Eight miscarriages and a stillbirth: How my anti-choice mother survived her own beliefs

tw/cw: discussion of miscarriage, stillbirth, blood, medical neglect, surgical procedures, and anti-choice beliefs.

My father once went to jail. I grew up hearing this story told with whispered pride. He had stood up for his beliefs. He had been arrested for protesting abortion rights and access.

The early years

When my parents met in the mid-1980s, they were each entrenched in fundamentalist, Evangelical teachings and practices. My mother was living with a family that didn’t permit women to have second servings of food until the men had eaten their fill. Her husband-to-be kept literally running into her on the University of Wisconsin campus, because although legally blind, he had stopped wearing his glasses because he believed God would fix his vision. (God didn’t get this memo, and my dad did start wearing glasses and contacts again eventually.)

They were engaged within three months, married a year later, and conceived their first child six weeks after that. Everything happened quickly. When I was young, their engagement story sounded like a meet-cute, told with laughter and tenderness. It took time for me to see the disturbing parts of their swift romance, like the coded message in a magic eye puzzle coming…