“I did not feel I deserved to live. All I thought about was how I would kill myself, when I would kill myself. I wrote goodbye letters to my family, my good friend and my flatmate and researched the most efficient way to kill myself - I wasn’t going to make any mistakes. After all, if I can kill my baby, I can sure as hell kill myself - and I deserve it. Because I couldn’t even look after my baby when it was right there deep inside me.”
In the turmoil of the abortion debate, the to and fro between pro-choice and pro-life there are voices that are rarely heard. They are the women who have undergone abortions and have been horribly scarred emotionally and even physically as a result.
This is their book. Canberra-based journalist Melinda Tankard Reist has interviewed hundreds of Australian women from a variety of backgrounds in compiling this collection. Many of the women are apolitical, others would place themselves on either side of the abortion debate.
But Giving Sorrow Words is not a political book. It is a heartbreaking anthology of sadness. It does not see itself as the definitive word on the subject of abortion. Reist acknowledges that there are many women who have not experienced the sort of trauma depicted on these pages. But it does address a hitherto unacknowledged problem.
Abortion grief is a taboo subject. The fact that the author needs to justify her book and argue for its validity is an indication that the debate is often removed from the experience of real women. It is a politically incorrect topic as well. Women are expected to feel grateful for their right to choose and focusing on abortion grief is seen by some as ‘letting the side down’.
Giving Sorrow Words is a devastating book to read. Achingly simple in its composition, it focuses on the lives of eighteen disparate women with smaller excerpts from many others. All the women whose stories appear are united in the debilitating sorrow they have experienced post-abortion.
Attempted suicide, eating disorders and depression are among the symptoms described in the book.
Some had abortions shortly before the book was complete, others were suffering after forty years.
For many women the issue of choice was complicated by coercion. Spouses, boyfriends, parents and guardians, in many cases, required the woman to choose between them and the baby. Some were expected to abort or be disowned. For some younger women the decision was made for them. Yet they still experienced the guilt and remorse.
Poverty was another factor which was seen as robbing women of choice.
Many women spoke of inadequate pre-abortion counselling and a lack of compassion among doctors and nurses in abortion clinics.
Some women have recovered from their depression while others still labour with their pain, needing forgiveness but finding none.
For some, becoming pregnant again and having a baby was part of the healing process. Others received comfort in finding God.
One woman explained, “... my father in heaven who gave me my life back; forgave me and helped me forgive myself.”
Brutal and raw in its honesty, Giving Sorrow Words is an important book. It is not easy reading for it reveals a wounded society replete with fractured relationships and broken people.
