Existential Etymology: Learning How To Say "Abortion"
Abortion is an old word, and it contains multitudes.
Welcome to Existential Etymology, a series in which I attempt to filter my latest existential meltdown through the reassuring lens of the history and origins of language. Today’s topic:
abortion (ə-ˈbȯr-shən): 1) the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus; 2) arrest of development resulting in imperfection.
An uncomfortable admission: I still have trouble saying the word abortion aloud.
Not long ago I said to my partner, apropos of nothing, “I think I need to buy this abortion shirt.” I was talking, specifically, about this shirt. I had just attended a daylong training with Abortion Access Front, and I had a vague idea that if I wore a shirt with Abortion written on it three times in plucky, brightly colored lettering, I would somehow become more comfortable claiming it.
(Yes, I did realize at the time that I was participating in the 21st century sub-brand of capitalism, Activism via Buying Shit on the Internet, and no, that did not stop me from doing it anyway).
The jury is still out on whether it worked––I have since worn it often, but I still sometimes feel compelled to zip my sweatshirt up over it when I walk around, even in my neighborhood, which is the sort of place where the bookstore has FREE AND ON DEMAND ABORTION signs in their window.
My discomfort has its origins in the fact that I grew up Christian in the 90’s, at the peak of the evangelical moral panic over abortion. That abortion was a moral crime was as much a fact of the Christianity I grew up in as Jesus dying on the cross, despite the fact that the Bible contains no instruction with respect to abortion. Despite this, I didn’t think about it all that much––I would characterize my posture toward abortion at the time as believing it was a sin, but in, like, an indifferent kind of way. To put it another way: I thought of it vaguely as a problem, but not my problem. Until it was.
The foundation of my strongest-held moral beliefs have, for the most part, boiled down to an immediate gut reaction. This one was no different. My unexamined position on abortion changed after two things happened: first, a friend of mine told me they were pregnant and considering an abortion, and my immediate reaction was to think, of course you are, that makes total sense, I would too, in your position.
Secondly, when I was nineteen, my cardiologist told me that were I to get pregnant, it would be considered high risk due to my heart condition, and his recommendation would be to terminate it.
It was all hypothetical: I wasn’t pregnant then, or in any immediate danger of becoming so. In the eighteen years since, the heart condition has been mostly resolved after two surgeries, and I have never been pregnant, and thus have never had occasion to get an abortion.
Still, I think about it probably more than I should. One of the things I think about is whether I exaggerated that conversation in my memory, to give myself a better excuse for a theoretical abortion than wanting not to be pregnant. I can easily imagine how my memory could have blurred the boundaries of it a little––maybe instead of calling it risky, he just said it would not be ideal; maybe instead of saying he would recommend terminating the pregnancy, he just said I should take precautions against becoming pregnant. I am always suspecting myself of things like this: of editing memories to make them more convenient to my narrative needs. In this case, giving myself the get-out-of-jail-free card of a heart condition, in case I got pregnant and needed an abortion.
Because it would have been a great one, wouldn’t it? Abortions don’t count as abortions when they’re a medical necessity, or a D&C as you’re miscarrying, or the treatment for an ectopic pregnancy. Despite the fact that abortion ban exceptions aren’t real and don’t work, this is obviously the thinking behind them: that abortions aren’t really abortions if you’re getting them because you have to. Only of course they do count as abortion. That’s the thing about the word: it’s expansive and inarguable. Abortion is abortion, whether the pregnancy was wanted or not, whether the procedure was planned or the result of a miscarriage, whether your life is in danger or not, whether the pregnancy being terminated was the result of rape or consensual sex––it’s all abortion.
Regardless of the semantics––I did not know any of this nuance, when I was a nineteen-year-old virgin sitting in a hospital room alone with a doctor who wouldn’t look me in the eye, having a conversation about abortion without ever saying the actual word abortion––I do remember the feelings that followed it. I remember that when I thought about this hypothetical pregnancy, really considered for the first time that I could get pregnant, some panic dam inside me broke, flooding all the organs I had never really thought much about before. I knew, in a way that I hadn’t before, that if I got pregnant, I would have an abortion.
I can’t remember whether I felt ashamed of that fact, though I doubt it. I didn’t feel shame about most of the things I expected to, during my gradual and disorganized divestment from evangelical Christianity, which feels like an inexplicable kind of grace. Plus, I was very sick at the time, and sickness has a way of narrowing your area of focus: if I felt ashamed of anything, it was of having a body that was dysfunctional in a way that wasn’t easy to hide, that I worried made me seem overly dramatic (which maybe I was––I was after all, worried about having to abort a hypothetical pregnancy before I was even sexually active). There wasn’t much room for anything else.
Anyway, if I did, it’s gone now. In the nearly two decades since that conversation, I have become significantly less abashed in my support for reproductive freedom. But see? Even there, reproductive freedom is easier to say than what I mean: freedom to have an abortion, if you want to, with or without a medical reason.
It’s not the belief itself that I have a hard time with: it’s the word itself, the saying aloud of it. It comes down, I think, to the death part of the definition. I am far enough away from the kind of Christianity that I grew up in that I no longer picture a bloody baby-shaped fetus when I picture abortion; I know that 9 times out of 10, what gets aborted would be unrecognizable as a baby. But I’ve also never been able to persuade myself into thinking of it as just a clump of cells. It feels too easy. I don’t want to get off on a technicality, the way I did when I was nineteen. If I am going to fight for the right to abortion, I want to be able to defend it, even if it means that I am defending the death of a potential baby. This is how I think of it now: not a baby, not a clump of cells. A potential baby. A beginning that could grow into a baby, or abort into nothing––a memory, a road not taken.
The idea of abortion still holds some moral gravity for me; not because I think it’s wrong, or because I think people should think long and hard before they decide to get one. But because it feels, as Jia Tolentino wrote movingly, like it has at least something to do with the sacred.
It feels that way even though I do not believe that abortion should be considered any differently than any other medical procedure (for what it’s worth, I feel the same way about a lot of medical procedures––both my heart surgeries felt invested with a weird amount of spiritual gravitas, even though they were both laparoscopic, not even open-heart, which you’d expect to have some spiritual and metaphorical heft to it). It feels that way even though it likely wouldn’t be a difficult decision for me, then or now. I did not feel particularly alive, when I had that conversation with that doctor. I felt sick and exhausted and I thought about dying a lot, and I thought I was dying a fair amount of the time, before I knew what was wrong with me. But still, I would have fought for my life over the life of a potential baby. I would have done that even if my life hadn’t been in danger. It didn’t even feel like a decision to me; it felt like a survival instinct. It felt like self-defense. It felt––it still feels––like life or death.
Death is, after all, right there in the definition: the termination of a pregnancy after, accompanied by, resulting in, or closely followed by the death of the embryo or fetus. And you don’t have to look very far into the history of its origins to see the outlines of the battle between life and death, and specifically, whose life gets precedence.
Abortion is an old word. Unlike a lot of old words, it hasn’t changed very much. It comes from the Latin word abortionem, one of the definitions for which is the delightfully whimsical phrase: procuring of an untimely birth. It contains the root word aboriri––”a compound word used in Latin for deaths, miscarriages, sunsets, etc.” (I find this idea bizarrely comforting: abortion as sunset). Abortion’s etymological roots go back at least two millennia, probably longer, and it meant the same thing then as it does now: the ending of a pregnancy, either by accident or on purpose.
The history of abortion as a procedure mirrors its history as a word: the ability to end a pregnancy has been passed down through most of recorded human history––the oldest record of instructions on how to induce an abortion are from as far back as 1550 BCE––which is not surprising, given that pregnancy was literally a matter of life and death (it still is: the maternal mortality rate is worsening in the U.S., especially for Black women, who are three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes).
I can’t decide whether abortion’s staying power comforts me or not. The idea that people have been finding ways to abort their pregnancies all this time and will keep on doing it (the lucky ones, anyway). I would be more comforted if its history were in any way linear. But it’s not. Like most historical arcs, the history of abortion is not of oppression followed by freedom; it is freedom followed by oppression, followed by freedom, followed by oppression. We were free once––if not entirely, because freedom in this country always depends on access––and now we are less so.
Which is the other definition of abortion: an interruption that causes something to come to naught. An arrest of development leading to imperfection.
I started writing this after Roe v. Wade fell; I finished it as Kansas voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed state legislators to ban or significantly restrict abortion. I am revising it months later, with half a year’s worth of knowledge of what a post-Roe world looks like. It looks bad. There have been some steps forward, mostly in the form of decisive voter rejections of efforts to curb abortion freedoms, and many steps back, mostly in the form of elected officials ignoring the will of voters. But the political setbacks don’t haunt me nearly as much as thinking about every single person who needed an abortion that couldn’t get one. Each of those political steps backward represents so many individual apocalypses.
An arrest in development, indeed.
It’s a strange feeling, knowing that a fundamental physical right you once had is being stripped away. In the days after Roe v. Wade fell––even that word fell, the way it sounds both like an accident and like an act of war, a city falling under the onslaught of an enemy force––my body felt both too empty and too full. The potential it held was suddenly heavier and way more terrifying. It made me feel insubstantial, like I could be blown away by a positive sign on a pregnancy test.
It still feels like that, despite the fact that abortion is still legal where I live, despite the fact that I have an IUD and am thus unlikely to become pregnant, despite the fact that I know that were either of these things to change, odds would still be good that I’d be one of the lucky ones, the ones who could still probably buy their way to accessing one.
Even still, it haunts me. When I look at my body, sometimes I imagine it changing without my permission, adapting itself painfully to a pregnancy I don’t want. When my heart races, as it still sometimes does, I imagine how pregnancy might cause it to riot fully out of control in a way it hasn’t since I was in my twenties. I find myself getting angry about the fact that people aren’t talking about abortion enough (which is pretty hypocritical, considering this whole thing started about my own discomfort in talking about it) and when they do talk about it, I still get angry. I get angry if they focus on the positive (it’s not better just because we have access to medication abortion and people can travel out of state, especially when you consider the impact the increased surveillance state is having on people in states where abortion is illegal!!!) or if they focus on the negative (people can still get abortion medication mailed to them, don’t freak them out by talking about coat hangers!!!!). I get maybe the most angry whenever anyone discusses abortion in theory. Because it’s not a theory, I want to yell (and sometimes do), it’s a need. It’s fundamental.
So fundamental that it has stood here, this harsh old word that I have so much trouble saying, unchanged through two whole millennia, functioning as a blaring exit sign for anyone who needs it. And so it will stay, I guess, though fewer of us will be able to walk through it freely, and more of us will never make it through at all.
That analogy fails, as all analogies having to do with abortion inevitably do. There is no language I can imagine that would be able to accurately convey the alienation, the violation, the utter fucking panic of being forced into ceding the territory of your own body, and thus there are no words I can imagine that would accurately convey the fundamental need for abortion. How do you convey all of that in a word? You can’t. Even the word abortion, stalwart as its stood all these centuries, can’t manage it.
But I’m going to keep trying to say it anyway.