Many women find out they were mothers too late. I don’t mean an accidental pregnancy. I mean, they learn that they were mothers after they aborted the baby they were told was a clump of cells. This discovery causes great distress for all but the most amoral and sociopathic. Women are shocked to learn that they cannot forget the decision they made in haste, or by coercion, or by brainwashing.
The body doesn’t forget. The subconscious remembers everything.
Even the humblest woman makes an indelible mark on the future by becoming a mother. She influences a future generation, one child at a time.
Too little is written for these women. Feminists believe that no pregnant people like this exist. They play pretend. Watching the wildly theatrical pro-abortion crowd one gets the impression that they’re protesting too much. Underneath, there is pain they dare not speak, for to do so would be to tell themselves the truth: the dehumanized zygote, then embryo, then fetus is a baby and she killed it and in so doing, killed part of herself.
Some women breeze along and come to the realization when they decide to get pregnant with a baby they want. Then, the horror sets in. It’s even worse if the woman can’t get pregnant or suffers with infertility. It must be God’s punishment, she says to herself. How can God forgive me for murder?
God forgives at repentance. A woman, though, lives with her choice forever and may never forgive herself for what she’s done.
These women are mothers. They are forgotten and their pain denied.
I knew I was pregnant with my daughter before the positive test line showed up. How did I know? For the first time in my life to that point, I had heartburn that woke me up at night. How can a tiny multicellular creature that’s not producing enough hormones to turn a pregnancy test positive cause so much misery so quickly? In the middle trimester with said child, if I didn’t eat a pound of strawberries a day, I felt panicky. On one fateful night, I broke down crying in the car ride home because I needed strawberries.
With my first pregnancy, by about six weeks in, the smell of cooking chicken or pork made me throw up. I couldn’t handle it throughout my entire pregnancy. It took about five years before I could eat chicken again. My sense of smell was so strong, that one time, I had to leave the mall because I could smell every person who walked within ten feet of me. People do not smell good. I don’t know how dogs do it. But for about three days, I had the nose of a canine.
With my third pregnancy, Mexican food, anything spicy and hot, was not just wished for but needed. Yes, I felt ridiculous. How could my body transform so completely with each pregnancy? How could my children come out the chute with the same food preferences? It was and still is bizarre.
From the earliest moments of being with child, I was changed. Transformed. Another being was inside of me and that little turkey had his or her own preferences. Many days, I felt like I was along for the ride.
My body doesn’t like being pregnant. In each pregnancy I went into labor around 24-25 weeks. Women can still have abortions at that point. My twin sons were born at 24 weeks, five days. They were fully formed, breathing, crying babies. They had wills. My firstborn drove the nurses nuts because he would kick his leg out of the swaddling they were using to trying to keep him in a flexed position. He yanked, like all people do, at the intubation. No one likes being intubated. It’s not natural and if a being has any consciousness at all, they try to yank it out — even if the being is 750 grams (that’s 1.6 pounds).
Like so many other families, my children’s first photos of themselves in their baby books are the first ultrasound images. With each baby that came, the older sibling would look at the ultrasound, then look at my belly, and then hug me. There is a baby in there! They loved that baby.
The younger generation is more pro-life than the Boomer feminists who foisted Roe v. Wade on the nation. It’s no wonder! These children, if their mothers aborted, know that they dodged a bullet. They know they were babies, real humans, in utero. They have proof.
Texas passed its heartbeat law a last year. Beyond the shock that the bill actually passed, is the greater shock that no one protested much. Women are using the morning-after pill. Some women are leaving the state to get abortions. Attorney General Ken Paxton says 17,000 lives have been saved. Perhaps women are being more responsible. No matter the truth, this is a win for women and babies.
These mothers need support. All women feel insecure about pregnancy and motherhood. Certainly, first-time mothers feel insecure. Rather than reinforcing their fears, inconveniently pregnant women need encouragement. They can do this. They are doing this.
Girls grow up hearing about careers and how difficult motherhood is. Careers are great, but nothing compares to motherhood. They’re not told that they’ll get smarter, that they’ll avoid certain health problems, that they’ll become more efficient, that life will be better than they ever imagined. They’ll be surprised by their own bursts of creativity. They’ll be stunned by their ability to overcome — that they’re stronger than they ever imagined.
Each child expands a woman’s perspective. The interests of her children become her interests and she learns. There is, yes, terror, that no mother is a perfect mother and that the mistakes can be so permanent. But there is grace here, too. Motherhood necessitates forgiveness and grace. There’s no other way to get through it.
Too many women have been told stories of how motherhood diminishes a woman and limits her life. In fact, the opposite is true. Even the humblest woman makes an indelible mark on the future by becoming a mother. She influences a future generation, one child at a time. No masterpiece of art, no innovation of science can replicate or compare to the miracle that is one child.
A fearful lady rushing to the abortion clinic wanting to extricate herself from an inconvenient or shameful situation forgets these truths, but they come niggling back. Try as she might to forget, she wonders what might have been. The milestones pass and she remembers. She sees children the age her child would be and imagines his or her face.
In these reflective moments, the truth is manifest: She is a mother. She always was.
