Hello! Please consider supporting this newsletter to keep it going. That could be through a contribution, paid subscription, or if you aren’t able to financially support, through sharing it with your loved ones. Thank you. x
Trigger warning of violence, death, abortion and miscarriage.
1 in 3 women in the UK will have an abortion in their lifetime [source: gov uk, 2019].
Medical notes written in 1550 BCE were ‘discovered’ (robbed from) in Egypt in the 1800s and were bound to create the Ebers Papyrus. At 115 pages and 20 metres long, it is one of the oldest preserved medical documents on earth today. The ancient Egyptians wrote about the heart, depression, dementia, tumours, broken bones and burns, sativa, pregnancy… and abortion.
Remedies to induce abortion included smearing “a paste of dates, acacia, and honey to wool to apply as a pessary.”
Surgical options were only attempted in the late 19th century - up until then, through the ages pregnant people ingested herbs such as silphium (a now extinct North African herb), and the flowering mint plant pennyroyal. Sanskrit texts from the 8th century speak of women sitting over a steaming pot of stewing onions to induce abortion. Physical methods like ‘massage abortions’ (a very specific technique documented across Asia spanning back at least 2,000 years), weightlifting, and abominable binding have been documented across the Levant, India, Cambodia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Nigeria, England and New Zealand. Ancient Egyptians wrote about women diving into water, fasting, and partaking in strenuous climbing to induce abortion.
Long story short: In every society for which some recorded history exists, there is evidence of abortion dating right back to the beginning.
I’m not one for explaining a woman’s need for abortion - Mona Eltahawy (a favourite feminist writer of mine) said of her abortion experience: “It is important to share abortion stories that say simply: I did not want to be pregnant. In my case, I was not raped. I was not sick. The pregnancies did not threaten my life. I did not already have children. I just did not want to be pregnant. I did not want to have a child. I am glad I had my abortions. They gave me the freedom to live the life I have chosen.”
That being said, there is the terrible realisation that many women who are refused abortion will die due to health issues - mental and/or physical - or abusive partners. Fact: in the US, the leading cause of death in pregnancy is MURDER. I had to capitalise that because it’s fucking shocking, no? Pregnant women in America are twice as likely to die by homocide than via actual pregnancy-related issues and two-thirds of those deaths took place in the woman’s home, which indicates they were victims of intimate partner violence.
What happens in the US is relevant here, in England. I can bring it closer to home, all the way to my own hometown of the borough of Croydon. In 2020 26-year-old Kelly Mary Fauvrelle was 33 weeks pregnant and asleep in her home in Thornton Heath when her ex-partner broke in and stabbed her 21 times in her bed, killing her and their unborn child.
In September 2021, 31-year-old trainee solicitor and charity worker Fawziyah Javed was pregnant and on her honeymoon when she was found dead at Arthurs Seat in Edinburgh, an extinct volcano with a peak that stands at 843 feet over the city. Her husband was formally charged with his wife’s murder shortly after.
Her mother Yasmin said: "To lose a child under any circumstances would be painful, but when it's your only child and your unborn first grandson too, I have no words to describe my pain. We will never, ever get over this.”
If it’s not men trying to kill pregnant women, it’s the state under the guise of religion - which, to be fair, is also the patriarchy.
*
The death of Dr Savita Halappanavar in 2012 changed the landscape of Ireland, triggering abortion reform in the country.
Savita was a dentist living with her husband in Galway when she became pregnant with her first child, and she was 17 weeks pregnant in October 2021 when she went to the hospital with excruciating back pain. After receiving an examination the doctors told her she was having a miscarriage, but they refused to induce an abortion as the foetus still had a heartbeat.
Her husband said that the doctor told the Hindu couple “this is a Catholic country,” when explaining why she’d have to forgo an abortion and endure the pain as the foetus slowly died inside of her, leaving her in “agony” and deep distress for days as she developed maternal sepsis. As the doctors kept her in hospital to continuously check the heartbeat of the foetus, waiting for the inevitable, Savita got increasingly ill. Three days later the foetus was removed and Savita fell into a coma, went into septic shock, experienced failure of multiple organs and died of cardiac arrest on October 28th, 2012.
Telling a pregnant Hindu woman “this is a Catholic country” as an explanation for her impending death sentence stings. At the time, ethnic minorities made up 17% of the population of Ireland, but they accounted for 40% of all maternal deaths.
Emily Wasak, a founding member of Migrant & Ethnic Minorities for Reproductive Justice said at the time: “let us not ignore the role that racism plays in access to reproductive healthcare, on both a state and individual level."
Something that the US and UK have in common is the higher rate of maternal deaths for women of colour. Black women in the UK are four times more likely to die in pregnancy than white women, Asian women are twice as likely to die, and women with mixed ethnicities are three times more likely to die.
The Conversation reported: “While the largest inequalities were seen in the most socioeconomically deprived Black and South Asian women, adjusted data demonstrated that socioeconomic deprivation, smoking and body mass index (BMI) had little effect on outcomes for women from ethnic minorities.
“This means that a Black or Asian woman who is not poor, does not smoke and does not have a BMI outside the recommended range may still be at a greater risk of an adverse birth outcome than a white woman with a similar economic and health background. This points to racism as a cause.”
It’s important to not be shamed into silence and yet I still feel some form of unexplained shame as I type, something I’m trying to shed myself of, because I can’t write this letter and not speak about my own abortion. I was 17 years old when I found myself pregnant and unwanting of a child I’d conceived with an ex-boyfriend who was, to put it mildly, awful. I couldn’t bring myself to tell a caregiver, so a college friend of mine met me after I took the medical abortion pill in the clinic, and we walked to Speedy Noodle in Brixton because truth be told I was a kid and it didn’t even occur to me that I should go home, despite medical advice.
I started to feel abit strange over a bowl of noodles and so I jumped on the bus home, an hour long journey. Nobody was home and I felt feverish, so I dived into bed and hoped to sleep it off. Over the next few weeks I bled and I bled, every single day until three weeks later I collapsed on the floor, black spots in my eyes. I wish I’d known better, I wish I’d got myself checked out sooner instead of gallivanting around thinking it was akin to a heavy period, waiting for it to pass, when what was really happening was I was slowly hemorrhaging to death. That’s the thing though, isn’t it? Women are programmed to expect to feel pain, so I was dying and I didn’t know it, and assumed the feeling of bleeding to death was just a part of womanhood.
Eventually I saw a doctor who sent me straight to hospital and kept me there for numerous pints of blood transfusions over several days. Despite my experience I never regretted my abortion, even then, not at all. I would have done it three times over so not to be bonded for life to my abuser through a child we couldn’t look after. To be clear, what happened to me is rare; it can happen to 1 in every 1,000 women who have a medical abortion. I was just one of the unlucky ones, and I’m fine now. I suppose the lesson that could been taken here is don’t suffer through pain thinking it’s normal, you deserve medical care as a human right. And that’s what it’s all about - our human rights.
So what is really scary is to think of the women who have no choice but to venture down life-threatening routes because they’ve been stripped of any agency over their bodies through a patriarchal authoritarian state. They say you cannot ban abortions, you can only ban safe abortions, and that is absolutely true.
What’s next, and where next? Murica’ is feeling very Handmaids Tale.
I’ve written about the right to rage as a woman so many times across my newsletters and it’s something I’m learning to use as a superpower, instead of a poison. I’m gonna go back to what Mona said in her newsletter:
“Patriarchy wants to deny us a necessary response to injustice when it tells us that our anger is wrong or out of place. Patriarchy knows that our anger will hold it accountable. Patriarchy prefers instead that we perform a self-reckoning, one in which we turn anger not outwards where it belongs and can target injustice, but inwards. The result is that instead of using anger to destroy patriarchy and its injustices, anger will instead destroy us, with sadness and shame, self-hatred and trauma.
Refuse the currency of sadness. Sadness does not terrify patriarchy, anger does.”
‘’That’s the thing though, isn’t it? Women are programmed to expect to feel pain, so I was dying and I didn’t know it, and assumed the feeling of bleeding to death was just a part of womanhood.’’ <—- THIS! We need to stop acting that the pain we endure is the norm. And thank you for opening up about something that we should be able to talk about without shame. X