MY BODY IS MY COMPASS, and it does not lie. As women, we are quiet about our personal lives, especially when it comes to sex. We are quiet because there is a history of abuse and harm committed toward those who tell the truth. Marriages are shattered. Families are broken. Judgments are rendered. The woman stands alone. Our stories live underground.
Muriel Rukeyser asked the question “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.”
The world is splitting open.
On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first family planning and birth control center on 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Nine days later it was raided by police. Margaret Sanger, the leader of the modern-day birth control movement, spent thirty days in prison. She would be arrested seven more times in her eighty-seven years of living, for speaking out on behalf of a woman’s right to birth control and the privacy of her own body.
H. G. Wells stated at a 1931 dinner speech in Margaret Sanger’s honor, “The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time in controlling man’s destiny on earth.”
When we were children, we visited Mother in the hospital. We were told she was having “corrective surgery.” Later I learned she made the decision to have her tubes tied, not a common practice among her peers. “Freedom,” she said.
Birth control gave me my voice. It is perhaps the only thing in my life about which I have been utterly responsible. I have never had an abortion, but I was grateful to have that choice before me. I was a senior at Highland High School in 1973, when the landmark case Roe v. Wade was decided in the Supreme Court. It was a decision that gave us confidence as young women entering sexual maturity that we did have control over our own bodies.
No woman terminates a pregnancy easily. No one who has ever felt life inside her can negate that power. It is never a decision made lightly, without love or pain or a prayer toward forgiveness.
Because what every woman knows each month when she bleeds is, I am not pregnant. Because what every woman understands each time she makes love is, Life could be in the making now. Which is why when a woman allows a man to enter her, it is not just a physical act, but an act of surrendering to the possibility that her life may no longer be hers alone. Because until she bleeds, she will check her womb every day for the stirrings of life. Because until she bleeds, she wonders if her life will be one or two or three. Because until she bleeds, she imagines every possibility from pleasure to pain to birth to death and how she will do what she needs to do, and until she bleeds, she will worry endlessly, until she bleeds.
If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
No, I have never had an abortion, but I know the tenderness of many women who have. It is much more common than we choose to admit. We have gone underground. This is the conversation we are not having. The abortions we have experienced are an intrinsic part of who we are and what we have become. And it is deeply private. Just recently I learned that three of my closest friends have had abortions. It is not something we ever discussed. One involved a genetic disease, another was a situation that would have imperiled her marriage, and another was a pregnancy in college that would have changed the course of the woman’s life. We can take responsibility for our own fertility, but it is never 100 percent, and so when birth control fails us and passion enters in, suddenly we are faced with the responsibility of a life. We make a choice. This is our spiritual and legal right in the United States of America. We deserve to make this choice without the judgments of others.
There is nothing abstract about giving birth. There is nothing more sobering than for a woman to place her hands on her belly and wonder what is the right thing to do. It is always about love. It is never done lightly. And there is nothing more demeaning to women than to have a man, especially a man we don’t know, define the laws that will govern our milk and blood.
Milk and blood.
Why these two words?
Because milk—as in cow as in breast as in semen as in any substance that nurtures and nourishes at once—is at the heart of pleasure. Because we drink deeply. Because we drink deeply out of need and desire.
Because blood, as in flow as in menses as in moon as in cycle, means I am not pregnant. Because what every woman understands each time she makes love is, Life could be in the making now. Which is why, when a woman allows a man to enter her, it is not just a physical act, but a spiritual one.
Milk and blood.
Because milk is what we desired first. Because blood is what flows through our working heart. Milk and blood. Men and women. Pleasure and pain. Love is to life what life is to death. And so we risk everything trying to touch the ineffable by touching each other. Over and over. Again and again. With little control, we lose our minds as we lose ourselves in fire.
If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.
What a woman never forgets is when she allows a man to make love to her, she enters a pact with angels that should a child be conceived in that moment, she holds the life of another. A man can come and go, he pulls out and walks away. But a woman stays and remains tender. She wants to be held. She wants to talk. She wants to revisit that motion made inside her because in the lovemaking, a woman is remade—because until she bleeds, she knows that man is the father of her child whether she ever tells him or not. Because until she bleeds, her body has been rearranged through his ecstasy and hers, which will now become theirs. Because until she bleeds, repeat it again, she will check her womb every day for the stirrings of life. Because until she bleeds, she wonders if her life will be one or two or three. Repeat and repeat, because until she bleeds, she imagines every possibility from pleasure to pain to birth to death and how she will do what she needs to do, and until she bleeds, she will worry endlessly, until she bleeds.
Milk and blood live together.