Remembering Our Humanity

---

I wrote this in 2015.  It has taken me 11 years to finally post it.  This piece has been updated to include more inclusive language.  

This has been six years in the making.  Six years of saying I’m fine and I’ve moved on, when the opposite is true.  A lot can happen in a day.  Whole worlds change, you can experience heart-bursting joy or earth-shattering pain in just one course of 24 hours.  You can even experience both at the same time.  Oh, to experience both.  To cry and laugh, that’s life. 

On an August day in 2009, I found out I was pregnant, and three days later, in that same hot August, I found out I couldn’t keep the life whose existence I had already started plotting for.  I saw it all, the springtime birth, the first steps on an Okinawan beach, the dented bumper from that first parent-free car ride, the dorm room packed full of memories, etc., pass through my fingers like fine sand.  All the potential vanished as I stared at my empty uterus on the ultrasound machine.  

The next hours were a blur, mostly taking place in dark solitude.  I remember the tech quickly turning off the volume as she detected “the mass”.  “The mass”.  That was their wording.  Every doctor, nurse, and technician used it.  An attempt, I believe, to disconnect from the reality that was taking place.  “The mass” had a heartbeat, but it would never get to reach its potential, for it had no potential outside of the womb that was meant to protect it. 

There was the constant quoting of statistics to ease my mind and possibly ensure I didn’t put up a fight about needing to terminate.  I’m a logical person; I knew what needed to be done, but that didn’t numb the pain. 

The pain.  It seared every inch of my body, more than the two shots of methotrexate that coursed through my bloodstream later that evening as I lay awake, soaking my pillow with the salty tears of failure.  Failure of a body that couldn’t fulfill the one task I ached for it to complete.  To successfully bring forth life and make me a mother again. 

 The days spun around.  I found myself drowning in fake smiles during the day and unyielding tears at night.  A friend suggested a pregnancy and infant loss group. I took the information and buried it at the bottom of my purse, because what right did I have to attend such a group?  While the loss was, and still is, very real to me, I didn’t believe I had earned the right to grieve it the way other parents could. 

Once I uttered the word abortion, I knew how I would be received.  I saw this play out in the days after they administered the medication, when I began the difficult task of telling people why I had grown so distant so quickly.  There was some sympathy, a few hollow “everything happens for a reason”, and plenty of silence.  Silence so cold and dead it would send a chill up the Crypt Keeper’s bony spine. And one truly painful occasion, the bitter response of “This wouldn’t have happened if you still believed in God.” 

As I’ve traveled through that maze of varied responses, the hate floored me.  The vile, seething hatred that the word abortion brings denied me my grief.  Six years later, I still navigate that maze, slowly working up the courage to explain why I say I’m a mother of four, three that live on this earth and one that lives in my heart.  The daggers of hate still pierce my heart.  For if they say it is god’s punishment for my godlessness or that I am in fact a murderer, then it all must be true, right?  I will myself to believe, to know, that it’s not true.  That they speak lies in an attempt to cut me, because they don’t know how else to process what they are being told.  

While I can stitch the cuts the daggers of hate leave.  I can’t stitch my heart whole from the loss.  That loss still burns as red hot as the day the swooshing sound of a developing heart filled that cold, dark hospital room.  Why did I feel so unworthy of a support group?  Why is it acceptable to demonize me and others for our abortions?  I believe it’s because we’ve taken the humanity out of the abortion discussion.  Both camps have done excellent work to accomplish this for completely different reasons.  

The pro-life camp wants to paint women as heartless, sexed up deviants who should just keep their legs closed, excluding trans and gender non-conforming folks entirely.  Delving into the gray area of abortion and choice would lessen their argument.  Best to keep it black and white, or people may begin to see the logic in leaving that decision up to the women it impacts. 

The pro-choice camp has removed the humanity, because it also makes discussions on their end easier.  We refer to “masses” instead of life, because to use the term life, despite it being correct biologically, could -possibly- set us back even further as we fight for the right to make our own reproductive decisions.  

In removing the humanity, though, we’ve created a world where those who utilize abortion, for whatever reason, have no safe place to turn.  No shoulder to lean on if they need it, without first swimming through a sea of shame to find it.  No one to reassure them that they do, in fact, know what is best for their body, their lives, and their families.  No privacy when seeking out their choice and no safe public forum when they are ready to put a face, and more importantly, a voice, to the word abortion.  

I argue that while those who seek to restrict and ban our right to informed choices will never embrace the humanity in the abortion conversation, those of us who do believe in an individual’s right to choice should embrace humanity.  Embrace the people making these decisions, remember that every story is unique to the people it impacts, and that not everyone comes from a place of joy or sorrow after an abortion.  Sometimes there is a mixture of both. 

While my heart still aches for life I knew needed to end to preserve my own, I also rejoice in the fact that I could make a safe and informed decision.  Access to a safe and legal abortion has allowed me to spend the last six years of my life raising the children I already had, as well as bringing forth another life.  1 in 3 is a statistic we can easily quote and rattle off as need be, but let’s remember that behind the statistics are people.  

Every number is a story, a person making their way through this world.  Let’s remember, as we continue the fight for our right to determine our lives, that we’re all in this together.  And every story that yearns to be told needs to be told.   

Copyright(c)2026 Rayven Holmes