My daughter is the light of my life, but her birth could have killed me. I didn’t have an epidural, because thanks to years of writing Greys Anatomy, I was more fearful of complications than of labor pain.
My labor was considered normal, which is to say, I paced, doubled over, and vomited from agonizing pain every few minutes for 22 hours, then pushed with my entire body for four more hours. And still, I required a vacuum assist to get the baby out because her head was stuck on my pelvis. When my daughter finally emerged, healthy, I wept with relief, but my face was dry because I was too dehydrated to produce tears. That was the moment it quickly went from normal to terrifying as blood started pouring from my body and pooling on the hospital floor.
I didn’t bleed to death because the medical team had easy access to misoprostol—a drug that has now been taken off emergency carts in Louisiana because, although it’s incredibly effective at stopping post-partum hemorrhaging, it can also be used to induce abortion. I also required packing with sponges and gauze and nine stitches to stop the bleeding.
It took me months to fully recover from childbirth, partly because of blood loss, and partly because one of the sponges was forgotten inside of me. If you’re a Grey’s fan, you know that a left-behind sponge can lead to serious infection, illness, and death. I was lucky that I could feel that something was off and that the doctors believed me, searched, and found the rotting sponge while antibiotics could still treat the infection.
I’m telling you the grisly details of my child’s birth because women usually don’t. The same way that our culture has taught us to whisper about our periods and hide our tampons—despite the fact that our menstrual cycles perpetuate our species—new mothers are culturally guided to hide the more brutal details of childbirth. Our society focuses on beautiful, giggling babies. It ignores, through culturally perpetuated silence, the physical and emotional wounds that accompany the experience of pregnancy, miscarriage, labor, birth, and motherhood.
I believe it’s partly because of this silence—because we are made to feel that we are somehow betraying our breathtaking, beloved babies when we name the realities that lead to and accompany their existence—that we have allowed laws to be passed in the United States of America that force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. I believe it’s imperative that women start talking about what the term “reproductive rights” actually means—because it’s the only way to drive home the reality of how important it is that we all vote in this election.
My complications were relatively “minor,” because when I was in pain, I was believed. For many women, and for Black women in particular, whose pain is systemically disbelieved and dismissed, childbirth in America is regularly life threatening and too often fatal.
And still, many people believe their vote doesn’t matter.
We are bombarded daily with catastrophic news, and it’s tempting to think “nothing ever changes so why vote?” But regarding women’s reproductive health in our country, beyond a shadow of a doubt, things have changed, and if this election goes the wrong way, things could rapidly get a whole lot worse.
The side that wants to functionally outlaw abortion in all 50 states only wins if female voters, young voters, progressive voters, voters of color, and LGBTQIA voters stay home on election day. Your vote desperately matters.
For 50 years, Roe v. Wade, guaranteed our legal right to abortion, which is medical care. Then an adjudicated rapist who brags about grabbing women’s pussies put a guy on the Supreme Court who was credibly accused of attempted date rape—and Roe was replaced by Dobbs. The irony of allowing men who assault and rape women to determine that women also must carry pregnancies to term is a dystopian hellscape that is happening right now in the United States.
When I was 16, I lost my virginity to date rape. When I think about the trauma of that experience and the weeks that followed, watching the calendar and praying for my period to come, I can’t imagine the compounded trauma if abortion hadn’t been a legal option. And yet, a devastating number of women and girls are experiencing that right now because an estimated 134 rape-induced pregnancies occur every day in states with abortion bans. Please hear me: Your vote matters.
When I was in my twenties, my best friend had a wanted pregnancy that turned out to be ectopic. The embryo had attached to her fallopian tube, and when it grew, the tube burst and my friend nearly bled to death. (Like the character Cristina Yang, from Greys, who collapsed on the OR floor and later famously yelled, “Somebody sedate me!”) The doctors who saved my friend’s life said that if she’d gotten to the hospital sooner, when she first started cramping, they might have been able to dissolve the pregnancy with drugs and spare her the trauma of emergency surgery. But back then Roe was the law of the land.
Today, in states with abortion bans, when a woman goes to the hospital with the extreme pain that suggests an ectopic pregnancy, doctors now face an impossible calculation: withhold help until symptoms become life-threatening or risk going to prison for murder. Doctors are reportedly delaying care until the symptoms become extreme— so they can prove that the “abortion” they performed was to save the life of the mother. Women and girls are dying because of the delays. I know this sounds like something out of a dark work of fiction. It’s Orwellian. Or Atwoodian. And it’s also happening, right now, in America. This is why your vote matters.
Please make reproductive rights the single issue that drives you to cast a vote in this election. Because if your wife or sister or best friend was dying in front of you, you would want the doctors to do everything in their power to save her—without hesitation, without fear, without slowing down to call a lawyer for permission to do what needs to be done to save her life.
Imagine that scenario for a moment—the one in which your person dies because a doctor won’t care for her. Or the one in which she is raped and denied the right to an abortion, then bleeds to death giving birth because the drug they need to stop the bleeding isn’t on the cart. Know that these things are already happening in our country. Then vote like our lives depend on it.