The Birth (an excerpt from Beneath the Water, the book I am working on)

            “Prep room” someone says. A hospital gown.  A hard table.  No one explains anything.  The razor scrapes across my pubic bone.  I am embarrassed.  Humiliated.  Then more.  An enema with an effect so immediate I barely make it to the toilet.  The nurse stands outside the curtained doorway.  “Aren’t you finished yet?” she asks. 

            “No,” I say.  The cramping might be from the baby.  Or maybe not.   A hot stream fires into the toilet.  Why have they done this to me?  Why won’t this woman—this nurse—or whoever she is step back from the curtain?  Finally, legs shaking, I emerge. 

            White room.  A bed.  The TV murmurring.

             I am alone.

             I want my mother.  I want Sarah.  I want my boyfriend.  I want him to bring me a bouquet of long-stemmed roses so red that they are almost black.  Like my father brought my mother when I was born.  She pressed them in my baby book.  Which I won’t have. 

            Don’t need a baby book. 

            Don’t bring roses. 

            Just come.

            Still morning.  Still alone.  Nurses come in and lift the sheet.  Spread my legs.  Talk to each other but not to me—as if I am only my lower half.  No eyes.  No mouth.  No heart.  Their hands are inside me.  Probing.  I am mortified.  Sick with pain.

            TV prattles.  Clock ticks.  Contractions compress my body like a vise turning tighter.  Tighter.  Still morning. 

            Sarah appears in my doorway.  Someone is watching the kids.  “I can’t do this,” I tell her. Teeter toward the toilet. Vomit.

            “We all feel that way,” she says, and gives me a roll of Lifesavers from her purse. “They can’t give you anything to eat or drink, but these will help you.”  Milk white vase of artificial violets on my nightstand.  Then gone.

            Time tips into afternoon.  More nurses.  More hurt.  Speaking in centimeters.  Then words.  “Doctor O. has a dinner party to go to at 7:30,” one says to the other.  Injection.  Something long and plastic torn from a cellophane wrapper.  Pushed inside me.  A rush of wetness between my legs--warm and urgent.  Floodwaters spilling over a riverbank.  River of pain.

            Gurney. 

            Hallway.

            Delivery room.  Masked men.  Masked women.  An animal howling.  “No sounds,” the older man says.  “I don’t want to hear any sounds from you.”  Light whiter than white.  I am blind.  Arms strapped.  Body splitting in two.  Body splitting into a miracle. 

            4:10 p.m.

            Baby out.  Baby crying.  Baby whisked away.  Baby.  “A boy,” the younger man says. “Your first?”

            “She’s an unwed mother,” the older man says.  Silence.

            Stitches.  Down there.  I am ruined.  Disfigured, I think.  Maimed.  Burning freezing shaking.  My hair a lump of knots so thick I must turn my head to get comfortable.

            Wheeled out the door.  Hallway has a shiny floor.  Eyes closing.

Land of 10,000 Billboards

The billboards are as plentiful as birch trees in Minnesota.
"Face it. I had Eyes, Ears, and even my Tongue 28 days from Conception."
"God knew my soul before I was born."
"Adoption can be a Life-Saver."
The ads feature photographs of adorable babies and are impossible to miss even if you're powering down the highway at 70 miles per hour.  These billboards are the work Prolife Across America, a Christian organization that makes the claim that it has been "saving babies for 20 years."

I'm not going to say much about abortion here.  Hilary Clinton is the politician that makes the most sense to me with her "safe, legal, and rare" philosophy. I'm a girl who got pregnant in 1969 while attending Catholic school in a town so Catholic public school wasn't even an option. Abortion was not on my list of considerations. And now all these years later,  I have to say, I'm relieved it wasn't--for me.

It's the mention of adoption on these prolife billboards that I'm concerned with.
"2 Million Couples wait to adopt."
"God made me! Mom and Dad Adopted me!"
"If you're not ready to be a Daddy, let someone who is."
 I feel a little crazy at these slogans which promote adoption as the sole alternative to abortion.  I find it curious that mothers do not merit a mention equivalent to the "If you're not ready to be a Daddy" campaign--in fact there's no mention of the mothers (not even in the archives of past campaigns) at all.

It seems like shame's role in the pregnancy/abortion/adoption drama should have played out by now.  But I don't think it has.

I'm not a pro-lifer, but if I were and my mission was saving babies and I believed that God had entrusted me with that work, my campaign would go like this:

"If you're not ready to be a Mommy, let us help you get ready. Parenting classes and cash subsidies   available!"

"Thinking of abortion or adoption? They both hurt. Let us help you keep your baby."

"Prochoice means More Choices. Keep your baby. Daycare and parenting classes available."

Of course I'd have another component to the ad campaign too:

"Sex. Everybody does it. Be safe. Be sane. Be satisfied."

"Take control of your Birth Control. 

Or how about this?  "DEATH TO SHAME.  It makes babies and then kills them."

And of course I wonder about the financial relationships between the anti-abortion and adoption forces.  If the prolifers and adoption agencies are in the conjugal bed, a plague of shame on both their houses.