kingston.

Kingston posits that postpartum depression gets the limelight when mental illness during pregnancy is more common. The lack of screening seems inexcusable, given that women receive more medical evaluation during pregnancy than in most other periods of their lives. The book attacks the widely accepted myth that women experience depression during pregnancy mainly because of fluctuating hormones.

Maybe supporting mental health in pregnancy without shame can help us walk differently. Your Brain on Pregnancy helps moms think through the possible roots of mental illness and what kinds of treatment (talk-based therapies and brain-based medications) will suit them best. In style, it’s what you might expect from a nurse: factual, clinical, and not given to superfluous anecdotes. Kingston writes, “The assessment tools are meant to shatter the confusion that most women experience when faced with feelings of sadness and worry and give you a starting point for decisions and actions.”