Grudge of the Week—Roe and the Mother: Dual Anniversaries
May 2, 2022. Twelve days postpartum. Ten pre-dawn mornings since I pressed my hands to the low curved ceiling inches from my face and realized I had woken up in an MRI machine. Eight nights back in my own bed.
My baby remained in the hospital’s Level II neonatal intensive care unit with her moderately premature comrades born at 32 weeks or later. I missed her and I felt grateful for the rest, for the focus to alternate between Tylenol and Motrin every two hours for my C-section pain.
G’s delivery put an end to my preeclamptic nightmare, but like rent, my blood pressure readings were still too damn high. The systolic and diastolic numbers spiked when I missed a dose during one particularly long visit with G, lost as I was in the sensation of skin-to-skin contact and the focus on swaddling, changing, or feeding her.
“Stay ahead of the pain,” my kind nurse Thu said at the time. I left the hospital with a new prescription for Labetalol, which my drug sommelier, another title for a doctor, paired with the Nifedipine I’d been taking since the middle of my pregnancy.
I was at home, in bed, recovering from pregnancy and its various complications, when the news broke through my insular world.
“Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows,” the Politico story revealed.
Roe v. Wade was as good as gone.
The decision was not supposed to come out for a few more weeks. I had prewritten a draft to that effect for SELF magazine in what would be the final weeks of my abbreviated pregnancy. I didn’t know I’d be admitted to the hospital at 34 weeks, 4 days. The first nursing shift hooked me up to the magnesium drip that would prevent me from full-blown eclampsia’s seizure and stroke risk. Mag requires a liquid diet to mitigate the associated muscle weakness that can cause choking. I ate a hospital grilled cheese sandwich. And I dictated an email to my SELF editor, asking her to hold the story, come what may.
Now we’d reached the worst of what may come.
I do not remember how I dragged my hypertensive ass out of bed and crawled back in with my laptop. I made some minor changes and updates I don’t remember, either. I’d filed a pre-write for the fallout that every other reproductive rights journalist I respect predicted since the first Trump administration. I don’t think I touched my lede, the opening salvo of a news story.
“If you’re reading this sentence in the United States, your constitutional right to abortion will very likely come to an end by June.”
Four years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court officially overturned Roe. The Supreme Court didn’t give a damn about 49 years’ worth of legal precedent, nor the higher law of bodily autonomy. People have been having abortions since the beginning of recorded history, within the construct of edicts, statues, and rulings that come and go under empires that rise and fall.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization is the latest failure of man—in this case, five men and one fellow white woman central to the cause.
As I’ve written dozens if not hundreds of times, Roe was never good enough. The ruling legalized abortion nationwide, subject to terms and conditions that left out later abortion patients and often cut off Black and brown women’s access to care. A right without access is a right in name only. And yet, a right is important to name, to repeat, to shout. If you’re reading this essay, I want you to know that you still have the right to your own body, cis and trans, no matter the law of the land.
By June 24, 2022, Roe would be overturned and G would be home from the hospital. The morning after the Dobbs leak, I’d cradled her in the special care nursery. SELF posted my story to the magazine’s website as I held all four pounds, eleven ounces of her in my IV-battered arms.
Today, I write with the perspective of four years of parenting—specifically, the mothering variety. I celebrate and mourn the dual anniversaries that continue to shape me but don’t define me or limit the agency within each of us.
