I read a great article in the LA Times, which despite my other subscriptions, is my favorite newspaper. It was a brief piece by Mary McNamara, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television and culture critic, about what would actually be the best Mother’s Day gift: reproductive rights.
“Not surprisingly, those new laws have resulted in pregnant and miscarrying women being turned away from emergency rooms and clinics, where doctors and nurses are too afraid of being penalized for potentially assisting in or failing to report anything remotely resembling an abortion to do their actual jobs.
”According to a recent Yale study, there are approximately 5 million pregnancies each year, at least 1 million of which will end in miscarriage. One. Million. Coming to an emergency room near you.”
When our government unmasked itself as a fascist, authoritarian oligarchy and lived more deeply into what so many have said it was, one of the strategies I began to employ was careful selection and digestion of news. I spend more time on Substack than I used to; I read specific journalists who are covering reproductive justice, because that’s my work; and I try to spend more time on news outlets reporting in ways I value: independent journalism. But even so, the big guys like the LA Times and NYT get into my eyeballs and brain plenty, and it isn’t hard to see the ways in which the destruction of reproductive rights, funds, and access are destroying families and communities across the country.
I’ve lost count of the number of stories I’ve seen of women—Black and (let’s be honest, more often) white, lawmakers and civvies—who have been in front of microphones and cameras telling stories of how hard it is to get the care they need to end a pregnancy in a safe way. There are so many stories of women in Georgia, Texas, Idaho, who have been close to death because the laws in their states have made it impossible to get care, because the laws have scared their doctors and nurses so sufficiently that they can’t get treatment in order to deal with physically and emotionally painful and dangerous situations. An ectopic pregnancy. A pregnancy that has already ended in utero, that cannot be delivered. An infection after an unremarkable miscarriage. These are just the three that I could think of off the top of my head. There are so many reasons why a birthing person might need an abortion, the most important one being because they want one. But this is how we treat birthing people. There are many stories out there, which means there are many more that aren’t being told.
McNamara writes briefly about her own experience with miscarriage and she names that she required a procedure that can be used to end a pregnancy. It was “quite painful and emotionally traumatic enough,” she writes. “I cannot imagine enduring it without fast and appropriate medical treatment or under threat of being prosecuted.” I’ve heard so many stories like this. I always, always think, did anyone in the hospital call the chaplain?
It’s a drum I never. stop. beating. But I keep beating it because birthing people are experiencing this kind of grief and struggle more and more, and they’re being abandoned in it more and more. I write this three months out of what I thought would be my dream job, a hospital reproductive chaplain at a major hospital in Massachusetts. Well, it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, and part of the reason why is because despite how many colleagues and advocates I had who knew that birthing people—women with healthy pregnancies, folx who’d had complications, people who’d delivered early, premature babies and their parents, all of ‘em—could benefit from a friendly and present person unafraid to ask difficult questions in scary spaces, more of the people I worked with saw no value in my work, and made my life harder by making my job harder. I worked so hard trying to convince my colleagues we were on the same team and working with the same mission in mind, and ultimately, I just got tired of banging my head against the brick wall that was people who didn’t want to work with me. It’s not good for someone like me to keep pushpushPUSHING on a wall trying to make a door. It brings out the worst in me.
Having left the place where I’d hoped I’d get to do work that was nourishing to my soul felt weird. Because I discovered that for every pound of family I helped, there’d be five pounds of political and bureaucratic bullshit to carry, I feel much lighter having left. Still, the way I serve the reproductive justice community is evolving, and I miss the access I had to birthing people, even if there were a bunch of roadblocks in the way.
It occurs to me that many folks, based on their own religious trauma, might think that to bring a chaplain into the sphere of someone in need of an abortion, or grieving a miscarriage, is just going to bring in some dude who’s judging them for whatever circumstance they find themselves in. So let me say this:
hi. i’m jessica, i’m your reproductive chaplain. my faith in god supports your right to have an abortion. my relationship with spirit supports your desire for your reproductive destiny, and the actions you take to live into that destiny. I Believe in your capacity to know yourself, and to live into who you are and were made to be, and i’ll use whatever pronouns you want, and affirm whoever you tell me you are. i love you. i’m not judging you. i want you to have what you need to live a life that feels sustainable and right, and i believe that god wants that for you. i trust your ability to make reproductive decisions that are righteous and holy. no decision you make is wrong. no decision you make is sinful. god is with you in this, as in all, things.
American fascism is here, and it’s not going quietly. I think many people in this country are living into who they’ve always been, because it’s profitable, and because they think it will keep them safe. It will get worse before it gets better, this isn’t bottom, by a long shot. But I know who and what I believe in: I believe in the teachings of Jesus—community, justice, humility, liberation from oppression, and interconnectedness. I believe that every person has the right to bodily autonomy, and that right comes from a Holiness and Sacredness that is bigger than the systems and the institutions tell you It is. I do not need to separate my love of Jesus from my practice of reproductive justice, and because I hold them both so dearly, I can love people brilliantly and righteously. Shit out here is bleak, but I believe in a resurrection and a transformation that shatters systems and ideologies and even the basic stuff we cling to. And I’m here for it.
One more note: it feels important to name myself this way, not just so that we both know who I say I am, but also because I’m out here. I’m doing the work of loving and caring for and protecting and supporting people, reproductive people, and if you or someone you know needs spiritual and emotional support, I can be doing that work with you, too. And I’m not alone: there are lots of us out here in pews and pulpits and streets and by the riverside, doing the work of reproductive spiritual care. Join us, find us, let’s do it.