The author at the end of her junior year of high school was raped. The photo is courtesy of Dina Zirlot.
My story is one that some already know, but for the sake of those who might not, it is best summarized by these three sentences. I gave birth to a baby when I was 18. When I was 19, my baby died.
I wrote an essay for HuffPost about my rape at the hands of a trusted friend and how it led to a crisis pregnancy and the birth of my daughter. I told you about how I was forced to give birth to her and watch her die after I was denied an abortion because she had a fatal neural tube defect.
At the time, Donald Trump was spreading misinformation about comfort care for babies with fetal anomalies and abortion care. I wanted to give an authentic perspective on how these choices are as personal as the circumstances that lead to them.
Alabama passed a six week abortion ban with no rape and incest exceptions. I condemned the politics that reduced our bodies to pieces of rhetoric and ignored our actual lived experiences.
My being interviewed for various programming both nationally and internationally was a result of these essays being shared. I have never regretted it, even when my story began to circulate in my local southern Alabama community and former schoolmates, friends, even family, took to social media with negative comments.
I have had difficulty asserting myself. In order to avoid confrontation, I try to predict what people want from me, but here I found it hard to predict. If you have already lived through one of the worst things that can happen to a person, anything less than total destruction is manageable.
At 11 years old, the author is playing dress-up, performing in her first voice recital, and getting ready to try out for cheerleading. The photo is courtesy of Dina Zirlot.
It is odd to tell the story of her life over and over. I couldn't say my daughter's name after she died. What was on the other side would fall out and crush me as I opened those doors. There was too much pain and not enough of me to hold it back, so I had to start figuring out how to survive.
I didn't like living with it for a long time. I don't always. All of the past clings to me when I look out into my future. For the hundredth time, I sit here and begin to write this all down, but I hate myself for trying to make sense of what happened to me and ZOE. I've been searching for a long time and haven't found a context that would make me feel less sad about being robbed of sexual agency.
Forced birth has affected the architecture of a life. I know what it's like to be in that hospital bed. I can still hear myself begging my mother and doctor not to make me do this, even 16 years later.
It wasn't easy. I became preeclamptic in a matter of moments. The alarms started to sound around me. I only had to lie there and breathe and breathe. I was warned by a nurse or doctor that I was going to be shocked.
I believe my mother asked what that meant because she heard about strokes and seizures. It sounded dead. I wanted it to be simple so that I could stop thinking and feel what was happening to me. One moment of pain and then a slur of nothingness. Both of us were unable to escape the suffering that was ahead of us, as we were both sustaining a shadow of a life.
My body was resistant to any pain medication. I had no feeling in my legs. I cried and told the doctor I didn't want to feel anything during the procedure. I don't want to find out.
Being chained to this birth through labor repulsed me because I didn't want to hurt myself. To be in the air, or the tick of the clock, or the cracks in the plaster, I had to disappear. Anywhere but the bed, with the thin hospital gown covering my bare body and the monitors strapped onto me and the IV pumping, and the kind of hurting that requires your presence.
I was surrounded by people who were powerless to stop the assault of a powerless teenage girl. Pitocin contracted my muscles and forced me along a path I didn't want to go. There was no difference between the table in the kitchen where a boy pushed me down and raped me and the hospital bed where I delivered my baby.
I have never forgiven my body for betraying me. I can't stand to wash myself or remove my clothes on my own. I have to sleep in bras because the feeling of a shirt moving against my chest reminds me of being naked in the hospital. I don't like my body for it doesn't feel like my own
The girl who entered the labor room wouldn't be the same person who left. Time began to take with it the person I could have been, as time began to tear through her life. There were experiences and possibilities that died in that room.
The author was at a cheerleading competition. The photo is courtesy of Dina Zirlot.
I quit high school because I was afraid of my abusive father. I had struggled to fit in with my peers, but now they were so far apart that I couldn't. I was able to get into my local college with a GED, but the depression and anxiety would tear me back down to size. I spent a lot of time in hospitals.
I was too hypervigilant to achieve genuine rest due to the constant risk that she could suffer a fatal seizure at any time. I was afraid of who they might know so I didn't want to be close to them. Who would they tell? I was what took Dina's place because I didn't know how to relate to her.
I was still in high school. I wanted people to look at me and think it was worth their time. There were things that were special about the Dina before the one who lived in her place. I was no longer good at being afraid.
It was impotent rage that I had lost, not only my personhood, but smaller things as well. My sister took graduation portraits. A person is walking on the stage. Buying furniture for a dorm. Being indifferent to a roommate. I wanted to attend Troy University, try out for their vocal ensemble, go to a party, and find freedom from the strict custody schedule of divorcing parents.
I had ambitions to become a journalist, go into politics, become an ambassador, and more. I was on the verge of losing my mind. These things were important to me. I didn't have a clue how something I spent years working toward could be destroyed.
The possibilities were ended by the birth of ZOE. The only viable option was to study nursing. I had a child to take care of for however long she lived, and the best way to alleviate her suffering was to learn more about how to treat it. But then she passed away. I didn't have anything at that point.
ZOE was not long after her first birthday. The photo is courtesy of Dina Zirlot.
I left college after a short time. I couldn't keep up with class. I didn't sleep as well as I used to. I was desperate to get away from my reality. When I couldn't get out of bed, I stopped showing up for work and quit. I was scared to say no to the men I worked with. I was afraid of being taken over by someone.
I got married when I was 20, and of course there was love, but I think he was aware that part of it was about escaping. He loved me even though I was quiet. I became a mother because it seemed like the natural progression of events. I tried to forget that I had dreams of my own when I was grieving and traumatizing. I was able to make it past the first birth of our daughter, who had red hair and big blue eyes, but with our second daughter, I was broken.
Too much was present. There was too much on top of too little.
It's difficult to remember much of that time. I had a hard time remembering the first year of our daughter's life. I remember planning how I was going to end my life, but I don't remember my daughter's first step.
It is important that you understand that there will be no end to this grief. The price I paid to try and survive this is the foundation of everything else. The shape of my love is different because of grief. It stretches in a number of ways that it shouldn't. I'm on the other side of it. I know that my trauma will affect my children's lives as well.
I wonder what my daughters will think of me when they perform the autopsy of their childhoods to find out why they became who they are. I wonder if they will give me grace and understand the wounded core of a mother who tried and who, despite everything, loved them fiercely.
I'm attempting. It feels like my grief is what makes up the bones of this house and traps everyone inside.
Three of the author's daughters were born after ZOE. The photo is courtesy of Dina Zirlot.
My youngest was in the back of the car. She wanted to know if I was strong.
I was thinking about myself as she wondered if I could put our pitbull in her lap. I was thinking about how I had cried while cleaning the toilet next to the bleach and the rubber gloves, and how I was not happy.
The thought crept into my head as I was there. The bits that were left behind were what made me. She is still there when I come back, even though I try to put distance between us. It was right where I left her. I want her to be at peace because she has been through enough. I can't.
I have to stand here and listen to pundits and judges debate the question of whether or not I have the right to privacy in my body. It doesn't stop. How am I supposed to come to terms with the person I have become as a result of being dispossessed of their rights?
I used to be so consumed with the other traumas involved in my experience that I was afraid to ask people to care about my lost identity. I didn't know how to recover from my rape and the lack of agency I had in the birth, until recently. I don't know if I can convey the violence of forced birth and how it sets off a chain reaction that will echo into the rest of a person's life.
To the Supreme Court justices who just overturned the abortion law, I want to know how to reconcile ownership to this body that has been overtaken many times. Would you let your children use this? How can you sleep when you know you have assigned someone's fate to them? How is it possible that thousands of families would be condemned to the trauma of forced pregnancies and births? You're paying in our blood. It doesn't preoccupy you all the time.
Do you have an answer for me? These aren't rhetorical questions I am the person with the fingernails and a heartbeat. I have experiences and feelings and a reality that is fixed with limitations. These aren't things that you can just regulate into nonexistence and expect them to fit in with the rest of the world.
You already know this and don't care.
I am little more than another pound of flesh against an extensive anti-abortion agenda that predates my own birth, and these words will probably never make it to their intended recipients.
I might be best that you don't know me. I don't have a lobbying firm or organization to represent me and I am not a famous writer. I don't matter in the world. It is because of this fact that I would encourage you to read these words and think about the future you have created, for one terrible moment.
A lot of people like me will be affected by the decision to overturn the abortion law. Forced birth and forced parenting have given me opportunities and possibilities that I didn't have before. The family is a paycheck-to-paycheck one. Minimum wage work is what I am qualified for. When the kids fall sick, we need to spend money on medicine and co-pays. You would obligate me to another if I couldn't afford the mental health care to treat the post traumatic stress disorder from the first birth.
It's not a matter of opinion for me to experience and think about them. You can't take my life and draw different conclusions from it, just as you can't take a person's desire to abortion and reduce their motives to some vague annoyance.
You won't get ownership over us if you diminish language or fear tactics. You are unremarkable in every way, yet capable of such atrocities, so I don't think you are much more than that. In exchange for sympathetic adjudicature, this is all I have to give you.
The only thing I have is my words. They are not worth anything to me.
She is a stay-at- home parent. She lives in Alabama with her family. She likes to bake and decorate cakes with questionable degrees of expertise and taste.
Are you in need of assistance? The National Sexual Violence Resource Center has an online hotline.
The article was first published on HuffPost.
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