Prosecuting miscarriage is a crime

For Selena Maria Chandler-Scott

TW: Pregnancy loss

One November morning I was seated at my desk in my bedroom, writing my morning joke assignment for the late night TV show where I had worked for half a decade when I felt the smallest, barely perceptible sense that something was suddenly falling.

It wasn’t quite vertigo, it was an interior drop.

An instant later, I felt a rush of warmth, a tiny pain, and then the cold nightmare of a puddle.

I was two months pregnant.

In those two months, I had changed my life entirely. I had walked around imagining a new life for us all. Here’s where we’ll be careful of cars whipping around the corner. Here’s where we’ll walk to see the sunset. Here’s the park where we’ll lay out a blanket.

I had thrown out any cosmetic that so much as SEEMED like it might contain a “toxin.” I had, of course, stopped drinking coffee or wine and I crossed the street if I noticed someone who even vaguely looked like they might vape or smoke in my general airspace. I spent hundreds on prenatal vitamins and homeopathic nausea cures and ginger tea and special pillows and new bras and pants to accommodate everything swelling and shifting and growing along with this flickering potential for new life inside me.

I had walked around the second bedroom in our house and thought of where the crib would go — on the far wall away from the window, away from the drafts and light. I told my parents. My mother and I wept on the phone. “A baby! After so long. After so much heartbreak. A baby. The baby.”

The names were a constant poem.

Rose for a girl, Sam for a boy. Rose if you’re a girl, Sam if you’re a boy.

Rose Bell, Sam Otis

Rose Mary, Sam Louis

Rosemarie

Rose Dorothy

Dorothea

Thea Rose

Otis Samuel

I had peed on various sticks for a year — not pregnant, negative, frowning face, one line. And this, this clear positive, this double pink, this digital smile, this “PREGNANT” in the display window — this was a constant wave of anticipated joy. This was the universe made right all by the random fusing of cells in the right way at the right time sticking to the right place. This pregnancy was the closest I had felt to the presence of the divine.

“Our miracle,” we’d say, rubbing my barely barely barely showing stomach at night. “Our tiny love.”

And now — in the puddle, a few feet from that bed, in the bright Los Angeles sunshine, birds tittering wildly, the cat asleep at my feet, my husband making decaf a few rooms away, my phone nowhere, I felt the profound isolation and hopelessness and frantic disbelief of an astronaut cut from the space station, untethered from any possibility of the known world.

I walked to the bathroom, a few paces, a few hours, a few weeks, a few seconds, legs working, red pooling, the cat suddenly frantic, racing, aware.

The rest is gone.

The rest should not end with me in handcuffs.

The doctor’s appointment, the blood draw, the phone call about HCG dropping, the two numbers that stacked together mean sorrow, the soup, the soup, the soup the Downton Abbey the couch the call from my mother where we wept again the blankets the jokes I wrote anyway, the jokes I turned in, the jokes that made it to the fucking show that night.

It was a Thursday. I went back to work Tuesday. I collapsed into my friend’s arms in our office and a few minutes later she solemnly brought me a Pamplemousse La Croix and we laughed until we cried.

The torture of deleting the due date from the calendar. Deleting the Apple Note “Sam Rose Dorothea Otis Thea Rose Sam Samuel Cy Sam Rose Bell”

The cruelty of the app that let me know it was the size of a grape. I know. I saw. My tiny grape. My universe in a single grape.

The cruelty of G-d. The cruelty of the Los Angeles sun. The cruelty of the other bellies buoyant with my own lost hope suddenly everywhere, at yoga where I cried, at the grocery store where I cried, in the parking lot where I cried.

The crushing, unrelenting cruelty of guilt.

I shouldn’t have ran up the stairs I shouldn’t have stopped short I shouldn’t have lifted my computer bag I shouldn’t have eaten sausage I shouldn’t have gotten so upset about the Kavanaugh hearings I shouldn’t have flown to Chicago I shouldn’t have worked I shouldn’t have stressed I shouldn’t have gone to yoga I shouldn’t have moderated the event I shouldn’t have used the microwave I shouldn’t live, how can I live, how can I put one foot in front of the other knowing that I am a vessel of death, the same body that walks is the body that killed the possibility of hope.

The guilt is a life sentence.

I wrote this to illustrate that if at any point the police had gotten involved, it would have been the internal hell made external. It would have been state-sanctioned torture.

The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution plainly states: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

The most unusual punishment imaginable is prosecuting a patient for a spontaneous medical event. The most monstrous act of cruelty imaginable is to punish grief. When a miscarriage is punishable by law, the state has turned into a judicial grim reaper.

This is the MAGA agenda. The party of small government seeks to rip people experiencing the lowest depth of misery off the bathroom floor and lock them away.

If you have been forwarded this letter by someone who wants you to reconsider voting for a Republican in the midterms, and if reading this brought you closer to the experience of miscarriage, I am glad my pain can make visible the suffering of people so much less privileged than I am.

I was lucky to live in California. I was lucky to have a doctor covered by my insurance who would get me right past the tripwire of emergency room reporting. I am writing this as a lucky person keenly aware of how unlucky our nieces and daughters and friends will be in the exact same situation if the MAGA agenda takes hold.

They are hoping our pain remains invisible so they can shift the tragedy to a fetus over six weeks gestation. I am making this pain visible as a counter-narrative to the ghoulish insistence on fetal personhood, which by definition subsumes the personhood of its vessel.

You can vote to sanction torture, or you can vote to preserve the sanctity of the constitution, and the possibility of life. Of carrying another hope that becomes life.

When I hold my two perfect children, beautiful and full of the wonder of the universe, the hope of the world, and I am so glad my life didn’t end after that morning in the bathroom. And I am so sorry Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was not afforded the same grace that I had. The same personhood.

When I protest on April 5th, it will be in her name. When I vote in the midterms, it will be in her name.

I hope you will join me.