by Sophie Strand
image featuring Music Pink and Blue by Georgia O’Keefe
Once again, our governments and the Orwellian-speak pro-lifers (who are anything but pro-life),
have slotted abortion into the monochromatic hell realm of dualisms. When we are wildly
defending our basic bodily autonomy, we aren’t just losing abortion and reproductive justice. We
are losing the multi-hued lunar-lit reality of choosing to end a pregnancy. We are losing the
multiplicity of circumstances that create the need for abortion, and the possibilities and fertility
that emerges from its safe availability. The many different ways it saves and informs people’s
lives. It forces those of us with wombs to deny the complexity of the experience. The ancestral
inheritance of abortion. The power and intensity of saying, “No. I cannot bring another being
into this world.” I want to argue that abortion is fertile. It was the soil that grew my life and my
survival. My abortion saved my life. And it made my life.
I want us to safely be able to access abortion. And I also want to plant our abortions in circles of
curiosity. In healthy dirt. I want to learn how to hold it with other people. How to talk about it
without shame.
We live in a culture where the debate about whether or not abortion should exist
obscures our ability to ritualize, honor, and root an experience that is as old as vaginal birth.
What is it actually like to have an abortion? There is no right answer. There is a polyphony of
answers. Many discordant, sometimes converging, sometimes harmonizing songs of how abortion
is more-than-human. When you choose to give up a child, you are also choosing to leave behind
space not just your own life, but for other species lives.
In the spirit of adding more texture to this conversation, more color, I want to offer how my
abortion planted me in feral and generous world of kin.
Nineteen years old, post abortion, I felt like a tidal being, liquid with a mixture of profound relief
and grief. I was conscious that my body, according to my particular set of animist beliefs, had
registered another life. This is not a statement of fact. Everyone experiences birth and abortion
and miscarriage differently. A weather system had passed through my body. I was changed and I
wanted a way to honor that change in a way that wasn’t articulated in the highly polemical world
of politics.
I arrived at a practice of my own making, scraped together from the Tibetan Buddhism that had
permeated my early childhood. Within Tibetan Buddhism, there is a belief that, in-between lives
a soul passes through seven (or six depending on which frame you use) liminal realms or
“bardos”. It is customary for those still living to pray for the departed for 49 days, ensuring safe
passage into the next life.
With little guidance from spiritual mentors or peers, I decided to “plant” my released child for 49
days. In 49 poems. And in 49 other beings. I wanted to see my abortion as a gift of life to other
beings. That spirit didn’t become a human. Because I said no that spirit became the gift of other
being’s aliveness. I planted my abortion in the nuthatches picking berries outside my dorm room
at the time. I planted my abortion in the lilac bushes grown scrubby and anorexic mid-winter. I
planted my abortion in the mycelial networks dancing under each of my footsteps. “Live a life as
a bluebird, a virus, a racoon. Be safe inside fur, inside snakeskin. Inside this wide welcoming
world.”
The ritual made me realize that sexist politics informed by colonialism has conflated fertility and
birth with pregnant wombs. Paradoxically, my abortion was a womb giving birth to me. To a
wider sense of what kinship was available. On day 49 I felt solid again. My shorelines thickened. I
hiked down to my favorite look out on the river and a red fox darted in front of me. “It’s you!” I
thought. And then I saw a vulture. “It’s you!” I thought. And then I breathed in and felt the chill
blue of winter air swimming in my blood. I put my hand to my belly. I didn’t need to give birth
to that child to be that child’s mother. I could mother it every day by honoring and greeting the
world around me.
How did you honor your abortion? What practices and songs and books were part of that experience?
About the author
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com. And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.
