My womb is not terra nullius

(First published in Choice Words: A collection of writing about abortion (2019) edited by Louise Swinn. All proceeds go to the Marie Stopes Australia Choice Fund.)

Any discussion of abortion must start with those capable of becoming pregnant, and our bodies. These days this is rarely the case. Such conversations, often conducted by cisgender men, usually start with religion or morality, and the vicissitudes of eggs recently fertilized by sperm, when in fact abortion is a matter of our human right to reproductive health and safe, affordable medical procedures.

Writing about abortion in 2018 is for me fraught with emotion – not with regret and loss, but with the charged history of my heart, so closely connected to my womb. It raised two of my great and sometimes conflicting passions: my love for my vocation, writing, and my love for the man who eventually became the father of my children. And yes, there was some fear there as well – palpable, bodily fear.

When I first wrote about abortion publicly – in 2012 for the Overland blog – I did not feel fear. Today 2012 seems another age. It was before Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a justice of the US Supreme Court; before Trump, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. And it was before the defeat in 2017 of a bill in the New South Wales parliament to decriminalize abortion. The End12 Bill, as it’s known, would have overturned three archaic sections of NSW’s Crimes Act (1900). It would have brought the laws governing one of the state’s most common medical procedures into the 21st century and in line with the views of 73 per cent of its voters. The bill was defeated by a margin of 14 to 25. Twenty-one of the 25 MPs who voted against it were men. [Seven months after this essay was published, New South Wales became the last state or territory in Australia to decriminalise abortion, when the NSW Parliament passed the Abortion Law Reform Act 2019.]

2017 brought a novel I’d read in the distant 1980s – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale – kicking and screaming into the 21st century in ways that seemed terrifyingly plausible and disturbingly timely.

But the times have changed in other ways too. In 2012, I was blogging in response to a story called ‘I took secret photos of my abortion to empower and educate women’ published anonymously in the Guardian. It was before the abortion rom com Obvious Child, before Emily Letts filmed her abortion and posted it to youtube, before #shoutyourabortion, We Testify and Youth Testify. In 2018 many more of us are telling our abortion stories in the hope of normalising a medical procedure that must be safely available for all those capable of bearing a child, especially given that one in three of us in Australia, the UK and USA will have an abortion in our lifetime.

The woman who photographed and wrote about her abortion in 2012 remained anonymous because they were dangerous times for women and those capable of becoming pregnant. It seems, today, that the times are more dangerous still. Almost daily I read deeply troubling stories about the invasion of female reproductive organs by governments and others. 

I highlight the cold scientific term ‘reproductive organs’ deliberately, because I think such terms allow legislators – and all those outsiders who think they have a say in what happens to our bodies – to abstract our wombs from our breathing flesh, from the fabric of our lives and our stories.

Our wombs are not terra nullius. They are not blank tracts for others to write their laws upon. Every womb on this earth is enfolded in a person with their own unique life and story – and the decisions we make for our wombs must be governed by our lives and our stories alone. Not stymied by the abstractions of ‘God’, ‘State’ or any other lawmaking entity that does other than ensure our access to safe, affordable reproductive healthcare.

Anonymous published her experience online to show what a safe abortion looks like, to ‘help dispel the fear, the lies and hysteria around abortion, and empower women to make educated decisions for their bodies’. She was partly motivated by the fact that her mother had nearly died from an illegal abortion some 30 years before and then spent the months of her recovery ‘in silence in a country where she would have been banished, if not killed, for her actions’.

When Anonymous went to have her own abortion, she wasn’t sure which was more harmful: the anti-abortion protesters who threatened her outside the clinic or the procedure itself. But once she’d gone through the bulletproof (!) doors, she found a sanctuary.

Counselled, educated and physically readied, I let go of my anxieties in this safe place. The procedure itself, albeit uncomfortable, was straightforward and passed with ease.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Anonymous lives in the United States. The US continues to experience an abortion crisis. Here’s how she concluded:

Within 48 hours of launching thisismyabortion.com, I received a deluge of emails from men, women and couples all over the world confiding in me their own courageous and unique abortion stories. Some told tales of horrific self-inflicted abortions in countries where abortion remains illegal. Others expressed sincere gratitude for my documentation …

I hope thisismyabortion.com will be used as a tool to bring a fair, honest, balanced view of safe abortion. We, together, can take a stand for the truth, women’s rights and reproductive justice. 

In 2012, I wrote that her hope was my hope – and that I, too, had had an abortion. Like Anonymous, I thought it was time we told the secret histories of our wombs. Write them and the full spectrum of their stories – menses, abortions, miscarriages, births, menopause – into the culture. So that no one ever again mistakenly believes that wombs are uncharted entities ripe for government by external forces.

What I didn’t write then was that, in fact, I’ve had four abortions. Each time I got pregnant by chance, I’d thought I was safe: menstruating, using a condom or breastfeeding a new baby.

When I first became pregnant with the man I loved, we were living streets apart in rented studios in Potts Point and Kings Cross. Some hours after the test confirmed our pregnancy, I sat alone on my bed regarding the single room I’d painted shell pink for Botticelli’s Venus. I decided this was no place for a baby, with its father living six blocks away in his own single room making art in prized solitude. He wanted the baby but had no intention of changing anything, including our living arrangements; he longed to be a father as I did not long to become a mother.

My decision to end the pregnancy was straightforward, governed by common sense and my work. My writing life had just kicked up a notch: I’d recently started my first job as a writer of prose pieces longer than captions and I was relishing it.

The procedure – a surgical abortion – was equally straightforward. I was lucky to have a job and the money to afford it, and access to a safe clinic. I had close friends to advise me from their own experiences and to accompany me to the Preterm clinic in Glebe. There were no protesters outside – they would come later and abortion centres would become increasingly difficult to find. My initial nerves at the prospect of the unknown and of possible pain were soon calmed by the gentle atmosphere and attentive healthcare professionals. Of the procedure itself – vacuum aspiration with a local anaesthetic – I felt only the sting of a needle and a strange movement in my abdomen. Afterwards I was taken to the recovery room and more kind people brought me magazines, a cup of tea and biscuits. After a couple of hours, I went home. I had some cramping and light bleeding which continued for about three days. I was cared for with the greatest of consideration throughout.

Thinking about abortion also recalled my first tentative explorations of my body. I don’t mean childhood investigations of my genitals and budding breasts, but my first ventures into the organised world of feminists intent on demystifying the great procreative powers of my body.

It was 1993. Newly married and freshly pregnant, I joined a circle of women and girls in a hall behind Sydney’s King George V Memorial Hospital in Camperdown. I wanted to learn more about my embodied self and so I was starting with one of the last remaining taboos, which unsurprisingly happened to concern my body and precisely that one feature unique to most of those with wombs: menstruation. Some 60 women sat cross-legged in a circle to talk about blood, led by a prominent feminist elder.

We learnt that evening in our menstrual circle – sitting around a scattering of red towelling pads to be used for our monthly bleeding, many of us wearing red as suggested by the organisers – that ancient Egyptian women had known their bodies in ways we modern women had forgotten. With herbs and even with the power of their minds alone, they could abort a pregnancy if required. Without warning, sitting in that circle, harnessed to the power of that group of women and their blood law, I found myself mentally, calmly, releasing the child in my womb. The next day I bled. The following Monday I miscarried, spontaneously aborting our 8-week-old embryo. The ultrasound examination found that my womb had successfully expelled the entire contents of its pregnancy and no dilation and curettage was required. At the time, my husband and I were not yet in a position to bring a new life into our world.

I still have my diary from the day of that menstrual circle. I noted merely that at 7pm on Friday 30 April 1993 I went to a ‘lecture’. I was on a mission to learn more about my body but for reasons I never analysed at the time, this foray was of the utmost secrecy.

I wonder now – two adult children, two more miscarriages and two more abortions later – if my adventures into my own body were so secretive and fearful because I was investigating a realm that had until so recently in the scheme of human history been the property of men.

Because we also seem bent on destroying our planetary mother, in 2013 I began to investigate western property laws governing the natural world. I quickly discovered that they were analogous to the laws governing female bodies.

As recently as 1968, a widely used first year property law casebook made this parenthetical comment: ‘for, after all, land, like woman, was meant to be possessed’.

Ancient denigrations of women are well known. Two of the fathers of western culture – Pythagoras and Aristotle – believed women were inferior to men. As Simone de Beauvoir observed in The Second Sex, by the time humans came to write mythology and law, patriarchy was definitively established. And so

it is males who write the codes. It is natural for them to give woman a subordinate situation; one might imagine, however, that they would consider her with the same benevolence as children and animals. But no. Afraid of woman, legislators organize her oppression.

Consequently, there is a litany of foundational law that crushes women. The Hindu Laws of Manu define woman as a vile being to be held in slavery and Leviticus equates women with beasts of burden owned by the patriarch. The Athenian laws of Solon grant her no rights and the ancient Roman code puts her in guardianship and proclaims her ‘imbecility’. Canon law considers her ‘the devil’s gateway’ and the Koran ‘treats her with the most absolute contempt’.

Writing only four decades ago – in 1972 – US law professor Christopher Stone had this to say on the first page of his famous article on the rights of nature, Should Trees Have Standing?:

We have been making persons of children although they were not, in law, always so. And we have done the same, albeit imperfectly some would say, with prisoners, aliens, women (especially of the married variety), the insane, African Americans, fetuses, and Native Americans.

This was an astonishing aside. There I learnt what I had always imperfectly known: that in western law along with whole groups of human beings, one entire half of the human population had been excluded from legal personhood until appallingly recently. In fact, in the United States corporations were granted legal personhood in the 19th century decades before women were.

Stone goes on to tell a story about the first woman in Wisconsin who in 1875 thought she might have a right to practise law. She was told she did not, in the following words:

The law of nature destines and qualifies the female sex for the bearing and nurture of the children of our race and for the custody of the homes of the world … [A]ll life-long callings of women, inconsistent with these radical and sacred duties of their sex, as is the profession of law, are departures from the order of nature; and when voluntary, treason against it.

What is striking about the Wisconsin case, Stone says, is ‘that the court, for all its talk of women, so clearly was never able to see women as they are (and might become). All it could see was the popular “idealized” version of an object it needed.’ (Stone’s emphasis)

As he explains about attempts to extend rights to women, or to trees:

The fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer new rights onto some new “entity”, the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us” – those who are holding rights at the time. (Stone’s emphasis)

Thus it was that the Founding Fathers could speak of the inalienable rights of all men, and yet maintain a society that was, by modern standards, without the most basic rights for African Americans, Native Americans, children, and women. There was no hypocrisy; emotionally, no one felt that these others were fully people. (Stone’s emphasis.)

Barely a century ago, we women were rightless things for the use of ‘them’, felt by no one to be fully people.

When counsel was arguing for the unfortunate Wisconsin woman who had the gall to imagine herself a lawyer, her very presence in the court disputed her claim; the court found it ‘impossible’ even to suggest that a woman could be a person. The definition of legal person so incontrovertibly signalled masculinity that the court could not begin to imagine how it might apply to a woman. It was so unthinkable that a woman could be a legal person that to call her one was the same as calling her a man. So much so that in the court’s view it would then follow that she would be subject ‘to prosecutions for the paternity of a bastard, and … prosecutions for rape’.

These legal erasures of women made possible such views and practices as those of the 19th-century physician J. Marion Sims, the so-called ‘father of modern gynaecology’ and ‘architect of the vagina’ (really). Sims – notorious for his abhorrence of female organs – advocated ovariotomy and conducted medical experiments on enslaved African-American women. According to him, removing women’s ovaries enhanced their moral sense and made them biddable, industrious and clean.

Contesting the mass sterilization this unleashed, in 1906 Ely van de Warker MD advocated the protection of the ovary. Not because he considered ovariotomy to be an invasion of women’s bodies – but because ‘[a] woman’s ovaries belong to the commonwealth; she is simply their custodian.’ He then calculated the cost of this – not to the violated women, but to the United States: 

Some of this large number have openly boasted, when the lunacy was at its height, that they have removed from fifteen hundred to two thousand ovaries. Assuming that each of these women would have become the mother of three children, we have a direct loss of five hundred and fifty thousand for the first generation and one million six hundred and fifty thousand in the second generation.

Sixteen years later in the title of The Waste Land (1922), TS Eliot played with the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, whose wounded genitals blighted the regenerative powers of his kingdom as they damaged his own. Both kingdom and king lay wasted. The poem’s opening line, ‘April is the cruellest month’, makes spring a time not of green abundance but of menace and death. Thus did Eliot diagnose the barrenness of his age, ruined by the senseless slaughter of First World War.

In 2018 the mythological wounds that plague the western world go deeper than a legendary king’s genitals. The great mythic – and literal – wound of our age is not to the testicles but to the womb. 

In my shell-pink Potts Point studio, I was reading Karl Marx and his contemporary Johann Jakob Bachofen, a Swiss jurist, historian of Roman law and mythographer. I’d discovered Bachofen in the pages of Oskar Kokoschka’s My Life. He introduced me to the possibility of ancient cultures ruled by principles of mother right.

Having studied Roman legal texts, Etruscan tombs, ceramics and other materials, Bachofen postulated the existence of prehistoric matriarchal cultures. His mythic views of history were scorned by scholars interested only in a materialistic, political-economic approach to the past. But he was taken up by artists, writers, philosophers and poets, among them Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Rilke; he inspired ‘searchers of the psyche, and, in fact, anyone aware of the enigmatic influence of symbols in the structuring and moving of lives’, as Joseph Campbell put it. Archeologists and anthropologists later found evidence of the matriarchal civilisations Bachofen had deduced, including the cities of Troy and Crete, and hundreds of terracotta figurines of women with pregnant bellies and pendulous breasts.

And Bachofen’s view that myth – ‘the exegesis of symbol’ – was formative in human history is today gaining a new sort of currency with the idea that we are inherently storytelling creatures, an idea which has brought the now ubiquitous belief in the power of stories and narrative, and that to change the times we must change the story.

When writing was first used by lawmakers, priests and poets, around 2000 BCE, stories that had been passed down for millennia were recorded. And all of them recount one unvarying myth: a great goddess is separated from her beloved, who dies or appears to die, and falls into the underworld – or winter, a time when light and fertility are dimmed. The goddess descends into the darkness to find her beloved and return him or her to the daylight realm, so life may continue.

This story was changed around 2000 years ago and it seems that the myth that emerged in its place has a dangerous underbelly: womb bashing. The new myth suppressed the story’s female potency – reducing it to a virgin mother – and subverted it with a male god. It retold the ancient story of the cycle of darkness and light, winter and spring, in the form of the Virgin Mary and her son Jesus. Jesus dies and descends into darkness for three days (the number of days of the dark moon). He’s then rescued by his father. And as in earlier versions of the myth, his return to daylight coincides with the earth’s regeneration. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is winter turning into spring.

Laws that restrict or criminalize abortion and dare to invade bodies capable of bearing new life are rooted in a history of law making that has coopted the life-giving powers of wombs and installed them in a sky god and his crucified son. As Gloria Steinem said in 2011: ‘we got into this jam when some men took control of women’s reproductivity … man is not god and god is not man and we do not have power over women and nature’.

In an aside Steinem glossed the architecture of churches where men take over women’s power to give birth. They construct buildings with an outer and an inner entrance, a vagina-like aisle, two curved ovarian structures on each side and an altar which is the womb where a miracle takes place. Men in long skirts say: ‘You were born of woman in sin, but if you obey the rules of a patriarchal god you will be reborn into the realm of men.’ They sprinkle sacred water (birth fluid) over the rebirthed supplicant and say: ‘Yes, you can give life. But only we can give eternal life.’

And in return we women are plunged into shame and secrecy. US abortion activist and writer Katha Pollitt argues that contemporary opposition to abortion is a reaction to the growing secularization of American life, to the sexual revolution and to feminism. It’s an attempt to suppress ‘women gone wild’. 

Our potency is formidable – and under threat. No one who has experienced the labouring womb could ever again consider the so-called ‘feminine principle’ as passive. The womb is life giving and life taking. Every month of our generative lives our wombs prepare for new life. Every month that potential is either fertilised or destroyed. The waxing and waning of life happens daily in our bodies. Life and death are our domain. That is why religions and states are so keen to control us and our wombs.

Acknowledging the real life-giving potential of the womb seems to me a good way of going about life on this Earth. To start changing the story, perhaps we could adopt a metaphor from 12th-century medical practitioner and writer Trota of Salerno. She called menses ‘flowers’, because ‘just as trees do not produce fruit without flowers so women without menses are deprived of the function of conception.’ And if menses are flowers, then when a woman chooses to abort a fertilized egg, she is, we are, surely just plucking unripened fruit and returning it to the great cycle of life.