Anita Rao
If early aughts pop culture stood in for the public record, you might think women never go through with having an abortion. I remember watching Miranda in "Sex and the City" as she considered an abortion and changed her mind at the last second. And Juno —who got pregnant in high school — but was scared away from the procedure by anti-abortion protesters outside of a clinic.
But in reality, one in four women will have an abortion at some point in their lives. So while statistically there were certainly people I knew in real life who'd had the procedure, I didn't talk with anyone personally about their abortion until my early 20s. A few years out of college, a good friend of mine got unintentionally pregnant. I realized quickly that while my personal politics about abortion were crystal clear, my education was somewhat murky. How much would it cost? Would there be uncomfortable side effects? It wouldn't impact her ability to have kids in the future, right?
The good news is movies have become more representative in recent years. "Obvious Child," which came out in 2014, was a welcome education. An aspiring stand-up comic gets pregnant after a one-night stand and decides she has a choice. And while Hollywood has trained me to expect she'll change her mind at the last minute or be utterly devastated about the decision — none of that happened. That kind of representation shouldn't be revolutionary, but it is.
The politicized debate about abortion access distracts from the diversity of real stories about people who decide to terminate their pregnancies. Once you start talking to people, it's plain to see: no abortion story is the same.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
I never knew, mom, that you got an abortion after I was born until after Priyanka miscarried. And you just kind of threw it out there very off-handidly. And it was definitely a surprise to me. So I'd love to know more about it and why you've never really talked about it.
Sheila Rao (Anita's Mom)
Well, I really don't want to talk about it for the show. But I mean, to you personally, I can talk but not for the broadcast.
Anita Rao
There was more to this conversation that I'll share with you a little later on. But first: Where does my mom's discomfort with talking about abortion come from? Sure, there's her Catholic upbringing. But it's likely she was exposed to even fewer narratives about abortion growing up than I was. And it made me wonder how depictions of abortion have changed since my mom's generation.
Gretchen Sisson
We've been tracking film and television depictions of abortion stories over the past now over 100 years.
Anita Rao
Gretchen Sisson is a research sociologist. She works at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health Program at the University of California, San Francisco. And she watches a lot of TV for a living.
Gretchen Sisson
So if you are showing a character who's a teenager or a high schooler, and she's usually set up as having, you know, a really promising future. And because teen motherhood is so stigmatized, abortion becomes a more sympathetic or palatable option for a lot of audiences. So we do see those stories disproportionately.
Anita Rao
Also, it seems like for a long time representations were really in dramas — they were very dramatized. It was always a really emotionally fraught decision. And in movies like "Unpregnant," recently, it seems like there are more portrayals of people who feel in a pretty straightforward way. They get an abortion. They knew it was the right decision, and they move on. I'm curious about whether that is that because there are more comedies— are you noticing that storyline appearing more often?
Gretchen Sisson
So in the '90s and early 2000s, abortion stories were almost exclusively on drama programs — a lot on legal and medical dramas that were told from the perspective of a doctor or lawyer who was somehow involved in an abortion, legal case or medical decision, and fewer stories about the actual woman who was making a decision about a pregnancy.
Then we transitioned into more stories that were really directly about the women themselves. And then around 2014, with "Obvious Child," which was our first kind of film dubbed an abortion rom com. That sort of changed the tenor of a lot of stories. And since then, we've seen a lot more comedies — either dealing with abortion disclosures, abortion decisions, in less of a heavy handed, tragic way, and more in a matter of fact way. And even dealing with some sort of levity or bitter sweetness around it, so that it's not quite as fraught of a decision as it could be, which doesn't mean that it's flippant, but it means that we are seeing different types of abortion stories being told that recognize a wider range of emotional experiences around the decision.
Anita Rao
How about barriers to access? I mean, do we see that playing out in a lot of narratives? Does it parallel the existing barriers that are common around the country?
Gretchen Sisson
Yeah, so barriers are still under portrayed on television, particularly when you take out stories that are like set historically where the barrier is legality. So when you're talking about the barriers that women face today, they're very dramatically under portrayed. And part of that is because the biggest barrier that women face in the United States right now in terms of accessing abortion is cost. And you don't see a lot of stories about figuring out how people or characters are going to pay for their abortion.
But we have seen this sort of new trend of the abortion roadtrip movie and it's so funny because you know, six or seven years ago, when I started doing this work, I was like, you could have a buddy comedy with an abortion roadtrip, and all of a sudden, we had we had "Grandma" with Lily Tomlin that was a grandmother trying to help her granddaughter get an abortion. And then there was "Never Rarely Sometimes Always," which is another abortion bus trip movie about a teen girl from Pennsylvania going to New York City to get an abortion. And then you've had "Unpregnant" which is exactly this teen girl buddy comedy about a road trip from Missouri to Albuquerque, New Mexico to access the abortion.
Now, I think what these movies do a good job of is showing the work that goes into accessing abortion for so many young women. That doesn't necessarily make their portrayal of barriers the most realistic — both Missouri and Pennsylvania have judicial bypass procedures. They have abortion funds that these girls could have accessed to receive funding for their abortion. So there are more accurate ways of talking about the barriers and how women handle them in real life. But I will say — both of these films, these recent films that I'm talking about are very, very different. One is a drama, and one is a comedy. And they're in every way very different except for the plot details. But I do think that what they provide is a deeper conversation about the work women have to do to access abortion right now.
Anita Rao
So this brings us to the question that I guess we always ask when we're talking about representation, which is how much does it matter? How much does it really shape how people think about abortion, whether it should be legal, whether it shouldn't? I know you're kind of in the beginning stages of some research about this influence but what do you know so far?
Gretchen Sisson
Because abortion is so stigmatized in real life, there's a deficit of real abortion stories to contextualize what we think we know about abortion. So everybody knows someone who's had an abortion. They just don't necessarily know that they know someone who's had an abortion because it's so secretive. And in that way, fictional stories can be really powerful exemplars.
Anita Rao
Gretchen's research confirmed what my anecdotal experience shows as well. We do retain information from movies and TV. A sappy or stereotypical plotline can easily influence our ideas about abortion, especially if the people in our lives are reluctant to speak on the topic, which brings me back to my mom. As you heard earlier, my mom didn't want to have a conversation for this podcast about her experience getting an abortion. She knows that when I call her with my recorder running, I'm asking her to do what I asked everyone else on the show to do: get uncomfortable and vulnerable. But mom was unwilling to get into the details about the termination. And I totally understand. It is not something that everyone wants to talk about publicly. So it meant a lot to me that she and my dad shared something to help open up that space for conversation.
Satish Rao (Anita's dad)
The timing was going to make it extraordinarily challenging for us — the time we were in. And so we thought the right thing was to proceed in this fashion. And...
Anita Rao
Were there any, like, conversations that you all had after? Did you ever have any mixed feelings? Or was it very much like: We knew this was the right decision at the beginning. We felt that way the whole time. We always continued to feel that way.
Sheila Rao (Anita's Mom)
100% completely. Yeah ... No regrets at all. No conversations, no nothing. Just very matter of fact: This is what's happening. And after the procedure was over, really never talked about it again. Literally. Never talked about it again.
Anita Rao
Really?
Sheila Rao (Anita's mom)
So totally.
Anita Rao
That's interesting. Did you talk about it with anyone else in your life?
Sheila Rao (Anita's Mom)
No, no. Just like when you go, like, go for an OBGYN check. You know, they ask you and you'll say: Well, I've had, what, how many pregnancies and one termination. So you've got to give them your statistics. And just like, super matter of fact. And that's totally the truth from the bottom of my heart. Never, never even thought about it. Never. Life was way too busy. Too much going on. Sincerely.
Anita Rao
My mom decided to have an abortion when she was already a mother to two kids. That choice actually puts her in the majority. Almost 60% of people who have abortions are already parents.
Margaret
I think that is when a lot of people talk about abortion, they talk about it in a somewhat flippant manner. As if someone who needs to access an abortion hasn't really thought about it, hasn't really considered it. And I think that that is almost universally untrue. I think that everyone thinks it through [and] considers, you know, the pros and the cons, and, you know, what they need to do for their own life and their own family.
Anita Rao
Margaret, like my mom, was already apparent when she terminated her pregnancy. Her decision was not easy or uncomplicated. Margaret is also not her real name. She has concerns about health care privacy.
I first connected with Margaret through a support group for people who terminated wanted pregnancies for medical reasons. This is just one of many reasons why people choose to not carry to term, but it illuminates some of the obstacles and stigma that force abortion out of polite conversation.
Margaret
Well, I have a five-year-old daughter who is perfectly normal and happy and healthy. When I got pregnant again, everything looked fine. I went to my my anatomy ultrasound and found out that my son had a open neural tube defect, which means that the bottom of his spine did not close properly, and his spinal cord and nerves are completely exposed. And people do live with spina bifida, but it can cause a large range of disabilities. After we terminated that pregnancy, it actually happened again. We had another son that also had an even more severe case of spina bifida, in which we were not given a whole lot of hope. We were given the option to try fetal surgery — where they removed the baby and attempt to repair some of the defects. [It's] an extremely experimental surgery, and we would have had to move either to Philadelphia or San Francisco for upwards of a year to even try to pursue it. And we were not even sure we would be a good candidate. And we knew that it would not fix all of the problems that our sons would have. We also couldn't do that with a five-year-old child. So that's how we ended up at the place of terminating those pregnancies that we so absolutely, like you said, desperately wanted.
Anita Rao 13:46
We've talked a bit about access throughout the show. You were living in eastern North Carolina at the time that you chose to seek termination for these pregnancies. How did where you were geographically shape the options that were available to you?
Margaret
Yeah, it did hugely. Our first experience after we found out how severe our son's problems were was absolutely horrific. They didn't even bring up the option of termination, we had to do that ourselves. We had to find a completely different care system — a completely different hospital that would even give us the ability to discuss what our options were and what we could do that would be the best thing for our family. It was very, very difficult to access that in the rural part of the state.
Anita Rao
How did the timing influence your decision making?
Margaret
We were trying to gather all the information that we could about our son's condition and what we could do and where we could go. And we wanted to talk to the doctors doing the fetal surgery to see what those outcomes were like, but we also knew in the back of our mind that, you know, if we were going to be able to get this done in North Carolina, we only had until 20 weeks, and it was very difficult to navigate trying to get all of the information that we could in that timeframe. Also, my second termination, we found out that our son was very sick the week of Thanksgiving, and we couldn't get anyone on the phone to read us the 72-hour paper.
Anita Rao
That 72-hour paper is a common element in state laws limiting abortion access. It refers to a required script for abortion providers that includes details about services available during pregnancy, anatomical characteristics of gestation and possible adverse effects of both abortion and pregnancy. As of March 2021, 33 states mandate the physician to provide counseling prior to termination. In 12 of those states, it has to be in person. Here in North Carolina, the script can be read over the phone, but that doesn't mean things always go smoothly.
Margaret
We couldn't even get anyone on the phone to read us the paper because people were out of town for the holidays. And it just spiraled from there. Just being able to access the things that you need to access. When you're in a dire situation, that shouldn't be what you're worried about — finding someone to read you a paper. You should be worried about gathering the information that you need to make the best decision for you and your family.
Anita Rao
What has the process been like of navigating this choice within your partnership and within your family?
Margaret
One, I'm very, very lucky and and very happy that that my husband and I had, we had pretty much the exact same thoughts on this. We had a lot of the same, you know, fears and concerns. But also, those felt really strongly that, you know, our sons were, were going to be better off to not have to deal with all of the horrible medical complications that they were going to have. We were also fortunate to have, to have families who were extremely supportive of our decision. Extremely supportive of our choice. It is a little trickier in terms of friends, colleagues, and things like that. Most, most people don't know, they know that, that I lost the baby, but they don't they don't know exactly why or what happened.
Anita Rao
Margaret chose to remain anonymous while talking to us. But she's confided in some of the other women in her support group like Ruth, who also chose to use a pseudonym in our conversation.
Ruth
I came into a situation where a loved one of mine said: You know, what will you tell people? I think you should tell people that you had a miscarriage. And I just felt very disenfranchised by that statement. I felt like it was playing into this notion of shame and blame that we place on women in society regarding these kinds of terminations. And I guess when I say that, I mean that you're putting miscarriage in this kind of equation that removes the choice, right. And so in that way, it excuses us from judgment in the eyes of these people who suggest that we go on and tell people that we had miscarriages. That's not what happened. And in a lot of women's cases that we speak to in our support group, oftentimes these women prayed for miscarriages just to remove that decision from their hands, because it is so difficult to really reconcile with at the end of the day, these were pregnancies that we all wanted.
Anita Rao
Ruth made the decision to terminate after a prenatal diagnosis showed her baby had an 18% chance of being born.
Ruth
And, you know, after that 18% chance, the numbers just got smaller and smaller and smaller. Would we be able to keep her home? Would she be able to walk, talk hear, see? All of these things, the numbers just, you know, began to decrease. And we were told that it was a strike of lightning, and you know, it wouldn't happen again. And then it was our second pregnancy, we had a completely different diagnosis of medical issues.
Anita Rao
Ruth spent weeks traveling to several top specialists across New York State determined to find a way to keep the child. But for the second time, she terminated a wanted pregnancy.
Ruth
And at the time, I was about four months pregnant, and my doctor in Manhattan, she told me to go to the emergency room. And from there, I would be admitted to the hospital where we would have the termination. She did warn me that I shouldn't mention that I was there for a termination. And that kind of struck me as odd. As you know, I live in New York, I don't think of this as really an issue, right? She told me just to tell them I had experienced some bleeding, like, you know, a typical miscarriage symptom and to proceed to the ER and just tell them I wanted to wait for my doctor. And when we got there, I kind of felt like a thief in the night like I was hiding something. And I thought: I never felt like I would ever be faced with this kind of scenario, especially not in New York City. And when we got there, we were faced with judgment. In particular, one nurse looked at me and he said: We'll get to the bottom of this. And from then on, we spent the next 12 hours in waiting in the ER before we were admitted to the OR by this particular nurse.
Anita Rao
Our society's beliefs surrounding abortion are codified in law, but also in the fine print of insurance policies.
Ruth
With my second pregnancy, we were told that our child was incompatible with life. That's a diagnosis that no parent — or soon to be parent — ever wants to hear. But to complicate things further, to then go through a termination and receive a bill from your insurer for what I received was $42,000 bill. For a procedure that they deemed "elective" after a doctor told me that no doctor would would agree to, you know, have this child with me in a hospital setting. This was a baby that was incompatible with life. This would endanger my life. And it was sort of like we threw our hands up. How can this be deemed elective? How could I be billed for this as though I were having like plastic surgery? As if it were something that I walked in and planned and wanted? You know, when you choose to end a wanted pregnancy, it's quite a different feeling than ending a pregnancy you had never planned on having in the first place. And I think that mothers who go through this often don't talk about it because there's a large stigma and a severe amount of shame associated with these decisions.
Anita Rao
We found Margaret and Ruth through an online support group for people who terminated wanted pregnancies for medical reasons. If cost is a barrier to a safe abortion for you or a loved one, the national network of abortion funds may be able to help you can find the nearest office online at abortionfunds.org.
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. You can support the show and WUNC's other podcasts with a donation or membership at WUNC.org/give.
Thanks so much to Kaia Findlay, Grant Holub-Moorman and Charlie Shelton-Ormond for producing this episode. Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. Lindsey Foster-Thomas is WUNC's director of content. Our theme music is by Quilla. Thanks also to you for your support of WUNC and to Weaver Street Market, a worker and consumer owned cooperative selling organic and local food at four triangle locations. Now featuring online shopping with next day pickup: weaverstreetmarket.coop.
I'm Anita Rao on an exploration of our brains, our bodies, and taking on the taboo with you.
Are you surprised that I asked you about this?
Sheila Rao (Anita's mom)
Well, I just thought it was a very general conversation, but no, it's fine. Not a problem. We're all adults in the room we can have chats about this.
Anita Rao
Well, I just thought it was really interesting that you've never really talked to me or Priyanka about. And Priyanka and I have had multiple side conversations where we're like: Did mom ... Did they actually say that they did that did that? Did that actually happen? But [we've] never talked about it openly.
Sheila Rao (Anita's mom)
Okay. Well here we are.
Anita Rao
So in true Embodied fashion I decided to talk about it openly for the first time when the microphones are rolling. [Laughs]
Sheila Rao (Anita's mom)
[Laughs] Thank you. Never one to shy away from an awkward conversation.
Anita Rao
[Laughs] You're welcome.
Sheila Rao (Anita's mom)
You're welcome back. [Laughs]