What Does Freedom Look Like?
There is something raw in me that the subject of abortion touches.
I tend to share my own stories, what I see and feel and what I think it means. There is a lot of noise in the world, and some of it could be lessened if we commit to getting on our soapboxes only when we have something to add to a topic we know something about. When we want to show others exactly what we mean, words should be our last resort. Maybe words alongside actions, but certainly not just words alone.
I took a pedagogy class in college. Two good rules about the art of teaching remain with me today:
Arrive before your students.
Teach only what you know.
The second rule sounds so obvious, it’s barely worth stating. But you’d be surprised how many people are thrown into teaching something they don’t know. I once belonged to a very nice, upscale gym, the kind where the bathrooms smell like eucalyptus and boasts more body lotions and hair products than I’ve ever owned in all my cumulative years of having both hair and a body. They tried to hire me to teach cheerleading, of all things. I explained that I’d never cheered before (I was homeschooled, so who exactly was I supposed to cheer for—my dog after crapping on the lawn?). I didn’t even particularly like cheerleading. (My apologies to the many cheerleaders who subscribe to this newsletter and will now promptly unsubscribe). “Doesn’t matter,” the director informed me, “Nobody will know—with your background in dance, I’m sure you can fake it.”
Maybe she was right, but I’d rather teach the things I’ve actually spent a great deal of effort learning. I’d also rather not get in front of anyone and fake something, if I don’t have to (with the exception of that moment when the nurses and doctors assure you that you’ll be just fine with your newborn baby who you’re about to take home and though you don’t even know how to do a tight swaddle, let alone get enough sleep to function ever again, you nod and smile and murmur something about being ready anyway).
Besides, I couldn’t even imagine holding pom-poms and loudly spelling words in rhythm. Once when I was living in NYC, I took a class where we performed strong poses with our bodies and spoke affirmations with each move. I love both moving and affirmations, but there was something about doing it en masse, parroting a teacher, and feeling somewhat cheesy the whole time that felt embarrassing. I never went back, which is a louder statement than the hour’s worth of forced affirmations, but it’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to being anyone’s cheerleader. Anyway, I didn’t teach cheerleading.
Similarly, there are many topics I don’t have in depth knowledge of, so I don’t write about them. But I tell my stories. It helps me to draw meaning from the fabric of my days, to tell the truth, to decide what I think. All that to say, deep breath, I’d like to tell a story.
There is something raw in me that the subject of abortion touches. It is impossible for me to think about a baby (a fetus) who hasn’t drawn breath without also thinking about my son, Luca. He died in my womb at just short of 36 weeks from a cord accident. I then labored over him and delivered him. I held him for as long as they’d let me. He looked a lot like my other babies. Aside from being dead, he looked perfect. I grieved his death and the world let me. Nobody told me it wasn’t a big deal that he died. In fact, they told me that I’d lost a child, and this made sense to me, since I’d held him and saw with my own eyes that he was a child—specifically, my child.
I’m not trying to be manipulative by sharing this story. I’m trying to explain my own cognitive dissonance when the same world that tells me to grieve my own baby who’d never drawn breath also insists that maybe he was not a baby, not a human in his own right. It’s hard for me to understand.
Now here’s where I tell you that after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the 1973 Roe vs Wade ruling that named the right to abortion as constitutional, the internet accumulated a lot of strong emotions and words. Here’s where I tell you that a lot of the people I do life with feel terrified. They are angry and heartbroken. I love these people dearly. And conversely, some are grateful and hopeful. I love these people, too.
Social media is a minefield. The posts filled with the most other-ing and polarizing rhetoric tend to get the most attention. After all, we notice when a bomb goes off. We look at the blaze, grateful it didn’t get us before we scroll on by. The internet is like an angry father holding a paddle, threatening to spank the next child who admits to what they did wrong. A lot of us shut up really fast. The threat doesn’t draw out our most vulnerable stories. It is not spacious, it does not make room for our questions, for the angles we’d like to shed light on that might be different or new or doubting or hasn’t yet garnered permission from the gatekeepers of popular thought.
The internet is a hard place to tease out the truth, so we mostly do it elsewhere, face to face with people who can disagree with us and still tenderly hold our babies. People who are miracles clothed in skin and givers of honor and grace. People who have found the secret that they might be wrong, that we all might, at some point, be wrong, to be a shield. For humility keeps us safe. And in the moments when we are Icarus, when we decide we can do whatever we want—we can throw off whatever anyone tells us we can’t do, we can fly as close to the sun as we want, just watch!—we plunge, we fall, we perish, we find our wings are wax, our ideas not the solid ground we’d thought, proving that our ego makes us vulnerable. That our pride is dangerous.
I see anger directed at Christians, specifically. And that’s okay. Writer and speaker Bob Goff says something to the effect that God does not need a lawyer, and that’s the kind of statement I will camp out on. I’m not here to talk anyone out of their feelings or beliefs. I understand we all look at the world from differing views—each our own, from quite literally where we stand, where we’ve been, what we’ve seen and experienced—but I don’t see our nation as acting like a theocracy. If it was, well then, my ex would have been prosecuted for adultery (lol. Isn’t it amazing when you can casually throw an “lol” over something that once wrecked you? Thank God our broken hearts heal. Thank God for subtly dropped lols to prove this (okay, along with a few other things, too, I guess). The first amendment is crucial in navigating a space where so many different and disagreeing people are neighbors. I believe in the separation between church and state.
I don’t think this recent decision to overturn Roe vs Wade is religious fascism as much as it is first, giving the decision as to the legality of abortion back into the hands of individual states—by way of elected representatives, rather than unelected judges—and second, whatever compels pregnant women to share the image of their baby’s ultrasound photo and onlookers to say things like “Oh, look how beautiful!” and “He already looks like his mom!” and “Wow, she’s waving hello!”—things that make the world over think, There is something special about what’s happening inside her uterus. Something human and miraculous. Some great potential. Something that is this incredible mix of right now and the future—and we’re getting a glimpse of it. I think it is partly because of that, too.
If an ultrasound photo is precious, why is the value of the person being photographed expendable? The question is: what is it? IS it a person? Or is it nothing? Is this an oversimplification or does U.S law get it right when, in the case of the murder of a pregnant woman, the verdict is a double homicide? And do we get to decide, depending on our circumstance? Is it religion alone that makes us stare in wonder at an ultrasound photo? I wonder if both my non-religious and religious friends alike feel their baby kick within and experience a moment of full, wholehearted integration? Something like their body, mind, and spirit being in one place—all listening to each other—united in wonder? Something like the swell of the orchestra when all of the various sounds come together to make one piece of music that hangs in the air; a lullaby, a requiem that lays to rest our fears, a prophetic voice that hints at a kind of universal organization that makes one wonder if chaos isn’t the final word after all.
It’s hard being here along with—thanks to the internet—just about everybody else, too. Suddenly we’re “neighbors” with everyone who has access to the web. We don’t all see the same. We don’t even agree on what the facts are. Depending on the narrative, some are posting that women who experience ectopic pregnancies will now die, should abortion be banned. Others are saying this is a lie (It goes without saying we need to figure it out; the alternative feels like a cruel dystopian world we’ve landed in—one that is clearly not sustainable). Our perspectives are different and perspective shapes reality. I won’t really get into IVF, as I’m not an expert, but it’s something for which I’m grateful, considering the many women and men who become parents through the modern miracle it provides and, again, if a ban on abortion in some states limits this—that is tragic and needs to be accessible to families everywhere—but still the question remains: what is it that a woman is pregnant with?
(And this is when I cannot help but think of Luca. How can I not? He wasn’t alive outside my body and yet he lives with me always. On the tip of my thoughts, like a word that belongs solely to me.)
Allow me to share an excerpt from a speech given by the late great rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
Friends, we have just a couple weeks ago, in Judaism, celebrated the festival of Passover, which is our festival of freedom. And you may know, if you’ve ever seen a Jewish house before Passover, it’s hard work. It really is. I try and be away from home when it’s happening. You have to clear the house of all products that contain leaven, you got to clean everything, you got to take out a new set of utensils and cutlery and crockery and it is really hard work. I got somebody in England to design a special apron for Passover cleaning that read, “For this, we left Egypt?” And I used to wonder, why? Why make Passover such hard work? And now I know: because freedom is hard work. And it has to be fought for in every generation. We have to tell and re-tell the story. We have to remind ourselves what it feels like each year to eat the bread of affliction and taste the bitter herbs of slavery. Freedom is hard to attain, but it is very easy to lose. And that’s why it has to be fought for in every generation.
Freedom is hard to attain. Hard work and worth fighting for. And what does a free society look like, exactly? One in which everyone does exactly what they want? One in which relativism rules? Maybe, but maybe we’d quickly spiral into anarchy at worst and tribalism at best (we already get a glimpse of this on social media). Maybe freedom is negotiated. Maybe we come to the table and share our ideas of what freedom looks like. Maybe we’re wrong, maybe they’re wrong. Hopefully we see a little better when we have more eyes looking around, sharing their view. We add all our stories, offer them to each other with humility and vulnerability, and like paint on a canvas, they stick, they make a picture, they show us something worth seeing.
Which is why I talk about Luca. He didn’t draw breath, but he’s a person I grieve. He’s a person. I understand there are complexities that this story doesn’t encompass in terms of what a social net looks like, one wide and robust enough to actually catch those who are falling through the many cracks in our system. I understand there is more we should do to support women and mothers, and that babies and mothers, both, need to be protected. I think most of us dream of a world in which protecting both is not mutually exclusive. And I don’t have all the answers.
And still, my first thought when we talk about abortion is Luca. I don’t know how to change this, and I am not sure I want to. I am moved by all the stories I read, the crisis pregnancies, the victims of rape or incest who become mothers by no choice of their own. We all agree that there are lives at stake. How many lives, though—which ones are lives at all—continues to be the question we wrestle with at the table where we negotiate.
What does freedom look like in a real world? In a hard world? One in which consequences follow us doggedly, determined to stick to us in a way we’d desperately wished our cheating exes had? What does it look like in a world where we live and breathe and pay bills and fall in love and break our hearts and profoundly disappoint each other and ourselves? What does freedom look like in a world where we carve out our dreams upon the cold, hard unrelenting rock of our existence, hell bent on believing the rock can be carved at all; that it can be shaped and made worthy of the prayers of our parents or grandmothers or even one teacher who actually believed in us—made worthy of the dreams of God Himself? What does freedom look like here, now, where we push and pull and fight and offer our stories in the hopes of landing on an agreed-on truth, in hopes that all this fighting is for a freedom that is worth it. A freedom for all. Me, you, us. Those of us here, those of us who will be here.
I appreciate this, Jess. As women, we all must agree to disagree on this and many other subjects. Life gets lifey, right? Opinions are like flowers in our garden. Not all bloom at the same time. Thanks for your honesty. And god bless Luca.