MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

Certificate for Approving the Dissertation

We hereby approve the Dissertation

of

Siri R. Hoogen

Candidate for the Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

______Co-Director Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D.

______Co-Director Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

______Reader Vaishali Raval, Ph.D.

______Graduate School Representative Heidi McKee, Ph.D. ABSTRACT

CONTEXTS OF CHOICE: PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS OF MOTHERHOOD IN WOMEN’S ABORTION DECISIONS

by Siri R. Hoogen

Though women who have already had children make up over 60% of all women seeking abortions, common public discourse perpetuates the myth that women seeking abortions do not understand what it means to be a mother, do not know what it means to be pregnant, or are making irresponsible parenting decisions. The stories of mothers who are raising children and decide to terminate a subsequent pregnancy contain enormous potential to disrupt these discourses about motherhood and abortion. Here, tenets of feminist constructivist psychology and methods of creative ethnography including photo elicitation are combined to explore the complex personal, social, and political dimensions of mothers’ decisions to abort unwanted pregnancies. Five women were interviewed and performative narratives were constructed and reflexively and collaboratively analyzed to illustrate each woman’s process of building her personal construct of motherhood and how, or if, her construct of motherhood played a role in her decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. The stories indicate that women’s personal constructs of motherhood contain elements of individuality, commonality, and transition. In addition, each woman’s construct of good motherhood was central to her process of deciding what to do with an unwanted pregnancy: In short, each woman found that being a good mother meant, at least one time in her life, not continuing a pregnancy. Concluding thoughts demonstrate how narratives that complicate or disrupt social discourse can be directed toward the purposes of reproductive rights activism, explore the utility of photo elicitation as a narrative research method, and suggest future directions for research on the intersection of women’s personal constructs and the dictates of dominant social discourse.

CONTEXTS OF CHOICE: PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS OF MOTHERHOOD IN WOMEN’S ABORTION DECISIONS

A Dissertation

Submitted to the faculty of

Miami University in partial

fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Psychology

by

Siri R. Hoogen

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2010

Dissertation Directors: Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D. and Larry M. Leitner, Ph.D.

© Siri R. Hoogen 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS Prologue……………………………………………………………………………...... 1 Mother Variations……………………………………………………………... 1 Introduction…………...... ……………………………………………………….. 6 A Feminist Account of Abortion Literature…………………………...…...….. 9 Research and Discourse on Abortion……………………………………..…... 12 Feminist Criticism of Abortion Advocacy…………………………………...… 16 Related Discourses: Adoption and Infertility…………………………...……... 18 Orienting Theory: Feminist Constructivism…………………………………... 20 Feminist Constructivism and the Personal within the Social………………..... 25 Mothers Choosing Abortion: A Feminist Constructivist Study……………...... 28 Multimodal Research and Activism…………………………………………… 29 Method……………………………………………………………………..………...... 33 Orienting Theories and Ideals of Narrative Collection……………………….. 33 Ethical Concerns and Feminist Research Praxis……………………………... 38 Working Method: Generating Complicating Narratives……………………… 44 Analysis of Text and Presentation of Narratives……………………………… 50 Results………………………………………………..……………………………….. 52 Lilith’s Story…………………………………………………………………… 52 Of Chaos and Connection……………………………………………………... 64 Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision…………………………..... 68 Jane’s Story…………………………………………………………………..... 71 Of Perception, Pride, and Company…………………………………………... 77 Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision……………………………. 82 Ingrid’s Story………………………………………………………………….. 86 In Defiance of Limits…………………………………………………………... 95 Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision……………………………. 103 Maya’s Story…………………………………………………………………... 107 In Search of Family……………………………………………………………. 115 Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision……………………………. 122 Liz’s Story……………………………………………………………………... 125 Doing, Having, or Not………………………………………………………… 133 Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision…………………………… 140 Discussion…………………………………………………………………………….. 146 Feminist Constructivism and Narratives of Motherhood……………………... 146 Utility of Photo Elicitation as Method………………………………………… 156 Constructs of Motherhood and Potential Reproductive Policy……………….. 158 Limitations of This Project…………………………………………………….. 163 Future Directions……………………………………………………………… 165 References……………………………………………………………………………... 171 Appendix A……………………………………………………………………………. 181 Appendix B……………………………………………………………………………. 182 Appendix C……………………………………………………………………………. 185 Appendix D……………………………………………………………………………. 186 Appendix E……………………………………………………………………………. 187 Appendix F……………………………………………………………………………. 189

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Not knowing how to begin, I will begin at the beginning. Thanks to Max and to Rebecca, without whose births this project would never have been conceived. Their entrance into the world made me a mother and brought about the most radical shift in my world view: Now more than ever I am vulnerable, I am open, to life’s amazing potential for love, loss, pain, and joy. It is the most excruciatingly beautiful, terrifyingly wonderful gift I have ever received. Thanks to Lilith, Jane, Ingrid, Maya, and Liz, who laid bare the most intimate details of their lives and who let me take their stories into the world without shame or misgiving. Without their courage and generosity this work would not have been possible. Thanks to Sue and Cliff who shared some of their own story and helped me see the margins of devastation in parenthood. Thanks, too, to Julie, Rachel, Brendon, and Emily for their insight and effort in their work with the transcripts. Thanks to the staff of Planned Parenthood, who reviewed my proposal, hosted me in their workplace, answered my endless questions, and screened countless potential participants for this project. They did this out of their tireless dedication to the health and wellbeing of women and from their conviction that this project was worth their support. I am so grateful for their help on this project and also for their continuing efforts on behalf of women and their families. Many friends and family were supportive during the time I struggled over this task. I want to thank my advisors Ann Fuehrer and Larry Leitner for their direction, inspiration, and encouragement, which were instrumental in helping me form my identity as a feminist constructivist psychologist. Thanks, too, to my mother Marilyn Sizer for reading drafts and making gentle suggestions about the readability of my language, and to my father Dan Hoogen for his curiosity and interest in the narratives of mothers. I thank Bonnie for her company in the library and her unstinting support and cheer and Michelle for her unwavering faith in my ability to get this done. Finally, my thanks would be woefully incomplete without mention of my spouse Ethan Sperry, who has been my most constant champion, my most unwavering support, my cheer, my goad, my occasional enabler and sometimes nag. To Ethan, and to our children Max and Becca, I dedicate this work.

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Prologue Mother Variations A few summers ago, I walked with two gay male friends up a busy avenue in Manhattan, happily debating politics and social policies—agreeing, mostly, or arguing finer points in the satisfying manner of preaching to the choir. At some point, the topic turned to abortion. “I don’t know,” opined one. “If those girls would just watch those outfits they wear, abortion wouldn’t even be a problem.” “As if gay men are never slutty?” cried the other, clearly taken aback. I was silent and astonished. Why did I expect these men, who were otherwise liberally inclined, to be pro-choice? Their framing of the abortion debate as a problem and outcome of sexual promiscuity surprised me. I walked on with them, sweltering and mired in my own thoughts. I felt betrayed. Some time later I spoke to another man at a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood. He, at least, was unabashedly pro-choice: “After all,” he said, rolling his eyes, “it’s just a piece of tissue!” I had mixed feelings about his support. His comment echoed what I had believed for a very long time, during the period when I carried my pro-choice beliefs easily and thoughtlessly. Things changed, though, when I became pregnant myself. It was a wanted pregnancy, a struggled-for pregnancy. As many of my thirty- something friends had noted, it seemed unfair that after worrying so long about getting pregnant accidentally we found it so difficult to become pregnant when we wanted to. So when I at last had a positive pregnancy test I was ecstatic; when the bleeding started at seven weeks, I was crushed. I rushed to the hospital, I had blood tests done and an ultrasound performed. My spouse was out of the country at the time, so I wrote to him about it: I saw the screen when they did the ultrasound. I was worried, but then I saw the black pool of an amniotic sac amid fuzzy grey tissue. In that deep black pool was a small bright ring, like a glowing Cheerio. The technician said the ring was the baby’s egg sac. She printed out a picture for me to take home.

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For a day I marveled over that fuzzy black and white picture, thrilling at my little Cheerio in its black pool. But the next day my doctor called me in and told me that the glowing ring was likely not a baby at all, but only an egg sac. “There’s no fetal pole, no fetus,” he told me. He said that my ovum had probably not continued to develop after implanting, and that I could expect to miscarry in a few weeks if I did not elect to undergo an abortion sooner, to “start over fresh.” I took my Cheerio picture home, put it in a drawer, and cried. Two weeks later my spouse and I returned to the hospital for one last look to make sure of the diagnosis before scheduling a D&C. I told him about the Cheerio, and the blighted ovum, and how there probably wouldn’t be anything to see. He held my hand while the technician swiped gel on my bare belly. When the instrument swept low across my abdomen we heard it almost immediately, a swishing pulse faster than a rabbit’s. “Congratulations,” the technician smiled. “That’s your baby’s heartbeat.” * * * When my son was first born, I spent hours on my living room couch, nursing, or resting, or staring off into space. From my seat I could see the railing of the back deck, which overlooked a deep ravine. Seeing this railing troubled me out of all proportion. What if, I wondered, I lose my mind for just a moment and throw my baby over the edge? It didn’t seem unreasonable to me; anyone could lose her mind for the seconds it would take to walk those few steps and perform the fatal gesture. I sat on that couch feeling paralyzed by the magnitude of my responsibility and the terrifying potential of what would be lost if I failed. As my son grew older he became aware of and delighted by trains; I worried we lived too close to the tracks, and one day he might slip away to get a closer look and be killed. Cars passing too fast on the street, the pit bull living down the block, and, incredibly, the thought of a band of masked burglars breaking into the house brought more dire rumination. I hoped that my talent for imagining nightmare scenarios would disappear with the newness of motherhood, and they did eventually become less fantastical. I grew to feel that the payment extracted for this incredible attachment to my child—for the wonderful and profound love I discovered with him—was an equally profound and terrifying vulnerability to its loss.

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I experienced my new vulnerability as though motherhood had abraded my skin to a thinner and more sensitive membrane. The sensitivity attuned me to the vulnerability of other mothers, and I began to imagine tragedies I heard about as if I were living inside their skins. It was terrible to imagine the feelings of the mother accused of putting her infant in a microwave oven, or to contemplate the emotions of the mother whose enraged boyfriend swung her toddler, like a baseball bat, headfirst into a wall. I was haunted for weeks by the story of the mother whose toddler died of heat stroke after being forgotten in a hot car. Soon after that, I quit reading the news online and switched my radio dial to a music-only station. * * * A little more than two years later I was in a Planned Parenthood clinic, observing abortion services. I did so at the invitation and recommendation of the CEO, with whom I had been discussing the possibility of conducting research at the clinic in Cincinnati, the nearest clinic to perform abortions. She suggested I visit the clinic for several days, enough time to steep myself in the experiences of the women who come to the clinic and the staff who take care of them there. When I arrived I had to nudge my car carefully through the group of protesters outside, walking back and forth across the driveway with their giant posters of bloody fetuses held aloft. Inside, I spent time by the phones, listened to staffers answer questions and make appointments. I read the informational literature, mandatory in Ohio, about the abortion procedure and stages of fetal development. It was a daunting stack of paper. I studied the illustrations of the eighth gestational week and thought about how everyone here at the clinic has been so open and accommodating of me. I hadn’t told any of them that I was pregnant again. I suppose I was worried that they might try to protect me, or that maybe they might think I wouldn’t be able to handle watching abortion procedures if I was at a similar stage of pregnancy myself. When I was honest with myself, I didn’t know how I might respond, either. By the end of the day I had a lot more information, but any conclusions I might have come to were still complicated. One woman I observed was pregnant with twins. A single mother, she had two children at home already and was frantic at the thought of two more. Her abortion took a

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little longer than others but was still over in a matter of moments. When she was told it was done she began to laugh. “Thank God,” she said, and again, “Oh thank God. Oh, my God, oh, thank God.” She continued to laugh and seemed to shed layers of tension from her body. I smiled with her. Another woman was harder for me to sit with. She seemed nervous, and the physician paused repeatedly to ask her if she was sure she wanted to go through with the abortion, that she didn’t have to. She was early enough in her pregnancy so that if she left that day to think things over she could come back later if she decided she still wanted to terminate. At every point the woman replied, “No, I need to end this,” and the physician resumed. This continued through the minutes of progressive dilation and the few moments of quiet suction, followed by a loudly conclusive whoosh. When the woman was told it was all over, she began to sob. “I can’t believe it was so fast,” she cried. “It was so horrible to find out I was pregnant. It was such a big deal to figure out what to do…it took over my life…I just can’t believe that now it’s…over so fast.” The nurse gripped the woman’s hand while she cried and the physician patted her knees, murmuring comfort. My throat tightened, and I had to look away to blink back tears of my own. Later that day I visited the lab to observe the work of the technicians. I did not find it difficult to look at the pans of fetal remains. The medical technician guided me through her examination, pointing out the lacelike bits of incipient placenta and the remains of a ruptured yolk sac. In some pans I saw tiny arms and legs like the limbs of toy Kewpie dolls. In another pan, containing the remains of an older fetus, 14 weeks, I saw a spine attached to a translucent cage of ribs. Everything was shades of soft coral and pink and looked nothing like the maroon carnage on the posters carried by the protesters outside. I know that a lot of it looked very like the baby I was carrying then. Despite this, my eyes remained dry and I looked on with interest. When I left at the end of the day, my thoughts flew to a hospital a few miles away. My friend was there, suffering the end of her pregnancy at 20 weeks. I had cried for her daily since I learned she had a premature rupture of her membranes a week ago, and that one of the infant twins she was carrying had died. I had cried for her and her

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spouse when he told me of their decision not to try to continue the impossibly odds- against gestation of the other twin. Before I left the clinic that day, I sat in my car and thought about her across town, laboring to deliver the bodies—one dead, one doomed— of her tiny sons. It was a long time before I could see clearly enough to drive home.

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Contexts of Choice: Personal Constructs of Motherhood in Women’s Abortion Decisions

In most research, the goal is to gather enough information to reduce complexity into something more comprehensible: rules, or theories perhaps, something to lend order or predictability to the confusion of life. But I would be hard pressed to form a single rubric under which I could classify my feelings about pregnancy, and the ending of pregnancies, that I described above. Yet much of the common cultural discourse about pregnancy and abortion—on both the pro- and anti-choice sides—seems bent on simplification: It’s a baby. It’s just a piece of tissue. The termination of a pregnancy is a relief. The termination of a pregnancy is a tragedy. Can any one of these discourses adequately describe even the brief collection of experiences above: my glowing Cheerio, the pans of fetal remains, the laughing woman, the conflicted woman, and my grieving friend? I wanted to explore the complexity in women’s choice to have abortions. I never thought choosing to terminate a pregnancy could be an easy decision. I bristled at anti- choice intimations that women would ever choose abortion as a form of birth control, and when I first imagined this project, I imagined also the stories that would make this tired accusation patently untrue: stories of women who chose abortion after rape, or after incestuous abuse, or because their lives or their fetus’ lives were in danger. These three scenarios are the ones pro-choice proponents often put forward when advocating for the continued legality of abortion. This makes some sense, because most people, even those who would otherwise consider themselves anti-choice, would allow the procedure for women under these circumstances. The problem, however, is the vast majority of women who choose to have an abortion do so under different circumstances (Finer, Frohwirth, Dauphinee, Singh, & Moore, 2005). Making the argument of abortion contingent on stories of extreme circumstances misleads the debate and dishonors the experience of the women who felt they had to choose abortion for other reasons. It also falls into the trap of oversimplification, of minimizing the complexity of problems in individual lives in favor of promoting the “hard cases” everyone might understand. Indeed, anti-choice agencies have seized upon the notion of differentiating “hard cases” from other, presumably

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frivolous, circumstances: Under the “quick facts” link on the National Right to Life website is the complaint that “women have cited ‘social reasons,’ not the mother’s health or rape/incest as their motivation in approximately 93% of all abortions” (National Right to Life, 2010b; italics in original). A related oversimplified discourse runs along the lines of, “If women only knew [that it was really a baby in there/the facts about fetal development/that the fetus is really a baby] they would never choose abortions.” This sentiment is reflected in the growing popularity of anti-choice measures to require the availability—and increasingly to require the showing—of ultrasound images before an abortion procedure is performed (Guttmacher Institute, 2010d). Currently, nine states (Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin) require written or verbal counseling about the availability of ultrasound imaging and ten (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, and Mississippi) require abortion providers to show the woman ultrasound imagery of her pregnancy before performing her abortion (Guttmacher Institute, 2010d). More states, including Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota, are following suit with similar measures or more restrictive updates on existing requirements. “Since routine ultrasound is not considered medically necessary as a component of first-trimester abortion, the requirements appear to be a veiled attempt to personify the fetus and dissuade the woman from obtaining an abortion,” write policy reviewers from the Guttmacher Institute (2010c). Anti-choice advocates more or less agree. The author of Oklahoma’s bill, Senator Todd Lamb, said “We’re short-changing these moms if they’re not receiving an ultrasound so they can see how their child is being formed” (Vestal, 2008), and Representative Greg Delleney, sponsor of the bill for South Carolina, put forth a woman should use ultrasound imagery to “determine for herself whether she is carrying an unborn child deserving of protection or whether it’s just an inconvenient, unnecessary part of her body” (Gold & Nash, 2007, p. 10). Most recently Nebraska Senator Tony Fulton, the sponsor of a bill that would require women seeking abortion to be shown an ultrasound image of her fetus prior to the procedure, argued “If we can provide information to a mother who is in a desperate situation—information about what she’s

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about to choose; information about the reality inside her womb—then this is going to reduce the number of abortions” (Gold, 2009). Oversimplified discourses result in artificial dichotomies: If there are “hard cases,” then the others must be “easy.” A fetus is either “just a piece of tissue” or it is a “baby deserving of its mother’s protection.” Constructed divisions like these lead to others: a woman is either making a “good” or a “bad” decision, and mothers making this choice must be either “good” or “bad” mothers, as well. Yet it doesn’t seem likely that the complexities of women’s experiences could be made to fit such tidy boundaries. But despite the lack of fit, these artificial and generic constructions are used to inform public policies, fuel public debate and, ultimately, judge women for the choices they make. How, then, to complicate the discourse on unwanted pregnancy and abortion? The discourse of “frivolous choices” and the discourse of “if women only knew what pregnancy meant” offered clues for an important place to begin: the complex, contextualized decision-making of women who have already had children. These women make up the largest fraction (61%) of women undergoing abortions, a statistic that resides quietly in pro-choice fact sheets (e.g., Guttmacher Institute, 2010a) and is utterly absent from anti-choice literature (e.g., National Right to Life, 2010a). Presumably, having already completed at least one pregnancy to term, these women know very well “what it means” to be pregnant, and what it means to bear and raise a child. These women are already mothers, by anyone’s standards. If their stories were reintroduced to the abortion debate, how would they complicate the discourse—on either side? To prepare the ground of this inquiry, I reviewed literature on the history of abortion policy in the United States, research on and discourses about abortion, and critiques of abortion advocacy. I have prepared an overview of feminist constructivism, the psychological orientation I used to structure and guide my process, and a discussion of the unique merits feminist constructivism brought to this investigation. I then used the questions raised by my literature review and the possibilities invoked by the discussion of feminist constructivism to highlight the potential of my project to achieve my goal of uniting pro-choice activism and academic psychological research.

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A Feminist Account of Abortion Literature Rothman (2000) called abortion “the starting and stopping point” (p. 73) for all discussion about what it means to be a mother and/or a woman in contemporary America: All debates about the rights and responsibilities of womanhood and motherhood either begin with or ultimately touch on issues of abortion. In the section that follows I offer a feminist overview and critique of research and writing about abortion, including abortion history and policies, the frames of discourse that have structured these writings, and the limitations and potential risks of pro-choice advocacy as it is currently practiced. I conclude with a brief review of related literatures that were also important resources in my exploration of mothers choosing abortion: the literature on surrendering children for adoption and the literature on infertility. Feminist analyses of abortion policy in the last 150 years. A political history of abortion demonstrates the shifting allegiances of public support of abortion and the implications of changing abortion policies on who should become mothers, when, and at what cost. Abortion became a political issue in America in the mid-nineteenth century, when physicians claimed “medical” supremacy that provided them alone with the power to decide when abortions were necessary and when they were “immoral” (Luker, 1984). Though wanton abortions were a “crime against the fetus,” if a physician decided an abortion was medically necessary, that crime was ameliorated (Rothman, 2000). However, physicians and women have long had different standards of “necessity” (Cannold, 1998; Finer et al., 2005; Luker, 1984; Rothman, 2000). The history of abortion in the U.S. is rife with stories of illegal abortion, when women, desperate to end a pregnancy, have been driven to underground abortion providers because their situations did not meet the standards of necessity set by physicians. In 1973, the federal decision in the case of Roe v. Wade gave women the right to abortion in most circumstances. Couched in terms of the “right to privacy” between a woman and her doctor, Roe v. Wade ensures few restrictions on 1st trimester abortions, allows state regulation of 2nd trimester abortions, and allows state regulation and prohibition of 3rd trimester abortions. Feminists note that the structure of Roe v. Wade makes abortion increasingly difficult to obtain as pregnancy advances, and that the women who are most likely to need late-term abortions are often very young, uneducated,

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poor, mentally disabled, abused, or abandoned by their male partners (Jaggar, 1994). These critics also note that couching abortion rights in terms of “privacy,” conceived as the right for women and men to make personal decisions about their health care, obscures the gendered aspects of abortion, a procedure that only women need undergo (Jaggar, 1994). Furthermore, difficulty with access to medical abortion services contribute to the difficulty for many women of arranging an early abortion: 87% of all U.S. counties have no abortion provider (Jones, Zolna, Henshaw, & Finer, 2010), which makes the abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade difficult to obtain in reality, a far cry from meaningful reproductive freedom. Since the 1970s availability of abortion has increased across most of Western Europe and North America, with the exception of the U.S. In America, the move has been to increasingly restrict access to and performance of abortions. Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, the Supreme Court has upheld many restrictive measures. This began as soon as 1976 with the Hyde Amendment, a ban on Medicaid funds for abortion procedures that effectively limited or denied access to abortion for low-income women. In explanation, the Supreme Court issued a record that “right to privacy” meant that women had the privilege to decide the private matter of abortion, but did not have the right to receive support from the government through federal Medicaid funds to support her decision to abort. In the decision, the Court noted “although the government may not place obstacles in the path of a woman’s exercise of her freedom of choice, it need not remove those [e.g., the obstacle of poverty] not of its own creation” (MacKinnon, 1994). Although Medicaid could not be used to fund the discontinuation of pregnancy, those funds could be used to fund the continuation of pregnancy: In short, the court found the obstacle of poverty appropriately removed in the choice to become a mother, but not in the choice not to become a mother. Restrictions on abortion rights continued over the years, including the allowance for states to enact a “parental notification law” or “parental consent law” that would require minors to notify both parents and obtain their permission before obtaining an abortion, even if the pregnancy was a result of incest (Jaggar, 1994; Males, 1994). Males (1994) noted parental consent laws disproportionately affect girls who are already poor and abused, and that these laws effectively allow the state to force a teenage girl to bear a

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child against her will. Similar restrictions have been made to legalize the imposition of a waiting period after parental notification (Jaggar, 1994; Saletan, 2003). And though the Supreme Court has upheld parental and judicial rights to decide that a minor girl must have a baby, it has not mandated that those who make this decision, against a girl’s will, must then pay for her pregnancy and childbirth expenses or the costs associated with raising a child (Males, 1994).

In 1986 pro-choice activists made a rhetorical switch: To stem the loss of support for abortion rights, and to attract conservatives who might be swayed to support that right, strategists changed the message from supporting “women’s rights” to portraying abortion restriction as “big-government meddling” in the private matters of families (Saletan, 2003). This alliance seized the rhetoric of the “inviolable rights of families” to conduct themselves as they see fit. The people who hold these values believe in the tradition of family self-sufficiency, which detests government interference in private family decisions, but also abhors government insistence on extracting support in the form of taxes for the problems of other families (Saletan, 2003). In making this bargain, continued legality of abortion as a personal (and personally financed) decision was bought at the cost of promoting affordable reproductive choices and health care for all women. More recently, events have come to pass which illustrate the teetering point of a return to pre-Roe v. Wade mores in American abortion policy. One of these was the passage in 2007 of the “Partial Birth Abortion Ban,” a federal law that now prohibits the late-term abortion procedure known as “intact dilation and extraction” (intact D & E) by the medical professionals who perform it and as “partial birth abortion” by those, mostly non-physicians, who despise it. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, and in it he referred to an act “itself laden with the power to devalue human life” (Gonzales v. Carhart, 2007, p. 28). In a nod to the health interests of women, he noted patronizingly “while we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon [of psychological trauma following abortion], it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained” (Gonzales v. Carhart, 2007, p. 29, italics added). In one stroke the Court gives itself the power to “protect”

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innocent fetuses and to protect misguided women from the harsh repercussions of their own poor decisions. Most feminists conclude from this history that women’s having control over their own reproduction is a necessary precondition of their freedom from patriarchal dominance (Rothman, 2000; Sherwin, 1994). Because the personal cost of having a child is not equal for men and women, and because bearing and caring for an infant involves greater financial costs and reduced economic opportunities through loss of work, pregnancy and child rearing reinforce women’s dependence on men (Sherwin, 1994). Public policy has and continues to support this dependence: MacKinnon (1994) argued that, in law, the “way the male point of view constructs a social event or legal need will be the way that social event or legal need is framed by state policy” (p. 277). According to this point of view, abortions do not arise out of necessity or hardship but from a morally dubious desire to thwart the prescriptions of fertility. Research and Discourse on Abortion Examining the codes of public discourse about abortion reveals additional information about social constructs of motherhood and its presumed place in women’s lives. Moral or legal discussions about abortion—the majority of abortion discourse— occur without consideration of other questions about social practices that oppress women (Sherwin, 1994). Abortion research. Most mainstream abortion research, especially statistical research, does not include or specifically excludes the context of women’s lives except for in ways that assist in creating broad categories. Exceptions to this rule include the valuable research of institutions like the Alan Guttmacher Institute. In their 2005 study for that group, researchers Finer, Frohwirth, Dauphinee, Singh, and Moore supplied a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative study of why women in the U.S. seek abortions. What they found is perhaps not surprising. Women give four common reasons for not wanting to have a child: 75% worry about the detrimental impact it will have on their responsibility to their other children, to their spouse, or to other family members. Almost 75% of these women say they cannot afford a child. Close to 75% are afraid of how having a child would impact their work, their schooling, or their ability to care for dependents. Fifty percent of these women do not want to be a single mother, or are

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concerned about problems they are having with their spouses or partners. Demographically speaking, a poor woman today is four times more likely than a higher- income woman to become pregnant unintentionally, and a woman living below the federal poverty level is four times as likely to choose to abort that pregnancy (Finer et al., 2005; Jagannathan, 2006). But the rhetoric of anti-choice objections to legal abortion on demand assumes that women often make “frivolous and irresponsible decisions” about abortion (Sherwin, 1994, p. 315). Like the above examples, feminist research of the experience of abortion includes the context of women’s lives (Sherwin, 1994). Of special interest in feminist analyses are those factors that may have played a coercive or oppressive role in women’s decision making, including lack of financial and social support to raise a child and threatened or actual desertion by partners (Finer et al., 2005; Luker, 1984; McDonnell, 2003; Mirkin & Okun, 1994). Feminist research finds that women’s personal abortion decisions are made in consideration of their commitments to everyone concerned, including herself, her unborn child, and her existing family. (Bonavoglia, 2001; Cannold, 1998; Finer et al., 2005; Hadley, 1996; Luker, 1984; Sherwin, 1994). Ideologies and social discourse. Feminist analyses of the abortion discourse identify a number of prevailing ideologies and themes that make up the most common frames of expression and discussion. For example, scare tactics make a large part of the anti-abortion discourse, taking form in myths about abortion risks such as increased breast cancer rates and the possibility of suffering the PTSD-like “Post-Abortion Syndrome” (PAS). Despite the discrediting of these myths in the medical and research literature (e.g., David & Lee, 2001; Lee, 2003; Major, Cozzarelli, Cooper, Zubek, Richards, Wilhite, & Gramzow, 2000; Trybulski, 2005), they continue to play an integral part in the larger discourse about abortion, motherhood, and what’s “best” for women (David & Lee, 2001; Lee, 2003; Major et al., 2000; Trybulski, 2005). Feminists also have called into question pro-choice rhetoric, which has adopted the non-gendered theme of bodily privacy. A problem with the gender-neutral stance of “right to one’s own body” is that it continues to marginalize the gendered aspect of unwanted pregnancy. On the one hand, representing abortion as a gender-neutral right to privacy distances the phenomenon from women’s perspective and from women, which

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eases the transition through legal hoops. On the other hand, this distance hamstrings women’s interests more broadly in terms of reproductive health care: Abortion is a privacy issue, not a women’s health issue, so though at present it cannot be banned, it also cannot be required as a necessary part of states’ health care for women (Jaggar, 1994; MacKinnon, 1994). Certain strains of abortion rights discourse imply a troubling ableist, or anti- handicapped, bias. This is revealed in the language used to talk of the literal and figurative “costs” of pregnancy and child rearing, the “burden” of a child with “special” needs that might be “spared” by a timely prenatal diagnosis of disability (Rapp, 1994; Rothman, 2000). Feminists point to the problem of this language in its prejudiced implication to produce “normal” children and of what its standards of normalcy might be (Diamond, 1994; Rapp, 1994; Rothman, 2000). This bias precludes discussion of the choice some women might make to raise children with physical and developmental disabilities. When this discussion is shut down, it obviates critical scrutiny of the conditions (such as lack of municipal support in the form of disabled-friendly housing, transportation, and health care) that might render this choice difficult or even impossible.

But perhaps the most prevalent current in public discourse about abortion is the ideology of conservative Christianity. With this, women are judged for their disregard of conservative mores about sexuality (Rothman, 2000). Anti-choice advocates promote the conservative Christian ideology that women should not be sexual beings unless they are ready to raise children, and that having to raise children before they are wanted is an appropriate lesson for women who would transgress this rule. These same advocates then rest their anti-abortion arguments on the presupposition that women can avoid unwanted pregnancies by avoiding sexual intercourse. “Such views,” writes Sherwin, “show little appreciation for the power of sexual politics in a culture that oppresses women” (Sherwin, 1994 p. 316). In an egalitarian society, where women did not feel that their worth in relationship was directly tied to their sexual availability, it might indeed be possible for women to avoid pregnancy through avoiding intercourse. But even in such a society, it is still likely that women would still want the option of enjoying a sexual relationship without the threat of pregnancy, an idea anathema to conservative Christian values.

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Feto-centrism in the discourse. An interesting feature of anti-abortion discourse is the central importance of the fetus as the main subject of discussion, marginalizing if not eclipsing the figure of the pregnant woman who carries it. Currently, a woman is seen as either the protector or the enemy of her fetus, in either case a separate being as though the fate of the fetus she carried would not affect her as well (Rothman, 2000). In non- feminist depictions of pregnancy, the woman is invisible; graphically so, in anti-abortion advertisements that depict the unborn fetus floating alone as though the woman who contained it did not exist (Sherwin, 1994). If the mother is included in the discourse, the feto-centric position depicts her as a machine to gestate the baby. In the feto-centric discourse, the women who carry pregnancies are cast as passive vehicles where their only significant expectations are to neither abort nor harm their fetal passengers. In medical journals, pregnant women are commonly referred to as “fetal environments” (Sherwin, 1994) as though the uterus which housed the fetus was not itself contained in, and an integrated working part of, a woman’s living body. Many arguments against the “morality” of abortion often make the “innocence” of the fetus the central issue; this premise makes any woman’s actions against such innocence immoral by default. Historically, the only way to combat this feto-centric position is a sort of battle of relative innocence, as when, because of rape or incest, it is not the woman’s “fault” that she became pregnant, and thus her innocence can be weighed as part of the moral equation (Sherwin, 1994). Discourse of the fetus-as-independent-being has led to the practice of denying pregnant women the role of a thinking moral person with a fundamental interest in the future of the fetus she carries (Sherwin, 1994). The feminist contextual view of pregnancy notes that, far from developing within the blank void depicted on so many billboards, each baby comes into being as a specific pregnancy within a specific moment in particular women’s lives. They are not “individuals housed within generic female wombs” (Sherwin, 1994, p. 319). And fetuses are not owned by women as mere body parts. Currently, debating the “rights” of a fetus versus the “rights” of a mother merely perpetuates this notion of divisibility of component parts over the consideration of the experience and needs of an integrated whole, the pregnant woman who is a physical and social system connected to any number of other individuals. Feminist debate recognizes

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these inevitable connections, both between fetus and mother and also between mother and her other social relationships (Ellis & Bochner, 1992; Feldt, 2002; Rothman, 2000). A feminist understanding sees abortion as a woman’s ending a relationship (or not entering a relationship) versus her ending the possession of a fetus. A feminist understanding recognizes women have abortions because they take the relationship of motherhood seriously, not because they feel the experience is insignificant. Feminist Criticism of Abortion Advocacy Though many would argue that having an anti-abortion stance is not a feminist or woman-friendly position, there are arguments made by those who identify both as feminist and as anti-abortion that serve as important reminders of the importance of not merely seeking abortion rights as an end in itself. Maloney (1994), a self-named anti- abortion feminist, lobbed a number of criticisms at the unexamined ideal of abortion rights. She maintained that the need for abortion indicates “deep, real problems” in society and proposes that by keeping abortion legal, society offers women a quick band- aid for these problems rather than a meaningful cure. Like other theorists, Maloney identified “insidious victimization” of women in a lack of meaningful maternity leave, loss of professional opportunities due to pregnancy or maternity leave, and other problems of women in the work force. But Maloney proposed that women’s control of their fertility is part of this insidious victimization in that it tells women they have a “right” to “surgically or chemically alter her own body so that she can operate in a world shaped by and defined by men, so that she can be like men…” (p. 274). She argued that having an abortion as a result of sexist oppression (rape, incest, poverty, lack of education, etc.) is not an exercise in free “choice” at all. Though she admitted that many women and families will suffer from bearing unwanted and unplanned children, she would resist the legality of abortion because of fears that legislation aimed at reducing difficulties in people’s lives will reduce also the pressure for radical social change. Though this radical stance is consistent with feminist ethic of looking beyond the immediate choice to the context that makes that choice necessary, it is inconsistent with a feminist ethic that no outside agency shall have the right to decide what to do with an individual woman’s decision be a mother. It is also a stance that completely invalidates the wishes of women who would choose to never have children. Finally, it does not ask

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those who are most likely to suffer the repercussions of unwanted pregnancy—women of color—if they are willing to be sacrificial pawns in the battle for greater women’s rights. Women of color, especially African-American women, attach different meanings to abortion than do European-American, middle-class women (Collins, 1994; hooks, 2000; Smith, 1994). A historical complaint is that abortion issues have been a feminist concern, and African-American women feel alienated by their association of feminism with European-American women (Smith, 1994). In the late 1970s, women of color and low-income women grew critical of the “choice” orientation of the abortion-rights discourse. They felt that the emphasis on “choice” did not accurately reflect how “class and economic background pretty much makes the choice for us” whether or not to have a child (McDonnell, 2003, p. 70). At the same time, these women were subject to entirely different kinds of pressure than the mostly middle-class European-American women fighting for abortion rights: the sometimes unwelcome and often coercive directives toward contraception and sterilization (Jaggannathan, 2006; McDonnell, 2003). In part because of this shameful history, and in part due to a high value placed on large family in African-American culture (Collins, 1994; Smith, 1994), dialogue about abortion in African-American communities has often either been suppressed or, when raised, uncomfortably connected to ideas of genocide and of race extermination (Smith, 1994). Echoing these concerns about the genocidal implications of abortion is the increasingly large force of feminists who have joined with disability rights activists to question the ramifications of the convergence between the desire for elective abortion, the growth of ever more powerful reproductive technologies, and the lack of a growing structure of support for disabled children and their families. Feminist analysis of reproductive rights must recognize and decide how to negotiate a narrow line between support of any woman’s right to decide how best to take care of herself and her family and an awareness of how the increasing cultural ideal of “perfect, healthy” children invalidates people with disabilities (Kaplan, 1994). Prenatal screening for disabilities rests on and reinforces hardened stereotypes of disability. These stereotypes are cemented by assumptions of a disability being a hopeless tragedy for the disabled person and/or her family (Diamond, 1994; Kaplan, 1994). Rothman (1994) argues that the technological ideology of prenatal diagnosis masks an

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ethic of “quality control” to “separate those products we wish to develop from those we wish to discontinue” (p. 6): The implicit injunction of prenatal screening is to ensure the timely interruption into the gestation of “imperfect” babies. The anti-disability implications in the rise in prenatal screenings are revealed in the lack of a similar rise in the amount and quality of social support for disabled infants, children, and families (Kaplan, 1994; Rothman, 2000). The disability rights movement recognizes the social construction of disability, and notes that it is not the disability alone but the presence or lack of support and accommodations in the environment that determines the quality of a person’s life (Kaplan, 1994). Related Discourses: Adoption and Infertility In examining the social discourse of women, mothers, and abortion, I have found it helpful to address related literature on the topics of other experiences of pregnancy and motherhood, specifically, that on surrendering children for adoption and, especially, the extensive literature on the experience of infertility in a pronatalist culture. Below is a brief introduction to this literature and reflections on its relevance to this study of motherhood and abortion. Adoption. Adoption and abortion are two sides of a single experience: Not, as is often argued, of the experience of motherhood, but of the experience of social sanction for, and social recognition of, the role of mother. Historically, adoption has been a means for women to evade becoming mothers: By hiding the occasion of their pregnancies and giving birth in private, pregnant women could give up their child at birth and be considered “childless,” or unmothers (Modell, 1992). Secretive adoption of this sort was necessary at the time to avoid the stigma of unwed motherhood: Single girls were not to be mothers, and secretly surrendering newborns for adoption offered a means to satisfy that mandate. In her wrenching account of surrendering mothers, Fessler (2006) presented the stories of women who were required, usually for reasons of unmarried status and young age, to surrender their newborn infants for adoption. From the turn of the century to the 1970s, these women were most often secreted away to homes for unwed mothers to carry out the term of their pregnancies. Despite the diversity of women, of their expectations of motherhood, and of the “wantedness” of their pregnancies, the woman shared the

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common experience of surrendering a child as a life-shattering event. Though these women escaped the stigma of being unwed mothers, they did not escape motherhood entirely (Modell, 1992), and the grief they felt was the grief of mothers relinquishing their children to unknown fates. This common experience of emotional trauma gives credence to the feminist understanding of a pregnancy as the development of a relationship, and of abortion as a timely interruption or prevention of that relationship. It poses, too, an interesting comparison of the misery of enforced surrender of a child with the general lack of abortion-related trauma demonstrated in the psychological literature (Major et al., 2000; David & Lee, 2001; Lee, 2003; Trybulski, 2005). Certainly, adoption stories such as these serve as vital testimony against the oft-repeated solution offered to women facing unwanted pregnancies: They can always “just” give the baby up. Currently, the anti- choice debate position presents this as a trump card, and beseeches pregnant women not to abort because “there are so many families who would want to adopt your baby.” Infertility. While abortion and adoption are related by social constructions of motherhood, abortion and infertility share the experience of interrupted pregnancy. The literature on infertility and pregnancy loss reveals many strains of discourse similar to those about abortion, especially by locating the causes of conception and missed conception solely within the woman’s body and by assigning primacy of motherhood in women’s identity. Popular and academic discourses about infertility tend to focus on the woman as the sole participant in an experience of pathology. This point of view depends on the failure to separate the process of conception—which requires the contribution of male and female fertility factors—from gestation, which is more completely the bailiwick of the woman. (Gestation, too, can be adversely affected by male fertility factors, such as flaws in the sperm’s genetic contribution.) Even when male-factor problems are recognized as the sole or partial cause of infertility, Lorber (1989) found that the power of the medical discourse and of the patriarchal discourse create a sort of false construction of the experience of male infertility: that it is still a woman’s problem, not her partner’s, and is up to her to remedy through medical interventions on her body.

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Claiming fault for infertility occurs on the individual level, as well. When dominant social discourses equating motherhood to womanhood are part of a woman’s personal constructs, her sense-making of her infertility tends to pathologize her experience (Ulrich & Weatherall, 2000). Researchers Exley and Letherby (2001) demonstrated this phenomenon in their identification of the dominant cultural script for the adult woman (marriage, then bearing and rearing children) and then contrasting stories of infertile women set against these expectations. Orienting Theory: Feminist Constructivism I took the stance of a feminist constructivist to look at and make sense of the experience of mothers ending unwanted pregnancies. Below I offer a brief overview of the phenomenon of the individual making personal constructs within a social context in general, and a discussion of the “motherhood mandate”—that to be a woman means to be a mother—as a social construct of particular importance. I continue with an outline of the characteristics of the position of the feminist constructivist and the unique possibilities it offered for this investigation. Psychology of personal constructs. “Man creates his own ways of seeing the world in which he lives; the world does not create them for him. He builds constructs and tries them on for size” (Kelly, 1955, p. 12). This quote illustrates the core theorem of Personal Construct Psychology: As individuals, we confront our world and try to make sense of what we encounter in such a way as to oil the machinery of future encounters. We create sense—construe—so that we will feel better prepared to act on the events that come our way. Our constructs instruct our interpretation of who we are, what we are doing, who others are and what they are doing, and who and what we ought to be. Within its framework, a construct can house anything from simple to complex concepts by means of a dichotomized decision: something construed is understood to be one way and not another (e.g., mothers are “nurturing;” they are not “not nurturing”). Kelly (1955) termed this the “bipolar nature of constructs” (p. 106), a process of categorization that can accommodate any nature of people, items, and events found in the world. This structure is not rigid, but may be flexible and adaptable to new experiences over time; indeed, it is a feature of good mental health to be able to assess events that disconfirm our

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previous constructs and reconstrue them, as necessary, to make better sense of unexpected events. Though we are individuals, we live in a world of shared phenomena and attempt to make sense of similar concepts, events, and occasions: motherhood, for example, or the 9/11 terrorist attacks, or birthday parties. But people have idiosyncratic understandings of certain constructs, and one’s personal difference in how she construes something is referred to as individuality (Kelly, 1955; Walker, 1996). Different individuals’ personal constructs of common phenomena may share certain features, may even be quite similar at first blush, but will inevitably contain different shades and slants of meaning that make each individual’s personal constructs unique. Social constructs. Often, though, similar items, roles, or events are similarly (though not identically) construed by more than one individual. Similar constructs shared by a group or in a community are referred to as having commonality (Kelly, 1955; Walker, 1996). Mary Gergen (2001) described how the forces and norms of culture shape common ways of understanding: “Every community supports certain forms of discourse and resists others” (p. 31). Some theorists describe this system of support and resistance as a form of social determinism, creating expectations for how people will think and behave (Walker, 1996). Indeed, supported forms of discourse do shape how communities come to agree on common constructs and explain how the individual must work with or against these constraints in the process of her own construing. But the constraints that shape common constructs are restrictions, not rigid patterns of expectations. Kelly understood that our personal constructs are built within a social context that suggests certain constraints. His theory was that these constraints formed a “matrix” from which one can make choices about how to understand or act upon a personal construct (Kelly, 1955; Walker, 1996). What he did not address, however, was how different risks attend different choices within that matrix: Some choices are more socially sanctioned than others. The individuality of personal constructs does offer the freedom to bend or possibly escape the constraints of social constructs, but that freedom offers no guarantee of an escape: Though determinism and free will can coexist within a society, the power to exert free will is distributed unequally. Differences in economic resources, ability,

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education, and opportunity ensure that some choices will be more readily attainable than others. Personal constructs in a social context. As Kelly suggested, every construct is wrought as an individual understanding that best fits that person’s experience. But this personal understanding is achieved in relation to a social context that created, housed, or witnessed that personal experience. This is so for newly-minted constructs needed to make sense of a novel experience and for the re-evaluation of existing constructs. A person may look to the social context to understand how others have made sense of an experience that is new to her, or she may examine an existing construct against the backdrop of the common constructs in her culture. Inevitably, the intrinsic individuality of personal constructs means some space will gape between one’s personal understanding and the general understanding of her larger culture. The difference between personal and social constructs may cause an individual to feel tension, in response to which she may either reexamine her own construct and decide it is best for her or reconstrue to more closely match the expectations of her social context. So reality may be in the eye of the beholder, but this is not the only context in which it changes. Constructions of “reality”—as defined by the structures of social constraint and permission—flux and change with the actions of the society’s members and the passage of time, as well. (Fielding & Schaff, 2004). For example, Fessler (2006) wrote about the women in the decades before legal abortion who confronted a social construction (“reality”) of motherhood that held that unwed motherhood was shameful. The expected course of action for these women was to hide their pregnancies until they could give birth and give their children up for adoption—essentially, if all went “well,” they were construed as not being mothers. The expected course for unwed pregnant women after Roe v. Wade was different: They were to become mothers, by not having abortions, and what these women did with their children after their birth was less of a concern. (What remained the same across both time periods was the discourse of shame and judgment surrounding unwed pregnancy.) Fielding and Schaff (2004) remind us that abortion has been construed differently over the centuries, especially as different ages and cultures had different ideas about when pregnancy “quickened” into life: “Baby killing” or “baby murder” are only the most recent of social constructions. While, like

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other constructions, they operate upon assumptions of when the fetus quickens, our contemporary constructs are the only ones that have equated babyhood from the moment of conception. One cannot expect the difference between personal and social constructs, or even the constructs of different times, to be clearly defined. It is possible, for example, to experience a conflict in constructing a personal understanding of abortion when personal feelings of sadness or emptiness—despite conviction in the decision—seem to collude with the dominant discourse that ending a pregnancy is a bad thing (McIntyre, Anderson, & McDonald, 2001). Women live their lives immersed in dominant narratives, and having to construct a personal understanding of an experience may dislodge them as participants in the dominant discourse and leave them without the idioms of accustomed dialogue to describe their experience. To add to the difficulty, a woman making her own sense of motherhood and pregnancy must confront not only the social constructions of her own time, but any constructive legacy she might have inherited—with its different and contradicting messages—from women in her mother’s and grandmothers’ generations, as well. Motherhood mandate as a social construct. Feminist writers have given a name to the essentialist social construct of women-as-mothers: the “motherhood mandate” (Russo, 1976, 1979). It is this construct that houses the cultural expectation that women will become mothers and expectations of how they will mother. The motherhood mandate contains assumptions about the centrality of motherhood in woman’s identity and also makes assumptions about the quality of mothering the woman bestows on her children; namely, that it is constant, selfless, and takes precedence over other tasks, desires, and goals (Russo, 1976). Rothman (1994) wrote about the personal experience of motherhood within the social context that forms the motherhood mandate: The social structure creates needs—the needs for women to be mothers, the needs for small families, the needs for ‘perfect’ children—and creates the technology which enables people to make the needed choices. The question is not whether choices are constructed, but how they are constructed….We will have to lift our eyes from the choices of the individual woman, and focus on the control of the social system which structures her choices, which rewards some choices and

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punishes others, which distributes the rewards and punishments for reproductive choices along class and race lines. (p. 329) As Rothman suggested, focused critical attention to the social construction of motherhood reveals certain embedded caveats: Women should have children, but only certain women, and only certain kinds of children. Women should raise these children well, which means only in certain ways. Motherhood is a gift; motherhood is a punishment. Much of what the study of abortion has to offer is a means of assessing how the motherhood mandate is heard by different women, and of amplifying those tacit caveats that become detectable in the rub between women’s actual lives and the political and social forces that contain them. Dominant discourses in the construction of motherhood. Certain dominant discourses make up the social construct of motherhood. The first of these is, of course, is the essentialist discourse which confounds motherhood with womanhood and which makes up the frame of the motherhood mandate. Bohan (1997) explains that, due to essentialist assumptions and the conflation of womanhood with motherhood, “patterns of appropriate behavior” for motherhood have shifted from being understood as a set of social guidelines for a woman to follow into being understood as inborn characteristics, like eye and hair color, that women naturally possess. Because of this, the essentialist assumption is that a woman will inherently and inevitably express qualities associated with motherhood, including a desire for children, a nurturing personality, selflessness, and whatever other characteristics are currently considered “motherly.” Constructivist argument, on the other hand, recognizes that motherhood is not equivalent to female gender and is not an inherent trait of the female sex (Bohan, 1997; Guver & Rowell, 1997). Rather, “gender” is a construct that is used to define or identify what patterns of behavior are considered to be appropriate to what sex, and one of these patterns of behavior may include acting as a mother. The dominant discourse about the condition of pregnancy is that it results in the birth of a child (McIntyre, Anderson, & McDonald, 2001). When a live birth does not occur, that experience is problematized as “having an abortion” or medicalized (and problematized) as “suffering infertility” or “having a miscarriage.” These assumptions are made as though the experiences of women happened outside of any context that

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contribute to the decision to abort a pregnancy or the possible environmental factors that contribute to miscarriage. Instead, the non-birth conclusion of a pregnancy is treated as an aberration that occurred because of faulty actions by, or inherent flaws in, the mother. The prevailing narrative of abortion is that pregnancy does not happen by accident, that contraception is reliable and widely available, and therefore abortion is an unnecessary form of birth control (Finer et al., 2005; McIntyre, Anderson, & McDonald, 2001). Accompanying strains in this discourse include the ideas that pregnancies are always desirable, that women shouldn’t have sex if they do not want to become pregnant, and that (ironically) having a child is appropriate punishment for having sex for pleasure. The woman-blaming implicit in this discourse is linked to the dominant social discourse that women are solely responsible for both the conceiving of their pregnancies and of the decision for what to do about those pregnancies. Women themselves often construe the decision to abort a child as their own decision and do not recognize how their choice had been influenced by social and economic factors (Aléx & Hammarström, 2004; Gilligan, 1982; Puka, 1994). Feminist Constructivism and the Personal within the Social Feminist constructivism offers a powerful vantage from which to investigate the phenomenon of an individual’s sense-making of a personal experience within a larger social, cultural, and political context. Like other constructivists, a feminist constructivist understands the individual as making personal sense of social discourses about motherhood and abortion, not merely acting as a receptacle for ready-made, socially determined understanding. But the feminist constructivist’s departure from this stance is to make explicit that all personal meaning-making is a function of power, and the power any individual woman has to shape and be guided by her personal construal of motherhood is directly determined by her social context and her social position. The feminist constructivist realizes that while each individual can and must make personal sense of her world, information about the world is always meted out according to context, and contexts are defined by power. Thus the feminist constructivist examination of a woman’s making sense of her role as a mother and her decision to abort is focused with the help of two lenses in particular: one trained upon the presence of power, and the other making clear the sociocultural context of the moment.

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Power. Salmon (1990) called for an effort to integrate issues of inequity, privilege, coercion, and oppression into the theory of how an individual builds constructs. These are the forces that exert influence on an individual’s free will; these are the structures that form the constraints of social constructs and create the dominant discourses that women respond to when they construct their identities as mothers. A woman’s position relative to these structures determines the power she has to make personal choices about how to understand or enact motherhood within, or outside of, the matrix of social constructs. Thus, a feminist constructivist sees a woman’s experience of motherhood as not merely one of many “ventriloquated…narratives that the culture has made available” to her (Gergen, 2001, p. 39), but as an interpretive performance of a choice among social constructs. The interpretation and the performance are simultaneously personal and constructed by power. A primary artifact of power is the production of dominant discourses as the way we talk about and share social constructs. Dominant discourses are the tools that shape the cultural framework of social constructs, including motherhood. Through dominant discourses certain constructs, through common agreement, come to be understood as the most usual or “natural” way to comprehend the world. But closer examination shows those beliefs and practices, promulgated by dominant discourse and most often considered “natural,” are those that serve the interests of individuals and groups with the most power (Hare-Mustin, 1997). Essentialism, or the argument that the way things are is due to inherent or essential qualities of the individual or situation, is the argument that most frequently accompanies the definition of “natural” constructs. Arguments of essentialism also disguise the role of power in creating these constructs. Power in the above sense can be understood as the right to define reality; it is also the ability to make others accept a personal definition of reality (Epting, Prichard, Leitner, & Dunnett, 1996). A feminist constructivist examination of personal experience within the social realm would ask: What power do individual women have to define their own reality of motherhood, and to get others to accept their definitions? In any particular setting, what power does a woman have to say “This is how it makes sense to me to be a mother,” and to have others agree? In examining these questions, feminist constructivists

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inevitably run into the roadblock of essentialism, especially in the guise of “Why argue with the natural order of things?” Sociocultural context. In broad terms, much of the sociocultural context of the moment is informed by the ethos of individuality and autonomy. Recognized as core features of cultural phenomena such as “meritocracy” and the “Protestant ethic,” individuality and autonomy are the values given primacy by the mainstream of American culture. This trend results in widespread consensus that personal experience is directly related to personal attributes, including inherent qualities and expended effort. The effect of a meritocratic culture is a widespread understanding that individual people get what they deserve (e.g., they reap what they sow). By contrast, lack of success or the experience of hardship is assumed to be due to the fault of the individual. Lee (2003) attributes the prevalence of the meritocratic worldview to the growth of a “Syndrome Society,” a culture that individualizes, and pathologizes, problems of the social context. In terms of the experience of choosing to abort a pregnancy, the ethic of autonomy arises when women invoke environmental conditions (lack of financial and personal resources to raise another child, lack of social support, etc.) as reasons for terminating a pregnancy. In a context that pathologizes individual hardship, citing these as reasons to terminate a pregnancy contribute to the discourse that a woman’s “need” to end her pregnancy is her own “fault” for not trying harder to either improve her situation or to not become pregnant in the first place. A related problem is the tendency to ascribe personal experience to (presumably) inherent personal characteristics. Essentialism—calling any observed behavior or trait of a woman part of the inherent makeup of her sex—becomes at best a shortsighted analysis and at worst another form of victim blaming when women’s marginalized and oppressed experiences are then understood as coming from those “essential” inherent qualities (Bohan, 1997; Russo, 1979). For the feminist constructivist working to understand personal constructs of motherhood and reproductive experiences, problems arise when essentialist assumptions about women are conflated with essentialist assumptions about motherhood. This is especially problematic in discourses about abortion: When women choose to end a pregnancy, are they still women? When mothers choose to abort a pregnancy, are they still mothers?

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Mothers Choosing Abortion: A Feminist Constructivist Study I have read the research about when and under what circumstances women choose abortion. “Literature reviews, surveys, and statistical studies provide valuable ways of knowing, but these passive methods of data analysis fail to bring to life the depth and breadth of women’s lives and burdens” (Wang, 1999, p. 189). The contexts of individual women’s lives are at the crux of the explanation of why abortion is an important reproductive choice. But there is often a contrast between how women’s lives are represented in public debate and the elusive, richly detailed stories of women’s actual experience. The challenge is to eradicate this disparity (Wang, 1999). One way to attack the disparity between the common perceptions versus actual experience of women’s lives is to introduce complicating narratives of motherhood and abortion into public discourse. Given the oversimplified discourses surrounding motherhood (that it is an essential characteristic of womanhood, that it is primarily nurturing, that it is socially and culturally supported, among others) and of abortion (that it is an unmitigated trauma, that it is an unmitigated relief, that it is an easy choice, that it is an irresponsible decision), the primary task will be to locate women whose stories might not fit within the confines of these ideas. I submit that the stories of mothers who have chosen to have an abortion—the silent majority of all women seeking abortions— contain enormous potential to disrupt the familiar tropes in discourses about motherhood and abortion. Below I describe the questions I used to anchor my investigation into mothers’ complicating narratives of abortion. These questions are couched in terms of feminist constructivist psychology as theoretical guidelines. Because social discourse is not disturbed if the complicating narratives remain private, I engaged in this research to produce a document that can be used in the future to publicly advocate for reproductive rights. I conclude my description of this study with a discussion of multimodal methods and a rationale for these methods as my means of conducting this research. Constructs of motherhood. My primary question was: How do women who have already had children use their constructs of motherhood to help them make sense of their decision to abort an unwanted pregnancy? I chose to concentrate on women who have already borne children for several reasons. First, as I have mentioned previously, these

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women make up the largest single group and the majority (61%; Guttmacher Institute, 2010a) of all women seeking abortions in the United States. Despite their numbers, the existence of these mothers is almost unmentioned in public discourse about abortion on both the pro- and anti-choice sides. Secondly, while I would not dispute that constructs of motherhood very likely play a role in any woman’s decision about whether or not to proceed with a pregnancy, by focusing my attention on the constructs of women who have already borne children I could gather narratives that more clearly countered the anti- abortion rhetoric that women who choose abortion do so because “they don’t know what it means to be pregnant” or “they don’t know what it means to be a mother.” Although I do not want to deny the importance of any woman’s construct of motherhood—including women pregnant for the first time, women who have been pregnant and aborted before, and women who have raised a non-biological child—for the purposes of this effort, I believed concentrating on the stories of women who are most widely recognized as mothers would be the most immediate way to counter and complicate cultural discourse about motherhood and abortion. Feminist constructivism and the abortion decision. My secondary focus for this project was to consider the question: How does feminist constructivism cast a different light on exploration of personal constructs and the extra-personal forces that exert constraints on their construction? While there is valuable statistical and qualitative research on the experience of abortion, no qualitative research has made a point of considering how outside forces—including political, social, and cultural structures and discourses—play a role in shaping or suppressing personal constructs of motherhood and abortion. I sought to demonstrate how feminist constructivism is a valuable theory for directing psychological research in topics involving personal experience in a social context. Because of its combination of very personal experience with the spotlight of heated public debate, the phenomenon of choosing to have an abortion is especially relevant for the personal-within-the-political enquiries of feminist constructivist research. Multimodal Research and Activism Bringing personal narratives to the public debate is a way to unite research with activism. Narratives are gathered for the purpose of comprehending and communicating the meaning of a personal experience, and the task of creating and collecting narratives is

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to find the means to represent those elusive moments of experience (Bochner, 2000). Whatever means are used, successful narrative manages to convey the depth and breadth of context that is missing from other representations of how women make the choice to have an abortion. Researching and representing these individual contexts is a political act that reveals and supports marginalized ways of understanding the world and, as such, threatens to break apart the calcified strains of oversimplified public discourse (Lincoln & Cannella, 2004). Multimedia methods in creative ethnography. In ethnographic writing, the struggle is to unite the lived experience of the person with the representational practice of the researcher (Richardson, 1992). Writing in non-academic prose, or writing in non- prose altogether, offers opportunities to use literary devices and creative verbal structures in the interest of creating a text that lends itself to multiple meanings through multiple readings (Richardson, 1992). Whatever its form, creative ethnography is intended to evoke shreds of feeling, experience, and connection to the piece and to the characters within. Writing that succeeds in this evocation is often called “performative” in that it is meant to communicate with an audience. While most often performance ethnographies are meant to be performed live for audiences (Denzin, 1997), the realities of research production mean that most productions so conceived receive a larger reading audience through script publication than live audience through staged performance. Whatever its mode of delivery, a performative piece has dramatic appeal to the wider public desired of activist research. “Performance relates to people in our media society; it draws interest, draws attention, and leads to questioning” (Fontana & Frey, 2005 p. 720). Use of communicative modes other than writing has increasingly become a part of social science research (Gergen & Jones, 2008; Glass, 2008). Images, especially, provide a useful means of representing subjective experience. If acknowledged, the freight of meaning inherent in any image can be used as an important communicative tool: Where words fail, images serve to enhance the meaning of the story being told. Glass (2008) identifies the active potential of evocative imagery as “art at work” (Glass, 2008, ¶ 13). When visual media achieve their potential for action, they invite the “viewers, research participants, and the researchers themselves into the project” (Glass, 2008, ¶ 14). Until

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recently, the perceived “objectivity” of photographic imagery had been seen as a detriment to the postmodern effort to express subjective experience. An unintended cost of rejecting images was the loss of their iconographic power, a rejection of a means of communication beyond the verbal constructions of academic writing. This power can be reclaimed for the ethnographic purpose of communicating the subjectivities of personal experience. The combination of images and creative forms of writing is an effective means of communicating research findings. For example, Minge (2006) published a multimedia ethnodrama about her personal experience of abortion. Featured in the script was the author herself and various characters impersonating certain “significant voices,” such as anti-abortion protesters, her mother, her lover, and medical personnel. Perhaps the strangest character was the one representing the author’s emotion, conveyed by a painter who created a pictorial transcription of the vicissitudes of the author’s experience as she narrated it on stage. In the published play script, the painter’s actions and a description of the stages of her creation were included as stage directions alongside photos of the artwork under progress. Multimedia productions have the potential to communicate many layers of meaning in less time and space. A provocative next step, after the production of print multimedia research, is to transfer the results into a digital format. Using digital methods of storytelling also takes advantage of simultaneous presentation of imagery, text, and spoken narrative to telescope several layers of meaning into one moment; this concentrated punch of information is ideal for the complication of social discourse in a public arena such as the Internet. Multimodal methods in action research. While multimedia productions can be adapted for more traditional academic publications, satisfying the requirements of academic research, the ultimate appeal of this work is the potential for more democratic sharing in the public media, especially the Internet (Gergen & Jones, 2008; Glass, 2008). Research is increasingly shared online; several of my sources came from online journals accessible to the public (e.g., Gergen & Jones, 2008; Glass, 2008, in contrast to online academic journals available only to individuals affiliated with an academic institution). Multimedia productions—whether mostly written text, hypermedia, digital images, audio

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clips, or a combination of these—can be easily housed on a personal website and be accessible to almost anyone with computer access. Accessibility, however, is only part of the equation: The public must become aware of any production as a resource, and for this awareness the cooperation of several agencies may be required. Fortunately, this cooperation is neither burdensome nor rare. Many agencies (Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and others) include sections of their websites dedicated to personal stories and feedback and on which a live link to a multimedia presentation may be included. Some other organizations are dedicated to the promotion of certain forms of digital narratives, such as Stories for Change (http://storiesforchange.net/) and the organization Photovoice (http://www.photovoice.com/index.html). These agencies collect, house, and display multimedia documents for the express purpose of education, social consciousness-raising, and social change. The immediacy and availability of documents on the Internet coupled with the complex network of interconnections created by live-link references means that knowledge of and access to these works spreads quickly. Internet media’s potential for access, widespread sharing, and growing its own audience is referred to in various ways. The term “viral,” while objectionable to some, is widely used to describe media (usually videos, sometimes blog pages, interactive websites, or other text sources) that achieve sudden and widespread popularity. Items of this sort that spread organically, voluntarily, from peer to peer are often termed “Internet memes.” Some researchers prefer the term “rhizomatic” (e.g., Warmkessel, 1994) to describe work that seeks to make use of the voluntary, widespread outreach made possible by public access. Whether termed “viral” or “rhizomatic,” the lack of organic connection in print media precludes this kind of natural, spreading growth. For this reason, I envision my research project as a means first to create a print document, containing evocative stories and images, to satisfy the academic requirements of my dissertation. But my eventual goal as an activist researcher will be to use this print document as a template for the creation of a multimodal production that I can distribute electronically as rhizomatic research—or viral activism—in the service of introducing complicating narratives into public discourse about mothers and abortion.

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Method Below I describe my process of generating narratives capable of disrupting social discourse about motherhood and abortion. I begin with a description of the ideals and theories that informed my method of investigation, including an ethic of collaboration from the standpoint of an interested, involved, co-expert researcher/participant. I continue with a discussion of ethical concerns that guided my process, including those integral to feminist praxis and special considerations for conducting multimedia research. I describe the working method I devised to pursue this collaborative research, including how participants were recruited, my process of orienting them to the project and obtaining informed consent, the process of the conversational interviews, techniques for using photos to elicit narrative, and the process of checking in with participants before research presentations were finalized. I then conclude with an outline of how the narrative data were transformed into the finished narratives that appear later in this work. Orienting Theories and Ideals of Narrative Collection My method of investigation was informed by two guiding ideas. The first was to conduct my investigation from a position of informed naïveté; that is, I am unfamiliar with the experience of having an abortion, but I could work to become familiar with the setting, people, and stories that are part of the experience. This gave me enough perspective and knowledge to know what direction my conversations with participants might take, but also allowed me to be guided and informed by the real experts: the women going through the experience of abortion. The second idea was to cultivate a working relationship with participants founded on egalitarian values, respect, and a shared desire to create new meanings of motherhood. This collaborative, creative relationship was fostered using ideas and values drawn from three methods of interviewing: empathic interviewing, in-depth interviewing, and photo elicitation. I describe the ideas behind informed naïveté and the three methods of collaborative interviewing in greater detail below. Preliminary groundwork. Activist researchers can learn how to be useful by first grounding themselves in the lives of those for whom they wish to advocate (Wahab, 2003). This often has involved actually living in a community for a time (Chataway, 2001). But immersion in this sense is difficult when the goal is to better understand the

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experiences of women who do not live in (or who do not define themselves as part of) a discrete community, such as the mothers seeking abortion services at a Planned Parenthood clinic. In an instance such as this, a feminist action researcher must conceive different ways of becoming immersed. I tackled this problem by gaining some background knowledge of procedures and familiarity with the potential research site at the invitation of the staff at Planned Parenthood. I spent many days observing all components of an abortion practice—from taking initial calls, to client education, to watching the procedure itself and the examination of fetal remains—and participating in informal conversations and discussions with the practitioners, the women having abortions, and the other advocates in the agency. In this sense, I formed a short-term relationship with the individual women I met and I also began a more permanent relationship with the agency as a whole. Empathic interviews. “Empathetic interviewing” takes the stance of advocating for the interviewee. With this method, my role was to act as a partner in the elicitation and representation of an important story, and to take the story out into the world with the hope of affecting social knowledge and policy to benefit the interviewee’s position (Fontana & Frey, 2005). Each woman and I worked together to create a narrative designed to aid a political cause, in this case, advocating for continued freedom of choice to have an abortion and creating awareness of the conditions that affect a woman’s ability to keep an unintended pregnancy. This method is compatible with the feminist ethic of transparency of stance: In empathic interviewing, I would by necessity make my pro- choice values clear. An empathic interview for this project began with the acknowledgment of my pro-choice position and my goal of using research as a form of action for reproductive rights. This served to set the stage for a frank discussion of the current state of discourse about abortion and the lack of mothers’ point of view in that discourse, a deficiency that the participants and I hoped to remedy through our work together. Beginning the conversation from an empathic, transparent position also helped to foster a working relationship, a sense that the participant and I were on the same side. Of course, I could not assume that there would never be friction or conflict between my thoughts and values and those of my participants, even if we shared a basic

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stance of being pro-choice. Legard, Keegan, and Ward (2003) suggest it is an important ability of the interviewer to empathize with different points of view, even if they run counter to strongly held beliefs. This did not mean that I pretended to be objective, or neutral, but that I was open to trying to imagine the position of each participant even when it was contrary to my political or philosophical leanings. This was only fair, for if research is meant to effect social change, then I myself needed to experience what it is like to bend my mind around a different point of view. In-depth interviews. In in-depth interviewing the process is a form of conversation, and though it has a purpose, it is not interrogative: The conversation is an example of the larger system of creating knowledge through discourse (Gergen, 2001; Legard, Keegan, & Ward, 2003). Feminist in-depth interviewing allowed me to take the stance of a non-hierarchical, non-expert to facilitate a dialogue between the participant and myself as equals, a democratic process of creating knowledge. While there is no set procedure to in-depth interviewing, as there is no set procedure for conversation, there are certain traits shared by successfully evocative in- depth interviews (Legard, Keegan, & Ward, 2003) that I sought to make part of my own process in my conversations with participants. The first was the intent to blend the structure of curiosity (What experiences would I ask about?) with the flexibility of conversation (What other questions and answers could arise from the impetus of my original questions?). A second trait was that the interview was an interaction: The first question I asked—or the participant asked—may have set the conversation in motion, but where that conversation then went depended on the inclination and curiosity of both parties. A third trait was the use of various means to probe for and elicit deeper answers: I probed verbally and used photographs to provide a locus for exploration and interpretation. Finally, there was the goal that the interview should not just re-create socially constructed knowledge but create something new, too, as one of the especial fruits of the research process. Photo elicitation. Empathic interviewing and in-depth interviewing have the potential to elicit complex narratives, but there are times when words fail to snag thoughts or to invite the sharing of certain experiences. Photography, however, can “capture the tangible and intangible aspects” of lives (Clark-Ibáñez, 2007, p. 170), and

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photos may provoke thoughts and memories in ways that words alone cannot. Photo elicitation, or using photographs as points of conversation or question probes, encouraged participants to reveal parts of their lives that otherwise might have remained hidden to me as the researcher (Newbury & Hoskins, 2008; Wagner, 2007). Photographic images were meant, in this sense, to act as points of entry into meaningful, co-constructed dialogue about aspects of motherhood in women’s lives and were not meant to be literal illustrations of these experiences. The question of whose photos to use was important: Would I select certain images I felt conjured ideas of motherhood, and bring these to the interviews, or would I ask participants to generate and bring their own images? As an interviewer I might have created and chosen different images to probe a woman’s experience than she herself would. As an outsider to the world of having an unwanted pregnancy, I might have chosen images that were strange or meaningful to me but not significant to the participant (Clark-Ibáñez, 2007). Using images I had selected could have limited or directed the conversation to what I, not the participant, thought was most important (Newbury & Hoskins, 2008), and in overpowering the direction of the conversation I could very well have been rewarded with a flat, dimensionless narrative. On the other hand “autodriven” photo elicitation (Clark, 1999), which takes the images produced by participants as the point of departure, held the potential to introduce content areas that might have been overlooked or unknown to me as the researcher. It empowered the participant by allowing her to choose the images that were significant to her experience and her sense of self as a mother (Frohmann, 2005). So I took a cue from Harper (2002) and decided personal photographs taken by the research participants would best show links among their constructs of motherhood, their personal experiences of choice, and the social and cultural context in which they constructed their decisions. When incorporating photos into the interview process, participants were first oriented to the idea of using creative or arts-based methods to explore the meaning of “motherhood” in a personal identity. I did this is by showing examples of how participants in other research projects had used images as a focal point for narratives about the meaning of significant parts of their lives. These examples included experiences of methamphetamine use (Newbury & Hoskins, 2008), living in a low-

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income community (Carlson, Engbretson, & Chamberlain, 2006), surviving cancer (Frith & Harcourt, 2007; Oliffe & Bottoroff, 2007), and defining “safety” in a relationship marked by domestic violence (Frohmann, 2005). With their permission, I shared photos created by the first participants with subsequent participants. And finally, in the interest of reflexivity and forming an egalitarian relationship, I shared images I created in my own efforts to make meaning of motherhood in my life. One of these appeared at the end of the Prologue to this work; others, seen below, I used to help illustrate some of my thoughts about motherhood. The upper photo, for example, I used to help describe my feelings of overwhelm as a new mother, and the bottom photo helped me describe the ways motherhood continues to jockey for position with other aspects in my life, such as my graduate studies and my preparations for my professional career:

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The photos served a number of functions. The first was personal: to provide a frame for each woman’s own meaning-making as she worked through the creative process of discovering, choosing, and interpreting images that felt expressive or evocative to her, in some way, of how she felt about herself as a mother (Frohmann, 2005; Newbury & Hoskins, 2008). The second function was dialogical, where the photo served as a talisman of sorts to direct and inspire creative dialogue between the participant and me as we worked together to interpret and explore the different meanings of motherhood in different contexts (Clark-Ibáñez, 2004). The third and most public function is yet ongoing: to act as a creative ambassador to introduce a complicating or disruptive narrative (Hare-Mustin, 1997) into the narrow views of oversimplified public discourse (Stanczak, 2007). Ethical Concerns and Feminist Research Praxis In what they call a “triangulation of ethical decision making” (p. 728), authors McKee and Porter (2008) describe the researcher’s process of attending to three important points of view: the participants in the research, including their participants’ communities and any third parties they may represent; people inside the field of study, such as any organization hosting or assisting in the research process; and people outside the field, such as the institution sponsoring the researcher and approving the research conducted under its name. I attended to these concerns using the precepts of feminist ethical research practice, including addressing imbalances of power in the research process to strive for the mutual benefit of all parties involved and working to examine my goals and motives as a researcher through reflexive and transparent process. I elaborate on these procedures below, and conclude with a description of the special ethical considerations I considered in conducting multimedia research intended for eventual online publication. Power in research. The hierarchy of my academic institution and Planned Parenthood over me as a researcher, followed by my position as an arbiter and distributor of women’s personal stories, suggested that the most salient concerns about power were those accounting for the participant’s position. I had to gain approval for my research both from my university’s Institutional Review Board and from the Research Review Board of the National Planned Parenthood Association of America before I could proceed

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with participant recruitment and interviews. If I did not satisfy the concerns of my academic sponsor and of Planned Parenthood, then either had the power to deny me permission to conduct or publish my research. The concerns of both agencies were important, and were intended to ensure the safety of the participants; for example, by attending to problems of confidentiality and informed consent. Beyond these basic considerations, however, were matters involving the participant-researcher relationship that went beyond the protection of a passive participant to the promotion of an empowered, active research partner. The feminist ethic of empowering the participant suggested a number of tactics to consider in this portion of the research process. “Relationship” as an organizing concern has long been central to feminist praxis; it remains the foremost consideration for me as a feminist constructivist engaged in action research. In addition to an overarching goal of changing the social and political context as I described earlier, I also seek to change the power relations and constraints of traditional social research (Maguire, 2001). Much of this began in my initial relationship with the participants. I addressed power in the research relationship in several ways: One was to attempt to hold a position in the research not more privileged than the participants’ by allowing their stories to be told in their own words accompanied by, but not subservient to, my critical voice as a researcher. Another was to acknowledge the co-created knowledge (or “data”) formed in the dialogical process of my open-ended, loosely structured conversations with women about their identities as mothers. Yet another was to allow women the chance to edit, argue with, or even veto my interpretations and analyses of their stories before I took the final step of including them in this work. Empowering diverse voices meant that women’s oppressive experiences should not be portrayed solely through the experiences of European-American, middle-class participants (Brabeck & Santiani, 2001, hooks, 1984, Kirsch, 1999). The venue where I conducted most of this research (a Planned Parenthood clinic in an urban setting) provided me with the opportunity to recruit women who were of lower socioeconomic status and who were of diverse race, ethnicity, physical ability, and religious affiliation. A vital element for my considerations of power in the research setting was the reflexive and candid examination of my position and motives as a researcher. For

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example, in my own reflections on what motherhood means to me, the theme of vulnerability as the flip side to attachment is especially resonant. As I demonstrated in the prologue to this work, I use this construct as a thread to link my experiences of motherhood to those of other women. This link was a useful way to begin to understand others’ experiences, but it was not the sole basis of interpretation. My construct of vulnerability and attachment helped me begin to understand the protective feelings of a mother who decided to end her pregnancy in the interest of better caring for her existing children. It made it much easier for me to begin to understand why many women felt they could never give an infant up for adoption, severing an attachment that grew and deepened over the course of a pregnancy. But this initial link to understanding was only the beginning of a process I followed in order to be open to understanding the experiences of women who differed from me in many ways. As a European-American, middle-class, able-bodied, university-educated woman, I enjoy many privileges that were not shared by all the women seeking abortion services at the Planned Parenthood clinic with which I collaborated. I was aware of some of these privileges; I was unaware of others that were salient to the participants, for example: my state of mental health, my relative lack of problems with fertility and pregnancy, and the stability I enjoyed in a married partnership. Part of attending to the balance of power, then, required exploring with the participant the ways my position affected how I understood her story. It also required a certain amount of humility on my part, a willingness to be taught ways of understanding motherhood that did not come naturally to me. By practicing this openness and eagerness to collaborate I hoped to dismantle some of the hierarchical differences that accompany the position of the traditional researcher. Reflexivity, transparency, and acknowledgement of bias. A common thread in feminist and other postmodern approaches to research is the rejection of the notion of “objectivity” in favor of recognizing that the researcher is never truly removed from the research process, but instead brings her values, bias, and subjective lens to every interaction (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Gergen, 2001). A researcher displays her bias in the questions she asks (and those she neglects to ask), the measures she uses to capture an experience (and those she forgoes), and the experiences she seeks to represent (and those she ignores) (Fonow & Cook, 1991; Olesen, 2000). Embracing a subjective, rather than

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objective, position leads to the practice of reflexivity (Ellis, 1997; Olesen, 2000), in which the researcher continually examines her own values and the influence they have on the construction and interpretation of her research. I addressed concerns of reflexivity in the research process in a number of ways. The first was by being transparent about my political stance and my activist goals related to this research project. Some of this was easy: for example, I suffered no qualms representing myself as pro-choice to Planned Parenthood when I approached the agency for permission to conduct research at their clinic. What was more difficult was confessing my reservations about current pro-choice discourse, including the rhetoric of Planned Parenthood itself. I needed to make it clear that I did not disagree with the agency’s published statement that “most women feel relief;” nor did I wish to challenge their position that abortion does not harm women. But I also needed to be open about my goal of representing women’s stories and thoughts about their abortions in all their richness, including, potentially, feelings other than or in addition to relief. I explained that my research was intended to explore the experiences of a special population of their clientele—women who have already borne children—and was neither designed to be abortion outcome research nor to generalize about the experiences of all women who receive abortions. With these clarifications I was able to satisfy the concerns of the agency and receive permission to proceed. I offered the same transparency of my motives and bias as I cultivated relationships with my research participants. Some of this came up front; making my values and my activist goals clear was an important part of introducing my research to potential participants, without which I could not honestly have asked for the participant’s informed consent. I accomplished this introduction in my initial conversations with women and by including reflexive statements in my initial flyer and in the document for informed consent (see Appendices A and B). I also shared representations of my own experience and identity as a mother in my conversations with the women and included material from those discussions as part of my own reflexive process throughout this work. An unanticipated gain from reflexive praxis was the enhancement of an egalitarian relationship with the women I met. Throughout the research process, I sought as a feminist researcher to avoid re-creating contexts of research hierarchy by engaging in

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practices of self-reflexivity, analysis of motives, and participating in the expression, interpretation, and representation of my own experience. I did this through keeping an ongoing research journal in which I recorded my impressions of the participants, my passing thoughts and reservations or inspirations about the project, and the evolution of my own construct of motherhood. These notes are included as part of the prologue and as part of the presentation of the narratives and their analyses in the following section. These notes show, I hope, how meeting with each woman was transformative for me and my understanding of this project. Ultimately, documenting and sharing my reflexive practice resulted in a collaborative relationship with the participants where the distinction of “researcher and researched” became less stratified (Lincoln, 2001), satisfying the feminist ethic of sharing power in the research process. Ethical challenges presented by digital multimedia research. In traditional, text- based research, ethical problems regarding the protection of confidentiality and the acknowledgment of the potential risks and gains of participation are capably managed through careful research practice and the negotiation of informed consent to participate. Many of these problems are surmounted in a similar fashion in the practice of digital or multimedia research. As is customary with ethical research practice for any investigation, I was the only person privy to the real names of the research participants and I kept this information secure and separate from the representative data mentioned above (recordings, transcripts, etc.). As I mentioned before, I acknowledged the right of the participant to revoke consent for any or all portions of her representation for any reason, and gave her special opportunity to do so in the process of the checking-in conversation, in which I presented my analyses and thoughts so far. These and other points of concern for the participant, including acknowledgment of possible psychological risk in participating and information about resources for coping with emotional difficulty resulting from discussing personal material, are detailed in my informed consent. But introducing non-text media to the production and publication of research brought special problems to consider. In a multimedia presentation, any visual elements must be edited for confidentiality with as much scrutiny and care as text (McKee, 2008). Preserving a woman’s anonymity meant weighing special considerations: What images, if any, might compromise her confidentiality? How might such images be edited, or

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could substitutions be made? Substituting images as a form of “visual pseudonym” could have enhanced confidentiality/anonymity, but might not have achieved the same representational effect as the original image (McKee & Porter, 2008). I decided if it seemed appropriate and necessary to preserving a participant’s confidentiality, visual pseudonyms might be used after discussion and with the permission of the participant. Other tactics I kept in mind included blurring or subtly distorting images so that they retained representational meaning to the person who created them but rendered the images unidentifiable to others. I employed a combination of these tactics in a presentation of my research on women’s narratives of depression (Hoogen, 2005). In that instance, I combined clips of written narrative with photos of actors staging scenes of the narrative’s action. I then digitally altered the photographs to look like comic book drawings and presented the whole as a graphic narrative. This resulted in a compelling and engaging representation of a personal narrative that protected the identity of the woman participant and also highlighted the process of construction in any research representation. In the present work, I eventually chose to blur or distort some images to mask the identity of people represented in the photos but did not, in the end, need to use any substitute images as visual pseudonyms. The problem of third-party representation is especially important in multimedia presentations, where the words “my daughter” or “my husband” might become positively identifying if coupled with an image. Because third parties cannot give informed consent to participate, I took special care to preserve their anonymity. The safest policy, when in doubt, was to not include direct representation of any third parties (McKee & Porter, 2008), a practice which many researchers using photo elicitation methods make clear to participants at the outset of the project (Hoskins, Newbury, & Segal, 2008). I discussed the risk to third parties with participants and suggested that, if they wanted to include images of third parties in our interview process, we would decide together whether to include the images in the final work in edited form or exclude them altogether. Aside from concerns of confidentiality and anonymity, informed consent necessitated making participants aware of the risks of eventual online publication, including discussion of different possible audience reactions to participants’ stories. While certain responses are anticipated and desired, in publicly accessible research there

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remains the likelihood that any story can and will be shared by individuals who disagree with or despise the point of view the story represents (McKee, 2008). While this is possible in any form of published research, the evocative potential of multimedia and the increased availability of research shared on the Internet make this concern more salient than when considering publication solely in an academic milieu. For these reasons, I used consent forms that detailed these concerns, the measures I would take to mitigate them, and the possible different levels of participation relative to the different risks involved in the different stages of research and publication. As I indicate below, I introduced this informed consent both at my initial, recruitment meeting with the woman and reviewed it again when we first met for conversation, after she had a chance to reflect on the meaning of her participation and what she was willing to risk for it. Working Method: Generating Complicating Narratives Participant recruitment. Most participants for this project were recruited from the clientele of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Cincinnati, Ohio. Because I was interested in exploring women’s stories and constructs of motherhood, only abortion patients who already had children were approached for potential participation. These women were identified by the counseling staff at Planned Parenthood, who made the initial contact and inquired of each woman as to whether she was interested in speaking to me and learning about possible participation in this research project. Potential participants were approached by the counseling staff at the counseling and information session given 24 hours or more prior to the abortion procedure. Some of the staff asked if they could talk about the project with their circle of acquaintances and refer any interested parties to me, to which I agreed. Over the period I was recruiting participants, 11 women initially indicated interest in participating; for reasons of time, second thoughts, and privacy concerns only five followed through to complete the project. The racial/ethnic demographics of the original 11 potential participants slightly underrepresented the diversity of that particular Planned Parenthood, with two of the women identifying as African-American, one preferring not to say, and the remaining identifying as European- American. Neither of the African-American women chose to complete the project and four of the European-American women also dropped out, leaving four European-

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American women and one who preferred not to say to complete the project. These women ranged in age from 28-59 and came from different socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from unemployed and on social assistance, to different levels of middle-class, to affluent. Three of my final participants came to me via word-of-mouth referral and two were recruited directly on site. Different women might have felt more or less vulnerable at the counseling and information session. I relied on the discretion and judgment of the counseling staff to make sensitive decisions about when and if to introduce the topic of my research with potential participants. Those potential participants who indicated interest were given a flyer (see Appendix A) briefly describing my research goals and interests and providing means of contacting me. The role of the counseling staff in this initial contact was brief and limited; they needed only to mention that this research was being conducted at Planned Parenthood, give the prospective participant the information flyer if she wished, and notify me if the woman was interested in speaking further with me that day while she was in the clinic, which most of the women who indicated interest in participating elected to do. In order to protect the boundaries and working relationship between the counseling staff and their clients, the staff were not required to elaborate on the details of my research and did not offer any encouragement or discouragement to participate. Orientation: Levels of participation, informed consent, and using photo elicitation. I met at least three times with each participant, including the initial recruitment and orientation meeting I described above, at least one conversational or interview meeting, and a concluding final check-in with the participant following the analysis of her narrative. The orientation, lasting approximately an hour, took place after a potential participant was identified and briefed by a Planned Parenthood social worker and agreed to meet with me. At that point, and relevant to the concerns of empathic interviewing (Fontana & Frey, 2005), I explained my goals as a feminist researcher and my position as a pro-choice advocate. I shared examples of stories women in other research projects had constructed using photographic images to illustrate aspects of personal identity (e.g., Newbury & Hoskins, 2008). Because visual or other non-verbal representations of the researcher-as-participant can encourage trust between researcher and participant (McKee,

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2008), I included images I had created as a means of exploring my own position in this project and my own reflexive feelings about motherhood. Much of this conversation served to give the potential participant the opportunity to get to know me a little as a real person, a mother, and a researcher. I hoped the conversation would help to build a sense of rapport and would help each woman decide if she trusted me and would be willing to risk the emotional engagement involved in working with me in this project. There were a number of different possibilities for participation, including: meeting to speak with me without using photographic images and using notes instead of recordings to take down the participant’s story, meeting with me without images but allowing the conversation to be recorded for transcription and publication, including discussion of personal photographs in the conversation, and allowing photographs, portions of recorded narrative, transcript, or all of these in the final dissertation, online publication, or both. These possibilities for participation are detailed in separate consent forms for participation, recording, the use of quotes, and the use of images (see Appendices B, C, D, and E respectively). If a woman decided she wanted to participate in the image portion of the project, we discussed a strategy for taking pictures. Guidelines for taking photographs were left intentionally vague (Newbury & Hoskins, 2008) in the interest of leaving the participant room to interpret the task in a variety of creative ways. I suggested two framing questions for consideration while capturing images: 1. What images reflect who I am as a mother at this point in my life? 2. What images reflect how I believe others see me as a mother at this point in my life? We then discussed various methods of capturing creative and evocative images, including “breaking the frame” (Harper, 2002) or taking photographs from unusual positions and vantages, intentionally blurring, underexposing, or otherwise obscuring images, staging scenes using props or objects as a sort of still life, and capturing reflections of images on different surfaces. We also discussed the risks associated with capturing images of people, including third parties, and negotiated terms under which such images could be used in conversation but might be excluded from representation in the final research product.

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Finally, we agreed to a means of setting up our next meeting time, either by indicating a time in the future and means by which she would be comfortable being contacted by me (e.g., in a month, via cell phone) or, if the woman was comfortable doing so, by taking that moment to schedule our next meeting. Upon parting, I took the signed copy of the consent form and gave each woman who desired one a disposable camera and an addressed, postage paid envelope to return the film to me for development. When I received the exposed film I had planned to develop double prints, sending duplicates back to the participant so she might review them before our next meeting. I also made arrangements so if a participant wished she could develop the film herself and be reimbursed by me. As it turned out, none of the five final participants chose to take a disposable camera, preferring instead to use their own digital cameras or existing photographs for the purpose of our interviews. While two potential participants did take disposable cameras with them, they did not follow through with the project and I neither received film from them nor met with them for interviews. Interviews. I proposed at least one conversational meeting after the initial orientation, lasting approximately 60-90 minutes and taking place in a private space provided by Planned Parenthood or at a different, private location of the participant’s choosing. All of the participants elected to meet outside Planned Parenthood, some in their own homes and others in public but secluded areas. Before we began our conversation, I went over the terms of consent again and reviewed the levels of participation. At that point I obtained signed consent for recording the conversation (see Appendix C), for the use of images (see Appendix D), and the use of quotes from the transcript (see Appendix E). After this review, we began our discussion of the participant’s sense of motherhood and how it related to her decision to terminate her pregnancy, loosely guided by a list of questions I had composed (see Appendix F). This conversation was the primary means of getting at the orienting questions about constructs of motherhood in the context of choosing abortion. Following the manner of in-depth interviewing, these conversations were semi- or loosely-structured: This gave women the space they needed to describe their constructs of motherhood and identity in whatever manner they chose and allowed our conversation to veer into unanticipated but potentially fruitful regions.

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We began by reviewing the two guiding questions for the process of taking photographs. We then discussed the photos (if any) provided by the participant, using them as contextual elements of a story or idea but not literal representations of experience or identity. Instead, the images were used as a creative means to get at deeper reflection and interpretation of the meaning of motherhood in a particular life. To initiate this process, I followed Frohmann’s (2005) suggestion to invite the participant to sort the photographs into groups or into sequences that were evocative of themes, story lines, or were otherwise meaningful to her in some way. I hoped and anticipated that a number of topics relevant to the task of complicating discourse about motherhood and abortion would arise during these conversations, including: aspects of the women’s history, ideas of “good” and “bad” motherhood, her process of deciding to abort an unwanted pregnancy, and her perceptions of cultural expectations for motherhood (see Appendix F). I recorded the conversations, given permission, in order to enhance my ability to recall women’s own words and to represent their stories in their own voices. I also consulted with the participant about which photographs she wished to have included as part of the research presentation, and took electronic copies (via email or by transferring to my hard drive) of the images she decided to allow. At the end of the first conversational meeting, we discussed if we needed another meeting to cover everything we wished to explore. Most participants agreed it would not be necessary to meet again before I checked-in with them with my initial analyses and impressions; one participant indicated she would like to meet again but did not follow through. For the rest, if we felt we had sufficiently explored the “mother identity” in the participant’s story we discussed my process of analysis and when we might meet again (check in) to review my analysis and make corrections, additions, or deletions to the final representation. Storage of interview material. All participants agreed to have their interviews recorded with a handheld digital voice recorder. Digital recordings were titled with the participant’s chosen pseudonym and saved on a CD that could be played or worked with on a computer but stored in a separate, secure location when not in use. Written

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transcripts derived from these recordings and electronic copies of participant images were saved in a similar manner. At no point was it necessary for me to attach a participant’s real name and contact information to her recording, transcript, or images. During the initial orientation, each participant and I decided on a pseudonym to assign to her materials. The pseudonym was the only name associated with stored recordings, transcripts, and images so that any research assistants or advisors had no access to the participants’ real identities. In the event identifying information was included in recordings, etc., I edited these materials to preserve confidentiality before allowing anyone else access to them. Checking in. Following my process of analyzing and interpreting women’s narratives (described in detail in the next section) I met again individually with each participant, with the exception of Lilith, as I describe more fully in her narrative. Because the final project is designed to go beyond the textual presentation of traditional research, checking in with the participant involved presenting the visual components of the represented story in addition to the print text (McKee, 2008). I shared with each my preliminary representation of her narrative and her photographs, if any, and invited her comments on my analysis. At that time, a participant could correct or explain a point she felt I had misinterpreted, object if she felt misrepresented, and make decisions about allowing my representation to go forward as it stood or if she would like to suggest alterations or withdraw portions of it from consideration in the final research presentation. When the women indicated they would like to make corrections, I made them without comment if they were small (e.g., “I was 22, not 23”) or, as with several of the participants, included commentary about the desired changes in the presentation of the results (e.g., in Jane’s narrative). The checking-in meeting also gave me a chance to show each participant what other participants had come up with in their own explorations of the meaning of motherhood in their lives (Frohmann, 2005; Newbury & Hoskins, 2008). This cross- referencing provided an opportunity to identify common themes and experiences and possibly to discuss how similar-seeming experiences meant different things to each woman (Newbury & Hoskins, 2008). In this manner, the element of community dialogue

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that is so vital a part of many participatory projects (Brydon-Miller, 2001; Chataway, 2001) was recreated, in a sense, in a one-on-one setting. Analysis of Text and Presentation of Narratives When the interviews were finished, I had upwards of 25 single-spaced pages of transcript for each participant. For reasons of confidentiality I transcribed the interviews myself, a task which also gave me time to re-immerse myself in each woman’s story. As I finished each transcript, I read and re-read each to begin to identify themes that seemed to correspond to the participant’s construct of motherhood. I marked the passages that illustrated these themes and then made a first, gross divide of which themes were associated with being a “good” mother and which were associated with “bad,” as a means of defining a rough bipolar construct. I then created a document I called a “construct sort,” in which I parsed the themes under “good” and “bad” motherhood into finer distinctions (e.g., ideas such as “pride,” or “togetherness,” or “responsible”) that were represented a number of times in the text. At this point I sent a de-identified transcript to a graduate research associate with the instructions to read and come up with her or his own rough construct sort, according to the procedure I outlined above. Once my associate had completed this, we met to compare our observations of the participant’s story and our interpretations of how her motherhood construct was represented. Seeking additional corroboration or challenge to my initial analysis provided me with one process of validation and a check against my potential biases (for example, as I discuss in the results section, my initial difficulty understanding the hardships experienced by the affluent woman). Discussing the interviews and the constructs I gleaned from them also helped me clarify my impressions and practice how I would present my analysis to the participant later. Before I committed to crafting drafts of narratives from the transcript material, I briefly checked in with each participant to let her know the direction my analysis was taking. Most women agreed with how I understood their stories; one objected at first to how I termed one of the themes under the pole of “bad” mother and we agreed to different language, and another indicated that she would respond to my questions but did not follow through, despite responding to me several times that she would.

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The nature of conversation is to touch on, depart from, and return to various topics, ideas, and thoughts; because of this, a rough transcript by itself was too scattered to suggest a coherent form for the final narrative. To make order of chaos I used the construct sort to identify and sort passages of text from the transcript. This gave me large blocks of text loosely grouped by theme or topic and was the basis of my first narrative drafts. I “cleaned” these blocks of text to remove most extraneous utterances that did not add to the meaning of the text (e.g., “um, like” and other false starts and verbal tics), but I tried to preserve the timing and delivery of the story with the indication of pauses, stammering or crying, and the like. The women’s individual voices suggested different forms of representation in their final narratives. For all I strove to craft a document that would present well online: for some this meant grouping small bocks of text adjacent to the images they addressed, others had images embedded in longer passages of narrative. I detail more of the decisions I made on an individual basis within the analyses of the following narratives.

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Results Lilith’s Story Because she was my first participant, I suggested the name “Eve” to the dreadlocked woman across the table from me. She smiled and replied, “If we’re going Biblical, how about ‘Lilith’? She’s so much more interesting.” I agreed. “Interesting” fit her. Lilith had a capable wit and at our introductory meeting readily talked about her interest in art, ethnography, and women’s studies. My background in clinical psychology interested her, and she unselfconsciously talked about her struggles with childhood trauma, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder. She was eager to meet and we set up an appointment for a week after her abortion procedure; in the mean time, she began the photo taking and sent me a dozen or more images via email. Because her enthusiasm was so patent I was only a little concerned when she rescheduled our first meeting. This was followed by a series of trips to her apartment where she failed to materialize, only to contact me later, apologize, and reschedule. One afternoon I caught her at home during a time we had scheduled to meet, but she confessed she hadn’t remembered that we were meeting that day and asked me to come back the next. I agreed, disheartened by that point, but on my way back to the parking lot Lilith ran out and caught up with me. She confessed she suffered from some social anxiety and nervousness but was working to overcome it. She invited me in for tea and an informal conversation. We sat at her kitchen table, vibrantly painted in a re-creation of “Starry Night” (“With apologies,” she had daubed in one corner, “To V. Van Gogh”). We sipped tea and traded stories about being new mothers, being mothers in college, about politics and the state of the world. She talked about her difficulty finding and keeping jobs due to her social anxiety and issues with neck injuries and her husband’s frustration with his own work. I talked about my own work history and hopes for the future. The next day, I returned and recorded our conversation about her images of motherhood and her life. Lilith’s delivery was somewhat stream-of-consciousness, as aspects of one story reminded her of another. I chose to use stanza form to present parts of her narrative as I felt it best matched the natural breaks and pauses in her speech; these sections,

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accompanying the photos, are more reflective. Other sections are more content-driven and are represented in a more traditional paragraph format. [Lilith, 28 years old, is currently unemployed and applying for disability.]

You know how every time you look in the back seat the kid is there? Or the child seat is there? She’s always there. it just was poignant to me every time you look in the rear-view mirror, you see your kid and it just reminds you.

I get this constant reminder that I’m a mother. it’s this reminder that she’s always there she’s right behind me, always. she’s right behind me.

She’s such a spunky little kid. She’s real fun to play with it was really nice always having her right behind me. she still is really close to me I have to be holding her hand for her to fall asleep she’s just… we’re really, really close.

So she’s still metaphorically right behind me.

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She’s very clingy and kinda marches to her own drum. She wears different clothes to school she wears dresses over pants which I do she dresses like I do she acts a little like I do she takes these things randomly groups them. you always find odd stuff all over the house. Especially living with her. she’s a really, really bizarre child.

She’s different.

She loves Buddha every time she comes across it she rubs its belly. this kinda shocked me that she’s old enough to realize that it means something.

It made me proud as a mom, that made me proud.

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We don’t go out and do a lot of things— we stay home a lot. But we went out bowling one day, she was just cuddled up against me I looked down and saw those shoes. they’re so small, and it’s fun, it just reminded me of my childhood. Doing family things.

This brings back so many memories it’s not just a picture of her feet, it’s a picture of the smell of the bowling alley, and watching her play, and how she’d jump up and down if she got even one pin down, it was the entire experience.

I’ve taken my nephews bowling, but that was nothing near the feeling of taking my daughter. watching your own kid, as a mother, makes you feel so what’s the word proud.

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I never wanted to be a mom I wanted to be an aunt, a really good aunt. I love my nephews, my sister’s kids. But I never wanted to be a mom. I just wanted to go to school and do what I wanted to do. And be free.

So she was a surprise. We ended up keeping her I don’t know why, I have no idea why we decided to but I’m really glad we did.

I didn’t have any ideas or dreams about what being a mother was gonna be like. I rebelled so hard at being raised as a Mormon housewife I wanted to do everything but be that.

That’s why I don’t know what I’m doing. I didn’t have any preconceived notions of it.

Bang!, it happened, and I’m just making it up. I guess that’s what you do there’s not really any manual or anything.

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Nothing really goes as planned. Especially when you’re a parent.

I always tell her: I’m making this up as I go. I have no idea what I’m doing. Just go with me. OK?

’Cause that’s what I would feel like. I have no idea what I’m doing.

I was making her dinner, I put it in the microwave and forgot about it. It burned through the plate, all of a sudden there’s smoke pouring out of the kitchen.

She started freaking out, and I’m like: I’m just making this up, honey, I have no idea what I’m doing. Let’s just cook more, it’s cool.

We’ll just go with the flow. I tell her that a lot. Because I have no idea what I’m doing— you just make it up as you go.

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I believe I’m a good mom, actually. She’s like my buddy, we hang out a lot. I think at first I had a really hard time asking for help with her, but the fact that I ask for help now, when I need it, shows that I have her in my best interests. Because I really can’t deal with it all. I get really stressed out and start having panic attacks. So I feel like I am a safe mom because I know when I need to stop and give her to somebody who will help take care of her. Or just go downstairs, and I’ll stay down there and my mom and my stepdad will help take care of her. So I’m with her, but I’m not having to deal with everything. I feel like I’m a responsible parent because I’ve reached this place of understanding where I know I need help with her, and I get the help with her that I need. I have some problems now, and I don’t go outside anymore, it takes a lot for me to leave the house. I have all of these issues…I have social anxiety when I go outside, it’s hard for me to be around people. So I don’t go out by myself, usually. I go out with my husband. I haven’t always been like this. Two years ago I had a major nervous breakdown. I became really manic and homicidal and crazy. I wanted to kill government officials and religious officials and stuff. I said I was going to kill President Bush. So they put me in the hospital, and I’m still recovering from that. I didn’t realize how much of a nervous breakdown I had, how big it was, until the fact that I’m still not over it a year out. I was in there for a week, and then I had four weeks of outpatient therapy, which was like eight hours a day. I’m still recovering from it. I wake up every day with a headache, and having a kid just exacerbates that…so, I take a lot of Excedrin, and my daughter thinks that they’re my “candy.” Because I take so much. But this is my day: I wake up, and I have a headache, and I take those pills throughout the day. It’s just being a parent: the noise, and the drama and all that comes with, it makes…migraines. So that’s just my everyday life. It’s really hard. It’s really hard to be a mom, because some days I don’t have anything to give her, and on the days that I don’t have anything to give her I have to find someone who does have something to give her. I feel like sometimes I’m pawning her off to people, like my parents or my husband’s parents. It makes me feel bad sometimes. Sometimes it makes me feel resentful. But when I can’t handle her, I just have to give her to people, and the people around me know why. It scares me, though, because she shows signs of being bipolar, too. When she was younger I read this book called The Bipolar Child, and she showed a lot of signs of bipolar, even at that age. And my husband and I are both bipolar, so she has a greater risk—so that makes me feel bad, too. It’s difficult being a mom and seeing this. And it’s hard: living with bipolar is hard, every single day. I feel bad that she’s going to have to live with that. Actually, it’s one of the reasons we decided not to have a second child. While I keep explaining how difficult it is, it’s also very rewarding. I like—I love being her mom. She’s so beautiful and wonderful and when I see her I’m so proud. But there are pieces of how I think a good mom should be that I’m not doing right now. Before my breakdown she was in gymnastics, dance class, and all that stuff, and now I don’t have her in anything. Part of it is financial, part of it is just that I can’t handle the social part. And in that way I feel like she’s missing out, like she should be able to be in extra-curricular activities. So I feel like that’s my fault. I should be able to find a way to let her do that. And in that way I feel inadequate as a parent—that I can’t handle the social situations to allow her to be in extra things that she likes to do.

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I’m waaaaaaaay overmedicated I have to take such a large amount just to function my recovery is trying to taper down my meds.

I take 19 different medicines I don’t remember them all, but I could name some of them: Prozac, Abilify, Seroquel, Klonopin …God, what else. Lamictal… I’m on a few vitamins because the drugs make my hair fall out.

What else am I on…. Provigil, which is a narcolepsy medication, because I take so much medication I get sleepy. I take it every morning and every afternoon, or else I’ll be a zombie.

I don’t know what else I’m on, because I don’t fill the pill manager. The doctors fill it for me. Because I’d just get confused and there are just too many.

It is literally a handful of pills. Every morning and every night. And a few in the afternoon.

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I had my daughter two years before I went to college.

Because of her, I had a reason to go to school. Because of her, I had a reason to get good grades.

I do better because I have her to look at. Being a parent and being a student you have extra incentive to do well.

I can’t go back to school right now, which really bothers me. Part of me feels like I can’t go back to school because of her, which gives me some resentment towards her.

I feel like if it wasn’t for… I can only handle so much: I can handle her, or I can handle school, but I can’t handle her and school.

I really want to go back to school. I really, really want to go back, but I feel held back and I can’t.

I have to have two things to go back: I have to have the ability to take care of her. About…80% of the time, I’m fine. I’m really, really good with her.

But I need to be able to take care of her, and not have to worry about who I need to take her to if I can’t.

I need to be able to focus… all the medication I’m on right now really impedes my ability to focus. So I have to get off some of my meds.

When I’ve done those two things, I feel like that will be my gateway to being able to go back.

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I paint, obviously. All of these little brushes are my daughter’s, so this is a mother-daughter thing. I share a love I love sharing my artwork with her. She has a canvas, and she paints when I paint.

This picture shows me sharing my joy painting with her.

Also, if she doesn’t paint with me, then I don’t get to paint. So I give in, and let her paint.

I let her help me on this we did this together.

I’m finally getting to the point where I’m proud of my art. For a long time I hid it, now it’s finally up on my walls. I’m willing to share it and do portraits for people.

I want people to see me as an artist. I want people to see me as stable, I don’t want them to see me as crazed. I try really hard not to show that part of me, but it’s hard not to right now. It’s a really big part of what I am right now.

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I wasn’t supposed to get pregnant, because when I was younger I was in a car accident and I broke two of the vertebrae in my neck. So actually, having my daughter was very difficult. The weight of carrying a child was really bad for my neck, and I was on bed rest a lot. I had a really hard time, because any strain that I have…any way that I push too hard, or pick up something too heavy, really, really hurts my neck. So I had a really hard time with pregnancy. I had a hard time when she was a little baby, carrying her around a lot. She knows now that I can’t carry her, so she just holds my hand. Even right after she was born, it was difficult. She got thrush, so I got thrush, and we just passed it back and forth. I would curl my toes and cry when she was nursing, because it would hurt so bad. It was absolutely horrible. I’ve had two pregnancies that I’ve decided not to continue. And the first one was before my daughter was born, when I was with my ex-husband. I told him I was pregnant, and the first thing he said was “Call up the clinic.” I was so glad that we didn’t have a child together, because that would have made it so messy. I really didn’t want a kid. He didn’t want a kid…it was a bad idea. We were already rocky. But the second time…my current husband and I have gone through a rough situation recently. So we’re going to marriage counseling. We’re a lot stronger now, we’re doing very, very well now. But this child just—it just came at the wrong time. We’re right at the crest of being OK…and I’m right at the crest of being able to—maybe not this year—but next year, go back to school. And another child would hinder all of that. And it would hinder our relationship a lot. And my daughter doesn’t do well with other kids, she’s kind of an only child. And I would have had to go off all my medicines. It was a better idea not to keep the pregnancy. There were a lot of aspects that went into it: I think the biggest ones were our stability as a family, and my stability medically. So those were our two biggest reasons. It just seemed…really irresponsible, to go through with it. And it’s been a real—I thought that I would feel sad—the first time I felt sad—but this time it was such a relief. To have it be over with. It’s not like you want to…you don’t go into life saying, “I’m going to go have an abortion!” You know? It wasn’t a light decision at all. It took a lot of work. The question that some people always ask: Would I have thought about continuing the pregnancy, and giving up the baby for adoption? Was that something that occurred to me? Is that something that would have been possible? Yeah, well, I would never give—I would never be able to give it up. Being a mother, you know that when you have a child you’re already attached to it, before it comes out. So I can’t imagine going through pregnancy and then just not keeping it. I think that would be a bigger loss than going through…not having the pregnancy. It would be a huge loss. The other aspect is that I’m not a good pregnant lady—I don’t do pregnant very well. Because I would have to be off my medicines, and that would be such a huge deal: I mean, having a kid, and being half dead because I’m going crazy, and then—it’s not worth having a kid to give up for adoption. We thought about that for a short time, but it was pretty much out of the picture right away because the reasons for me not to be pregnant were for health and safety reasons, a lot of it, it wasn’t an option. Having a pregnancy was just not an option. It just wasn’t an option.

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I’ve got my good friends, who say that we’re both good parents, because my daughter’s so awesome.

Everyone says “oh, my kid is so special,” I know she’s special just like everyone else’s kid. But she’s also just a little different.

She talks about ecosystems: this little kid was crying, and she told him “don’t worry, you’re part of the ecosystem.” And then he looked at her, and she said “I’m part of the ecosystem, too!”

And she just— the way she is, she’s just a little different. She’s a very happy kid. Just like, a bouncy, happy little kid.

I think that we’re pretty good parents. We’re just going through a hard time… it’s getting a lot better, though. But. That’s my life. Yep.

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Of Chaos and Connection My process in trying to understand Lilith’s story was to read through and look for themes that I could link to her construct of motherhood. Some of these themes would link to what she considered being a good mother, and some would link to what she considered being a bad mother. Some themes were more flexible, and would sometimes be linked to being a good mother while other times would be associated with bad motherhood. Though she didn’t overtly make these connections, the way she chose the images to talk about, and the way she talked about them, suggested to me these connections to her meanings of motherhood. Chaos. The first broad theme I associated with Lilith’s construct of motherhood was something I termed “chaos.” Chaos encompassed unpredictability and difficulty in a multitude of areas: medical and psychological disorders, relationships, financial status, and emotional wherewithal. When Lilith managed the chaos—which she accomplished in different ways—she considered herself a good mother. When the chaos overwhelmed her, she felt like a bad mother. Some of the means she used to manage her chaos became overwhelming in themselves, and so her understanding of whether she was a “good” or “bad” mother was often in flux. The best she could do, Lilith acknowledged, was to be flexible: “…nothing really goes as planned. Especially when you’re a parent….Because I have no idea what I’m doing—you just make it up as you go.” One aspect of chaos Lilith has to contend with in almost every aspect of her life is her experience of psychological distress. Her social anxiety affects her daily life: “We don’t go out and do a lot of things—we stay home a lot.” One of the occasions Lilith was most proud of was when she managed to overcome her anxiety enough to take her daughter bowling. This story is rich in detail, and Lilith associated it both with memories of her own childhood and with how she, as a parent, would like to be “Doing family things.” Though she referred to pride in terms of her daughter, it is understood that she was proud of herself, too, as a mother. Sometimes Lilith does not master her distress, as when she felt overwhelmed by the demands of parenting and “start[s] having panic attacks” and when she became overwhelmed by life and was hospitalized. These were the times Lilith faulted herself as a mother in terms of the care and attention she could provide her daughter: “It makes me

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feel bad sometimes. Sometimes it makes me feel resentful. But when I can’t handle her, I just have to give her to people, and the people around me know why.” Lilith managed the chaos of her psychological distress in different ways. To some extent she accomplished this by controlling her exposure to social stress as when, for example, she “forgot” or avoided meetings with me. This mitigated the anxiety she felt about social contact, but as a general strategy failed to equip Lilith to be the mother she wants to be: But there are pieces of how I think a good mom should be that I’m not doing right now. Before my breakdown she was in gymnastics, dance class, and all that stuff, and now I don’t have her in anything. Part of it is financial, part of it is just that I can’t handle the social part. And in that way I feel like she’s missing out, like she should be able to be in extra-curricular activities. So I feel like that’s my fault. I should be able to find a way to let her do that. And in that way I feel inadequate as a parent—that I can’t handle the social situations to allow her to be in extra things that she likes to do.

More than her practice of social distancing, however, Lilith relied on psychoactive medication to manage her psychological distress. She showed me the pill manager she mentions in her narrative: a tray-sized rectangle of 28 lidded compartments, four compartments for each day. Though she credited the drugs with giving her the ability to function, she also described this state as “overmedicated,” as being a “zombie” and not being able to focus. Like titrating her dose of social contact, using medication to manage the chaos of her psychological distress was something that was in transition from being associated with being a “good” mom (finally functioning) to being a “bad” mom (functioning only as a zombie). Uncertainty in relationships also featured in Lilith’s narrative and, as with psychological chaos, Lilith sought different ways to manage this stress. Foremost of these relationships was the one Lilith has with her daughter, and Lilith devoted a lot of time and thought to its maintenance: I believe I’m a good mom, actually. She’s like my buddy, we hang out a lot. I think at first I had a really hard time asking for help with her, but the fact that I ask for help now, when I need it, shows that I have her in my best interests.

Lilith acknowledged that to be a “good” mom means recognizing those times when she might not have the wherewithal to do so herself, and at those times she seeks other

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resources: I feel like I am a safe mom because I know when I need to stop and give her to somebody who will help take care of her. Or just go downstairs, and I’ll stay down there and my mom and my stepdad will help take care of her. So I’m with her, but I’m not having to deal with everything. I feel like I’m a responsible parent because I’ve reached this place of understanding where I know I need help with her, and I get the help with her that I need.

Lilith also took care of her relationship with her husband, with whom she described going through a “rough situation.” She managed the uncertainty of this by going to couple’s counseling with him: Part of their stated aim was to keep their family intact for their daughter, to continue to be good parents to her. Because of her psychological distress and her neck injury Lilith has been unable to hold steady employment, and at the time of our interview she was unemployed and seeking disability status. Her lack of work contributed to the family’s experience of financial chaos, and this affected the quality of parenting Lilith felt she could provide. She felt guilty that she couldn’t afford to pay for the things her daughter used to enjoy, like gymnastics and dance classes. During the course of our acquaintance, Lilith and her family had to move out of their apartment after her husband lost his job and they were unable to pay their rent. Lilith had to work hard to manage this chaos, and made some headway by seeking out social aid resources and by mustering the support of her extended family in the area. Emotional chaos came from being overwhelmed by all of the conditions described above: the psychological chaos, the relational chaos, and the financial chaos. Lilith referred to the state of emotional overwhelm as “not having anything left,” a feeling of depletion different from the social anxiety she named and the worries about money and marriage that appeared in her narrative. As before, part of how she managed emotional chaos was through mustering the support of others around her: It’s really hard. It’s really hard to be a mom, because some days I don’t have anything to give her, and on the days that I don’t have anything to give her I have to find someone who does have something to give her.

In addition to this, Lilith talked about how she fuels her emotional reserves, including her creative expression through art and her aspiration to go back to school to complete a

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graduate degree. In this way, Lilith worked to transform the wrung-out “bad” mom into a “good” mom who is full of creative energy and vision for the future. Connection. The second broad theme I took from Lilith’s storytelling and her images was one of connectedness, or more precisely, of identification or belonging. This theme, too, divided into several sub-themes. For the most part, themes of being connected/identifying were associated with her feelings of being a good mom, though there were times when too close an association or identification with another translated into feeling like a bad mother. By the same token, most of the time being “different” was associated with “bad” motherhood, but this too had a transitional nature and being different could sometimes be seen as a good part of motherhood. Lilith’s feeling of connection to her daughter was a potent force throughout her narrative. She illustrated this in her choice of imagery where her daughter is featured prominently and tenderly, such as the rearview mirror photo and the photo of the two of them in an embrace. Lilith used these images as a springboard to talk about their connection and sense of belonging to each other: “She’s right behind me, always. She’s right behind me….We’re really, really close. So she’s still metaphorically right behind me.” Connection and belonging can turn into obligation, and there were times when Lilith felt thwarted by the responsibility of being a mother. For some time, being a mother was inspiration for Lilith to do well: Because of her, I had a reason to go to school. Because of her, I had a reason to get good grades. I do better because I have her to look at. Being a parent and being a student you have extra incentive to do well.

But when Lilith’s emotional wherewithal was exhausted and she had to make a choice between going back to school and taking care of her daughter, Lilith’s feeling of connection and belonging became detrimental: I can’t go back to school right now, which really bothers me. Part of me feels like I can’t go back to school because of her, which gives me some resentment towards her. I feel like if it wasn’t for…I can only handle so much: I can handle her, or I can handle school, but I can’t handle her and school. I really want to go back to school. I really, really want to go back, but I feel held back and I can’t.

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Lilith saw herself in her daughter, and much of her narrative of motherhood was organized around observations about her daughter in which Lilith as a mother is a peripheral or implied presence. This was especially demonstrated in her use of images: Consider the mother’s point of view from which the rear-view mirror and the bowling shoes photos were taken, and the tiny reflection of Lilith with the camera in the faucet of the sink “art installation” photo. Lilith used narrative and images to illustrate the quality of “oddness” or “differentness” that she shares with her daughter. Sometimes this association brought forth feelings of pride, as when her daughter created art or showed appreciation for the meaning of the Buddha. Lilith remarked that her daughter “wears dresses over pants, which I do.” In response to a photo of a train (not included in her narrative here), Lilith laughed and explained “She counts train cars. So I just took this because she was counting the train cars, which I used to do when I was little.” Lilith enjoys being perceived as counterculture in a small, conservative city, and she expressed pride and satisfaction that as a mother she has passed some of her more cherished forms of “differentness” onto her daughter. But some of Lilith’s legacy to her daughter is burdensome, Lilith admitted. She made note of the traits of psychological distress that her daughter seems to share: It scares me, though, because she shows signs of being bipolar, too. When she was younger I read this book called The Bipolar Child, and she showed a lot of signs of bipolar, even at that age. And my husband and I are both bipolar, so she has a greater risk—so that makes me feel bad, too. It’s difficult being a mom and seeing this. And it’s hard: living with bipolar is hard, every single day. I feel bad that she’s going to have to live with that.

Lilith also noted with some ambivalence that her daughter is “clingy,” and that her daughter’s “march[ing] to her own drum” might make people look askance at her. Because Lilith struggles with her own social discomfort and feelings of not fitting in, these observances of mother-daughter similarity brought feelings of guilt and regret and were associated with being a bad mother. Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision Lilith’s construct of motherhood, with its implications of what it means to be a good and a bad mother, bore directly on her decision to abort her unplanned pregnancy.

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Her feelings about what it takes to be a good mother to her daughter and to her unborn child formed part of her decision; fears about how she would be a bad mother if she did not terminate made up the rest. When Lilith described how she managed the chaos in her life, she explained how having another child would disrupt her efforts. She recognized she would have had to go off all her 19 medications to safely continue her pregnancy, but she knew she would not be able to continue to be a good mother to her daughter if she had to do that: I need the medication just to function….I would have to be off my medicines, and that would be such a huge deal: I mean, having [to take care of] a kid, and being half dead because I’m going crazy, and then—it’s not worth having a kid to give up for adoption. We thought about that for a short time, but it was pretty much out of the picture right away because the reasons for me not to be pregnant were for health and safety reasons, a lot of it, it wasn’t an option. Having a pregnancy was just not an option. It just wasn’t an option.

Lilith went on to explore what would happen to her efforts to maintain her relationship with her husband if she continued the pregnancy: “We’re a lot stronger now, we’re doing very, very well now. But this child just—it just came at the wrong time. We’re right at the crest of being OK.” She mentioned protecting her daughter, too: “My daughter doesn’t do well with other kids, she’s kind of an only child.” Finally, she pointed out that she already felt she did not have enough emotional resources for her daughter, and while she works to redress that and be more of a “good” mom, she couldn’t allow the addition of anything else to her life that would have depleted her more, including another child. Lilith’s construct of “good” motherhood involves managing all these forms of chaos, and her decision to terminate her pregnancy took into account the measures she had put into place to effect this management, including: continuing to take her medications, devoting time and energy to repairing her relationship with her husband, searching out ways to better financially support her family, and marshalling her emotional reserves to fight the feelings of overwhelm that chaos brings. But she also considered what her sense of attachment, connection, and identification meant to her in terms of being a good mother, and these ideas also played a role in her decision to terminate.

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First Lilith considered her sense that she had been a “bad” mother by imparting the worst part of her “differentness”—her psychological difficulties—to her daughter. When she discussed her fears that her daughter will be bipolar, she stated, “Actually, it’s one of the reasons we decided not to have a [biological] second child.” She felt guilt and remorse for imparting such a burden onto her daughter, even though inadvertently. Lilith talked about the possibility of adopting a second child, and that brought her to her consideration of the question anti-abortion activists put forth: Why not adopt out your unplanned baby, rather than abort? Lilith had already detailed the dangers to the fetus of continuing a pregnancy on her medication and the danger to her and to her daughter of continuing a pregnancy not on medication. But to this she added a consideration of what it would mean to her to form a sense of connection to another child, as she had with her daughter: Would I have thought about continuing the pregnancy, and giving up the baby for adoption? Was that something that occurred to me? Is that something that would have been possible? Yeah, well, I would never give—I would never be able to give it up. Being a mother, you know that when you have a child you’re already attached to it, before it comes out. So I can’t imagine going through pregnancy and then just not keeping it. I think that would be a bigger loss than going through…not having the pregnancy. It would be a huge loss.

Lilith recognized her sense of attachment and belonging as one of the aspects of her being a good mother. She managed the threat of losing connection by preventing an attachment that couldn’t be fulfilled, by terminating her pregnancy before she felt the catch of a bond she couldn’t honor. Postscript: Lilith’s reactions to my treatment of her images and story. I communicated with Lilith throughout the process of transcribing her interview, making initial analyses, and preparing a final draft of her narrative. She suggested I send her my process questions via email, as she would find it easier to answer them on her own time and felt she was having increased difficulty meeting with others in person. I agreed, and sent her questions about how she felt about my analysis. She did not respond for some time, and for a while I struggled with whether to keep after her or respect her silence. I opted to continue to send her updates of my progress, and from time to time she would respond to apologize for her delay in getting back to me and to assure me she would like

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to discuss my work. At one point she noted her husband had lost his job and the family was moving in with his parents; the last I heard she and her husband were in the process of divorce. I considered whether or not to keep her narrative in this project without her express reaction to the final version. I decided to keep it: I had not made her final approval a condition of inclusion; I had offered her the opportunity to withdraw from the project, and she did not indicate she wished to do so; finally, I wrote briefly to say that I hoped we could still find a time to discuss this work but if I did not hear from her otherwise before I finished the project, I would assume her narrative was OK to include as it stood. Though I regretted not having her final input, I felt her story was beautiful, and important, and deserved to be included. Jane’s Story The next woman I met matched Lilith in enthusiasm and friendliness, but departed from her too in several ways. Where Lilith was dreadlocked and cheerfully counterculture in her personal presentation, “Jane” was trim, polished, and fashionably dressed. Though Lilith was socially anxious, she was not shy about having personal details of her life shared with strangers. By contrast, Jane was extraverted and friendly with me but also very concerned that details in her story not be associated with her public image. Both women stayed at home, but Lilith was unemployed due to disability and, while Jane wanted a job, she could afford not to work because she had the support of her ex-husband’s alimony and child support payments. I mulled over what I knew about Jane while I drove to our first meeting together at her home in a quiet, affluent neighborhood in the city. I enjoyed her energy and her enthusiasm; at our orientation meeting at the clinic we had talked so long about running, art, and parenting that one of the clinic staff became concerned that we were lost in the building and came to find us. Jane had a background in art history and she was greatly intrigued by the imagery portion of this project, and she talked some about her experience as an amateur photographer. She had promised to send some photos electronically before we met, but none came. When I arrived at her house and she greeted me at the door, the next thing she mentioned was how sorry she was that she had decided not to take photos, after all.

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Jane explained that while initially she was greatly intrigued with the idea of participating in the photo elicitation process, she worried that the images could be used to positively identify her in the final presentation. Even when I offered her the option of using photographs for our conversation, but excluding them from the research presentation, she demurred: J: I would love to be able to, but, it’s a control issue. Definitely. While I would love to have been able to illustrate this, I would never know, down the line, where the photos could go. I could never know, once I released them to you…the images can always be stolen or picked up off the internet.

S: Used out of context.

J: Yeah. I couldn’t control it, past my reach. It is, it’s that perception, and control. I just can’t let it go beyond my arm’s length. It’s just something I can’t, as much as I’d like to do it, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t let go. I can always tell you a story, and you won’t use my name or whatever. But [the photographs are] something that once I let it go, it’s gone.

S: And people will interpret stories, too, but that’s not as subjective as an image?

J: Right. So it’s kind of…like I know that I’ve made a very smart decision in order to move on with my life. I’m very comfortable with it. I think preserving that privacy was really a good thing to do. And I think that’s why I chose to leave the images out…maybe that felt too personal to me. And I like to take pictures, and I’m very artistic and things like that. And I’m a very visual person. So I guess it did feel too personal to me. Which is weird, and I didn’t know it when I volunteered [for the project]—I didn’t know I wouldn’t do it. Which is interesting.

Jane’s wish to protect her most personal privacy extended even to sharing her images with me: Such was their evocative power, she felt showing them to anyone would be “too personal.” Jane did have ideas of the kind of images she thought about using for this project, and her descriptions of the scenes she imagined are presented in black text boxes in lieu of images. I sought to use these text boxes as organizational foci for her wide-ranging, somewhat rambling story, which otherwise appears in conventional paragraph format. Her delivery was theatrical and engaging: She frequently enacted the parts of others in her story as well as giving voice to her internal critic/observer, and her voice flexibly expressed incredulity, despair, delight, and mischievousness in turn.

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[Jane, 32, is a divorced, stay-at-home mother]

You have your plans, and your hopes, but you look at the chaos of mothering and wonder, “Is this all?” And I think, “Well, I’m 32…What happens when I’m 40? Is that it?”

Is this all there is?

I always have these thoughts when I can hear the tea boiling, and I’m in the laundry room and it’s kind of quiet, and warm. I’m pulling the clothes out of the dryer and my son’s undies are all mixed in with my t-shirts, and I’m separating them, and folding them, and I’m pulling it all out, and I think….God, is this it? And…that’s it? This is all I get? I wasted my 20s, I didn’t realize there was another option in play: Having a great job, and then getting married. I could have done so many other things with my life….what possessed me to get married?

When I was going through in vitro fertilization—and this is why I know I probably shouldn’t have had a child in the first place—I thought, “if it doesn’t work, we’re getting divorced.” I literally thought—as I was going through a round of shots—“if this doesn’t take….” And then I got pregnant. And I was like, “Oh, crap.” I had a lot of trouble getting pregnant from my son’s father. I didn’t enjoy being pregnant, but when my son was born he was just a perfect little baby. But even still, I had terrible post-partum depression, afterward. Part of it was I didn’t have a lot of help after he was born. I had to fake it, put on this “I’m a brave mom, I’ve got it all under control” act. I think my husband called me when I was in the delivery room, and they said “Oh yeah, she’s actually having the baby today.” He didn’t believe I was actually in labor. I’m like, “Seriously, though. There’s a puddle coming out. I’m standing in a puddle. My water has broken. The baby will come out today.” He came to the hospital, the baby came out, and my husband went back to the office. Within minutes. Yeah, he just didn’t take time off. Which was fine. You know, somebody needed to earn a living. But…I also thought it would be cool if he were home for like a day or so. My parents were very hands-off kind of parents, so I went home in the middle of a snowstorm with this new baby. A-lone. I was alone with this new baby, and though I wasn’t afraid of the baby, like some people are—I knew he wouldn’t break, and I just needed to feed him, and change him, and we’d be OK together—I was alone. And I was afraid of the outside world. Which was the world outside my chair. So I thought, “We’ll just stay right here and not move. We will stay in this giant, humongous easy chair. Just put up the feet and stay in this chair!” We could rock, and I could nurse him for hours, and eat some granola bars, and not move. So I was alone with this baby. I was alone, I had this dog, I had this baby, and I truly didn’t have anyone to help me. I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t know how to ask for help. I thought, “I would

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really like someone to come help me,” but I didn’t know how to ask. So finally when he was about eight months old I got a babysitter. She’s like, “It’s OK. I’ll hold the baby. You go exercise. Go away for a few hours. He’ll be fine.” I’m like, “OK, perfect!” It was such a revelation: You go out, and then you come back…and it’s OK! That’s it! And he was fine! The babysitter was one of eight children, so she knew babies didn’t break. And she was able to just kind of hold on to me and the baby at the same time, and it was fine. And so that got me through the depression. But yeah, it was amazing. I needed somebody to almost detach the baby from me. I think I needed that. But I was so determined to be a good mom. There are so many different kinds of people, and so many different kinds of moms. I’m a good mom. My son is five now, he eats his vegetables, he’s a pretty good kid. Listen, I’ve screwed up a whole lot in the past year. Or two. How can I separate the screw-ups from everything else, and be able to show that I care, that I made good choices as a mom?

When people look back at my story, I hope people will see I handled a tough situation as best as I could, and my kid handled it really well. Meanwhile, people didn’t see everything under the surface. I think of the duck paddling—you don’t see anything above water, but the little feet are really going underneath.

Two years ago my husband and I separated, and we had lawyers and everything. But we are just such private, private people that no friends, no one knew. I thought, “Let’s get halfway through this before I tell people we’re getting divorced. Let’s just get this stuff drawn up, and midway through I’ll tell everyone.” But honestly, people didn’t guess we were separated even though he was out of town every weekend? And there was a big party over the summer, and I took my closest friends instead of him? We went to cocktail parties and we’d leave after 20 minutes? No one was asking questions. No one asked. No one was too concerned. But finally we pulled the plug officially. I was dating somebody else. And my husband was seeing somebody else—we were done! It was over! So this man I was seeing had left his wife, but they had this kind of hot and cold relationship. Which…I should have known better. But OK. My bad. I think part of it, the privacy and trying to act normal, was I never wanted my problems to be my son’s problems. I never wanted the drama between me and his dad to be his problem. So he had no clue that this stuff was going on. And most of the time I think it’s working. I look at him and I say, “You’re happy, you’re a healthy kid, you’re growing ’cause your shoes don’t fit, so I know you’re eating enough…yeah, you watch TV, but who doesn’t?” My ex and I get along well enough that when my son sees his dad he can not feel guilty or bad or caught in between us. But in order for that to work I had to over- compensate by being very kind to his father. Very kind to my ex’s parents. I mean, I had to tough it out all the time. I kept extremely good relations with them. And this truly was only for my son’s benefit. I never got to cry. I never got to have that time to grieve the end of my marriage. Part of being a good mom meant keeping relationships even though I was going through all this upheaval and divorce. Even when—during the hell. And you

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don’t let people see you unhappy, you don’t let people see the mess. You can’t let your guard down for a minute. And I don’t know…I just keep going. I had to keep going. I think my son has handled this divorce beautifully. And I don’t know how. I don’t know how. He’s five, and I think at different ages we’ll have different reactions, and at some point he’ll be angry with us, and at some point he’ll want to know what happened, and at some point there will be some disruptions about what happened. But right now he knows that his dad doesn’t live here, he knows his dad moved out, and that we’re not married, and all these things.

I feel like transition is a theme, and I feel like…a lot of it has been perception. Perception is really a big deal…I’m trying to always look like I’m together despite how messy my life is. I’m trying really hard to try to make it look like no matter how messy it is, I have it together.

It’s excruciating.

It’s….awful. To not be able to really feel what you’re going through. And there’s nowhere to be able to show it, and there’s no one to help. And I think that affected my decision to terminate. It maybe affected how come I got pregnant, maybe. I don’t know.

I think I’m trying to be a good mom. Or, people think I’m a good mom. Or don’t…I think there’s a lot of perception both ways. I know that. I usually think I know that I am a good mom. So…I just keep going, and going, and going. And I thought, “So what does this say about me as a mom? As a mom, where am I?” And I can see who I am as a mom in my son, in that he’s so well adjusted, that he’s such a good kid. What makes a good mom is having a good, happy child, where he’s not afraid, or unhappy, where he’s balanced. I don’t know. The good mom, it’s such a weird thing. I know what a bad mom is: She’s the one with the kid that whines, and throws the fits in the parking lot. She’s the one who has the bad kid. But I think being a good mom somehow makes your child a good child. And I guess it’s because whatever you do reflects on your child. So somehow you have to be peaceful, and your child is just sort of this reflection of you. So if you’re sad, or frazzled, or fragile, or scattered, or angry, or mean, or loud, or any of those things, that would make your kid be that way, too. They just sort of absorb it. And then your child would be crying, and screaming, and going to school and people would look at your kid and they say, “Your kid’s a mess!” ….Well, mom must be a mess. As a good mom, I can’t put pressure on my son. But I put pressure on myself…I want to be a good mom. I compare myself to the other moms….He has this Tae Kwon Do thing next week, where he’ll have a test where he’s supposed to break a board. So, we’re supposed to practice. I gotta do it…we gotta pass, and so we have to practice, but I’ve got to figure out how to do it without him realizing that we’re practicing. I mean I really want him to be able to break the board. So every once in a while I’m like, “Come

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on, hit my fist!” And he wants to do it, but I’m not going to put pressure on him to. But…you know, a good mom gets a kid to pass his test…and we gotta show up Monday, and he’s gotta break that board. I think in some weird way my son has become a great reflection of me. Because we spend so much time together, and we’re so close. I’ve always said, “Children behave as a reflection of you,” because if you’re good to your child, your child will be good. And if you yell and scream and complain, your child reflects that, because they’re just bouncing off of you. And my son’s just…good. I don’t yell—although lately he says, “Mom, stop whining,”— so I’m thinking, “Oh crap, I must whine a lot.” Because I used to say that to him: Stop whining! Now he’s saying, “Mom, stop whining.” I think we must be whining together a lot, lately.

I had always pictured, growing up, being a mom. And this is

kind of it: I thought I would wind up like this, with a nice

house with a picket fence in a nice neighborhood. Maybe

with more than one child…

I didn’t want to get pregnant with the man I was dating. I really didn’t want to get pregnant. But there’s something people don’t know about women: They like sex. Whether they admit to it or not, we really like it. And it’s not a horrible thing for them to like sex. And that’s the thing that’s missing, because it’s not acknowledged, that there might be reasons why a woman would take a risk and go out with someone and not just stay home and bake cookies. The other part in the back of my mind was, it took me so long to get pregnant before, with my husband, so why, why didn’t I get pregnant before? It just was impossible for me to believe that I could get pregnant so easily with the man I was dating. When I was pregnant with my son it was all about trying to keep the pregnancy every week—because the pregnancy was from in vitro fertilization, every day, every week, every month, everything was watched. I had so many ultrasounds. It was, “How are the embryos doing?” I think they put two in, but only one took. I was so excited. And that whole thing was: We’re having twins, and then there was only one, and every day was a roller-coaster. After all of that, and all the shots, and all that stuff—to this? What are the chances of this? To have this happen by accident? By accident, truly by accident. By accident, by accident. After going through all of that to get pregnant with my son, to have it happen accidentally was irony and relief. Kind of: Well, at least now I know I can get pregnant. So maybe I’ll get to have more children in my life. I’ll go on, and I’ll meet somebody else, I’ll get to have more children…and then I thought, “Well, oh crap, what if I wasted my…my bonus kid? What if this pregnancy was my shot at having my extra bonus kid, and I screwed it up!” Then I thought, “You know what, you can’t think like that. Because you don’t want the bonus kid at the wrong place and the wrong time. Because that’s just not a bonus, that’s just stupid.” And if you have a bonus kid that you don’t know what to do with, with somebody you don’t want to be a parent with, that’s not a bonus. In my community, pregnancy means a certain course of action. You don’t adopt the baby out. You raise the baby. You send your child to school. You are a very

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intelligent person, so you do all these things for the child, you do everything right. It’s like following this list of “What is a good mother.” No, of course you have the baby. You are blessed. You continue to follow this prescribed notion of what a good mother is. You have the baby, you raise the baby. Except, in my case, I got pregnant by the wrong person. At the wrong time. In this wacked-out situation. So no, it was not an option. If I had kept that pregnancy, I think it would have caused some serious rifts in relationships I had. With my ex-husband, with my parents, it would have caused problems with whatever remaining friends I still had…it was a tricky person that I was seeing, who got me pregnant. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. I think that would have been a problem, if people had known I got pregnant by him. And I can’t move, so I’m tied to this area. So I went off and did my own thing. I’m a very private person. And it’s not my nature to tell people my business. And I’m trying to preserve my child, who’s going to the school where I met this man. This is a tiny private school, and this is a tight-knit community. No one even knows about the pregnancy, but that I was even seeing him made me the bad guy. So I was keeping it all under wraps. I was just trying to just keep smiling, like that whole “I’m a good mom” thing. Keeping everything on an even keel. I’ve kind of got blinders on, I go in to the school, I drop off my son, I pick him up, I leave. My son is happy, he’s learning, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t notice. But all of a sudden we were not invited to birthday parties. There were no play dates. So we weren’t going anywhere, I was just dropping him off and picking him up. We were just doing our own thing. And I thought, “Hmm.” And over Christmas break I called his teacher and said, “Will my son be ready for kindergarten next year?” You know, I’m wondering if I should register him or not. And she said, “You need to repent. You have Jezebel in you. And the devil has gotten you, and what you did was wrong. And you need to ask that man’s wife for forgiveness.” And I’m like, “Excuse me? I’m calling to ask you if you think my son is ready for kindergarten next year.” She says yes, he’s ready for kindergarten. And she says, “What you did was wrong. And Jesus died on the cross for you.” And I’m thinking, “Oh, my god! All I want to know is if I should sign my son up for kindergarten!” She said, “You know, all the parents know about this.” I’m thinking, “How would they know? Did you tell them?” And when I go to my son’s Tae Kwon Do class I am totally not included. I know all the other moms there, but I am not included. It’s just this whole drama. You know, they have known me for two years, but they don’t even say hello…ugh. So I have to sit there and be secure enough to say to myself, “You know what, I’m a good mom.” You know, my son may not break the board on Monday. But he’s a nice kid. So I made arrangements for him to go to a different school next year. I feel like I can’t let him be hurt by my being blamed for the break-up of someone else’s marriage. Where I had such a small part of it. I think what happened—this small part, this abortion—was my story, my saga, my problem. Which no one knows about. So there was private turmoil, and then public drama. And…you know. I’m trying to just keep it together.

Of Perception, Pride, and Company As with Lilith’s narrative, my process in understanding Jane’s story was to look

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for themes that could be associated with the “good” and “bad” poles of her construct of motherhood. And as with Lilith’s, some of these themes proved more transitional or flexible in their interpretation, so that in some aspects they were associated with “bad” motherhood and in others, “good.” Perception. A primary theme that arose from my reading was the idea of “perception.” As Jane noted in the introductory passage before her narrative, she felt it was important for her to be able to control how she is perceived by others, to keep up appearances. She did this with me by crafting the story she wanted to tell and by not allowing the subjectivity of images into the process of her self-presentation. In other areas of her story, Jane demonstrated her awareness of how she communicates—and how others receive—messages about what kind of person she is: Perception is really a big deal…especially…I’m trying to always look like I’m together despite how messy my life is, I’m trying really hard to try to make it look like no matter how messy it is, I have it together…. I think of the duck paddling— you don’t see anything above water, but the little feet are really going underneath.

When Jane could control her image, she felt she looked like a good person to others. Sometimes she failed to control how she was perceived, and looked bad: I wasn’t seeing clearly, because I [was] worrying about my own divorce. OK, so [the other man’s wife] hadn’t said to people that they were divorced, she had said to people that they were “having trouble.” So I wasn’t…whatever, it blew up. I looked like the bad guy. And she was happy to use me as the excuse for why they were splitting up. And this is a tight-knit community, so…whoever yells the loudest is the victim. So she was the victim. It was very easy to blame me.

Perception and motherhood have a fluid interaction in Jane’s story. The overarching relationship is that when Jane could keep up appearances, she considered herself a good mother, and when she failed to maintain her good image she felt like a bad mother: Part of being a good mom meant keeping [up] relationships even though I was going through all this upheaval and divorce. Even when—during the hell. And you don’t let people see you unhappy, you don’t let people see the mess. You can’t let your guard down for a minute.

Within this relationship are other, reciprocal variations. One is that when Jane appeared to be a good mother, this helped her keep up appearances, as she described in a passage about enduring the censure of other women in her social group: “…so I have to

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sit there and be secure enough to say “you know what, I’m a good mom. I didn’t lose my kid’s Tae Kwon Do outfit… like her.” Another variation is how Jane both assessed and controlled how she appeared to others via perceptions of her son: I think being a good mom somehow makes your child a good child. And I guess it’s because whatever you do reflects on your child. So somehow you have to be peaceful, and your child is just sort of this reflection of you. So if you’re sad, or frazzled, or fragile, or scattered, or angry, or mean, or loud, or any of those things, that would make your kid be that way, too. They just sort of absorb it. And then your child would be crying, and screaming, and going to school and people would look at your kid and they say, “Your kid’s a mess!” Well, mom must be a mess.

I think in some weird way my son has become a great reflection of me. Because we spend so much time together, and we’re so close. I’ve always said, “Children behave as a reflection of you,” because if you’re good to your child, your child will be good. And if you yell and scream and complain, your child reflects that, because they’re just bouncing off of you. And my son’s just…good.

Because her son was a reflection of her, it became important for Jane that he kept up appearances, too: As a good mom, I can’t put pressure on my son. But I put pressure on myself…I want to be a good mom. I compare myself to the other moms….He has this Tae Kwon Do thing next week, where he’ll have a test where he’s supposed to break a board. So, we’re supposed to practice. I gotta do it…we gotta pass, and so we have to practice, but I’ve got to figure out how to do it without him realizing that we’re practicing. I mean I really want him to be able to break the board. So every once in a while I’m like, “Come on, hit my fist!” And he wants to do it, but I’m not going to put pressure on him to. But…you know, a good mom gets a kid to pass his test…and we gotta show up Monday, and he’s gotta break that board.

Pride. The next broad idea I associated with Jane’s motherhood construct was something I initially thought of as a theme of “Pride versus Shame.” When I reviewed this original impulse with Jane, however, she took exception to the term “shame” as not evocative of her experience or what she was trying to convey in her story of motherhood and unintended pregnancy: I think I’m not…I’m not…I don’t think there’s like shame, or guilt, or things like that. Because I think it’s just, it [the abortion] was a well-educated choice, and a well thought-out choice, and a smart choice. And it was a good choice, and I’m very comfortable with it. So I don’t actually have any of those feelings, which is interesting. But because of the nature of the relationship that it [the unwanted pregnancy] was in, there was so much—and the only way I can describe it is “bad press”—connected to it. And that [abortion] would have only added more fuel to

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that, if it came out. And it would have just been so devastating to so many people in so many ways. It was just…it was just, “I can’t have [the baby].”

I asked Jane what would be a better way to describe some of the areas I flagged as expressing “shame,” and she supplied a different take: I guess, “privacy.” And “caution,” and… “privacy.” Really, I was looking for privacy, and protection. And because it was personal, it was a very personal issue, it was something I had no interest in ever telling anyone. And…it was something I was living quietly with.

Through our discussion, “Pride versus Shame” morphed into and organizing theme of “Pride versus Privacy,” an idea related to perception in how Jane construed her experience of motherhood. In one way, both pride and privacy relate to being a good mother. It is easy to see how Jane’s experiences of pride allowed her to feel like she was being a good mother: I’m a good mom. My son eats his vegetables, he’s a pretty good kid…. I think my son has handled this divorce beautifully…. And I can see who I am as a mom in my son, that he’s so well adjusted, that he’s such a good kid…. You know, my son may not break the board on Monday. But he’s a nice kid.

But maintaining privacy, too, allowed Jane both to manage perceptions of herself and to protect herself and her son from the stricture of public opinion: My husband and I were separated, and we had lawyers and everything. But we are just such private, private people that no friends, no one knew. I didn’t want—I thought, “let’s get halfway through this before I tell people we’re getting divorced.” Let’s just get this stuff drawn up, and midway through I’ll tell everyone.

So this man I was dating had left his wife, but they had this kind of hot and cold relationship. Which…I should have known better. But OK. My bad.

So I went off and did my own thing. I’m a very private person. And it’s not my nature to tell people my business. And I’m trying to preserve my child, who’s going to the school where I met this man. This is a tiny private school. And I’m the one who has destroyed two families.

By keeping her own counsel, Jane also protected her son as best she could from the upheaval in her life: I think part of it is, I never want my problems to be his problems. I never wanted it to be his problem. So he had no clue that this stuff was going on.

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I go in to [his] school, I drop off my son, I pick him up, I leave. My son is happy, he’s learning, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t notice.

I think what happened—this small part, this abortion—was my story, my saga, my problem. Which no one knows about.

Company. A third organizing theme departs from the territory of perception and builds on the interpersonal considerations of “Pride versus Privacy.” This is the theme of companionship or, more precisely, the condition of being alone versus being supported. But where sharing information out of pride or keeping it quiet for the sake of privacy were decisions Jane made in relation to how she wanted to mother, the condition of being alone versus supported was largely determined by others in Jane’s life. Still, the experiences of being alone or feeling supported each had an effect on Jane’s experience of mothering and how she felt about herself as a mother. For the most part, Jane associated being alone with the more difficult or painful experiences of motherhood: I had terrible post-partum depression, afterward. Part of it was I didn’t have a lot of help after he was born. I had to fake it, put on this “I’m a brave mom, I’ve got it all under control” act. I think my husband called me when I was in the delivery room, and they said “Oh yeah, she’s actually having the baby today.” He didn’t believe I was actually in labor.

He came to the hospital, the baby came out, and my husband went back to the office. Within minutes. Yeah, he just didn’t take time off. Which was fine. You know, somebody needed to earn a living. But…I also thought it would be cool if he were home for like a day or so. My parents were very hands-off kind of parents, so I went home in the middle of a snowstorm with this new baby. A-lone.

I was alone with this new baby…. And I was afraid of the outside world. Which was the world outside my chair. So I thought, “We’ll just stay right here and not move. We will stay in this giant, humongous easy chair. Just put up the feet and stay in this chair!” We could rock, and I could nurse him for hours, and eat some granola bars, and not move. So I was alone with this baby.

A side effect of Jane’s attempts to maintain her privacy and to keep up appearances was to increase her sense of being alone: It’s…awful. To not be able to really feel what you’re going through. And there’s nowhere to be able to show it, and there’s no one to help. And I think that affected

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my decision to terminate. It maybe affected how come I got pregnant, maybe. I don’t know.

Though Jane did not consider being alone to be her fault, nor that being alone made her a bad mother, she did acknowledge that being alone as a mother was an “excruciating” experience, one she would not willingly repeat. Though experiences of it were few and far between, being supported was associated with positive experiences of motherhood in Jane’s narrative. She noted how, when she finally found support, she was able to surface from the depression she felt after the birth of her son: So finally when he was about eight months old I got a babysitter. She’s like, “It’s OK. I’ll hold the baby. You go exercise. Go away for a few hours. He’ll be fine.” I’m like, “OK, perfect!” It was such a revelation: You go out, and then you come back…and it’s OK! That’s it! And he was fine! The babysitter was one of eight children, so she knew babies didn’t break. And she was able to just kind of hold on to me and the baby at the same time, and it was fine. And so that got me through the depression. But yeah, it was amazing. I needed somebody to almost detach the baby from me. I think I needed that. But I was so determined to be a good mom.

Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision Jane’s construct of motherhood was formed by ideas of perception, of public versus private experience, and of the state of being alone versus feeling supported. Her decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy was also informed by these ideas, and Jane made her decision in light of how she understood what it meant to be a good mother. In terms of perception, Jane first acknowledged that she was already seen as “the bad guy” when people knew she was seeing a married man. When she considered the consequences of even this perception for herself and her son, the ramifications of pregnancy as proof of an unsanctioned sexual relationship became too great a risk. Jane described the tension of managing her desire for a sexual relationship and the threat of social disapproval: I didn’t want to get pregnant with the man I was dating. I really didn’t want to get pregnant. But there’s something people don’t know about women: They like sex. Whether they admit to it or not, we really like it. And it’s not a horrible thing for them to like sex. And that’s the thing that’s missing, because it’s not acknowledged, that there might be reasons why a woman would take a risk and go out with someone and not just stay home and bake cookies.

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Jane saw how her son had suffered from her being perceived as “the bad guy,” and her decision to terminate her unintended pregnancy took that into account: I’m trying to preserve my child, who’s going to the school where I met this man. This is a tiny private school, and this is a tight-knit community. No one even knows about the pregnancy, but that I was even seeing him made me the bad guy.

I asked Jane, in our follow-up interview, whether if she had not already had a child she would have made the same decision to terminate her unintended pregnancy: S: Would it have been different if you hadn’t been a mother already?

J: If I didn’t have my son, and I had gotten pregnant, by accident? I might have been willing to have the child.

S: Oh.

J: Very stupid…it would be a mistake, when I think about it now, but it would have been a really…[unintelligible]. But whether or not it would have been smart, I could see myself weighing the options. Really considering having a baby instead [of an abortion].

“Privacy” was also a central concern in Jane’s deliberations about her pregnancy. Related to her concern of appearing “put together” to the outside world was her desire to keep her problems from interfering with her care for her son: So I made arrangements for him to go to a different school next year. I feel like I can’t let him be hurt by my being blamed for the break-up of someone else’s marriage. Where I had such a small part of it. I think what happened—this small part, this abortion—was my story, my saga, my problem. Which no one knows about. So there was private turmoil, and then public drama.

Being able to quietly and confidentially terminate her unwanted pregnancy allowed Jane to control the amount of public turmoil raised by her relationship with a man in her community, and in so doing to limit the repercussions of that “public drama” on her son. Probably the single most influential aspect of Jane’s motherhood construct on her decision to terminate was that of being alone and unsupported. Jane recognized, quite keenly, the threat of being alone again if her unintended pregnancy were continued: If I had kept that pregnancy, I think it would have caused some serious rifts in relationships I had. With my ex-husband, with my parents, it would cause problems with whatever remaining friends I still had…it was a tricky person that I

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was seeing, who got me pregnant. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea. I think that would have been a problem.

She had already seen evidence of this problem with the increased ostracizing of her and her son: But all of a sudden we were not invited to birthday parties. There were no play dates. So we weren’t going anywhere, I was just dropping him off and picking him up. We were just doing our own thing. And I thought, “Hmm.”

And when I go to my son’s Tae Kwon Do class I am totally not included. I know all the other moms there, but I am not included. It’s just this whole drama. You know, they have known me for two years, but they don’t even say hello…ugh.

In her follow-up interview, Jane imagined what it would have been like for her if she had continued her pregnancy: I knew I may or may not be so stable. I’d be alone with the baby. So I have this baby. I’m alone, in my house, with the baby. Again. I have a guy who visits periodically, then I have to somehow draw up this parenting thing with a guy who I’m not going to marry…my parents may or may not be speaking to me. But I would still be alone with a baby.

She recalled the wretchedness she felt when she was alone as a new mother with her son, and reflected on her struggle to be self-sufficient versus her recognition that support was important to her in her experience of motherhood: And it’s interesting, because I think of myself as good at being independent, and taking care of myself, but I also know that people need a support system. You do. You can’t, you can’t function alone. It’s just not the way people are. But I think, “Well, I can take care of myself. I can do all these things, and I’m pretty good at being self-sufficient and independent.” But honestly…honestly?

I couldn’t have [had another child alone]. And just think about then what would have happened? Who would have been…ah, it’s really strange. It would have been a dumb choice. I don’t know. But it’s true, you need to have the support of people around you to raise a child.

Postscript: Jane’s reactions to my treatment of her story. Some of Jane’s responses to my interpretation have been covered earlier, as I discussed in the description of the “Pride versus Privacy” theme in her construction of motherhood and in her explanation of why she decided not to use images in her depiction of motherhood. In the

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rest, she mentioned an increasing flexibility in her attributions of certain qualities to “good” or “bad” motherhood. One of these was in the idea of perception, or keeping up appearances. In our discussion of this theme, Jane acknowledged its importance to how she raised her son: S: So a lot of this managing perception, on the one hand, maybe feels like it’s superficial. But it’s also working, too, for him. And at a deeper level it’s keeping him content and happy.

J: At the end of the day, I have a great kid. I did a good job on that. I’m a good mother. I’m happy with that.

But, in discussing this further, Jane stated: I think right now I’m going to try to work on myself and come up with personal depth. Right before this [problematic relationship and unwanted pregnancy], I had built up this new me that I really liked. Where I wasn’t as interested in superficial things, or how things appeared, or whatever.

I definitely downgraded things in my life, and happily, when I separated. I got a Subaru, which previously I would never drive, because of course everybody has to have like BMWs or Range Rovers or whatever. It’s the best car I’ve ever owned! So I think about this, and I wonder why I wasted all this energy worrying about what people thought about me? I just don’t care anymore, I just want to live my life and not be concerned about what other people think. I know that buying a car I can actually afford is not a life-changing event, because I’m sure that’s what most people do, all of their lives. But it is life-changing, too, because it’s a different way of thinking. A different way of living: To not buy a car that’s going to impress people. Because I don’t really care. These are not important things anymore. I want to raise my son and not think about these things all the time.

In our discussion of her story, Jane also considered her attribution of being alone as in transition from a purely negative experience to one of potential strength: S: And sometimes you have chosen being alone as a position of strength—like saying you’re “done” with this boyfriend, or you’re “done” with your marriage. It’s like, “being alone sucks, but I’m choosing to be alone, because it’s better than this.”

J: Right. And I think that I’ve never gotten to be alone long enough to really do something with it. Because even though my husband and I were separated, I wasn’t really alone, because I had this leech of a boyfriend. And then once I finally was done with him, my husband came over and was like, “Can I help you? I’m really sorry that happened, what can I do to help?”

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S: OK. So the “transition” is from being taken care of, or being dependent, to becoming more independent.

J: Yeah, I think so. And that I actually have to figure out. How do I maintain independence whenever I find it, if I do find somebody else? Or reconnect with my husband? I think I’m definitely in a very transitional phase of my life. No matter where I want to go. But I have to find this.

I was aware, in the beginning of my work with Jane, of a feeling of disinclination toward her story. I struggled with this—I felt that I liked Jane, on a personal level, just fine—and kept a journal on my thoughts about and reactions to her story. Eventually I began to see that what I heretofore had responded to in women’s stories was the experience of injustice, or of oppression. But I felt a lack of this galvanizing outrage on Jane’s behalf because of her socioeconomic status relative to the other women I talked to for this project. Initially, I worried how I could present a sympathetic narrative of a woman whose hardships were camouflaged behind a glitzy curtain of wealth. I had to get past my feelings about Jane’s economic privilege to recognize the struggle and pain in her experience of mothering. I am grateful that throughout that process Jane remained frank and, despite her fear of how she might be perceived, spoke with candor. The shift in my attitude toward her story reminded me of the importance of not assigning degrees of “more deserving” or “less deserving” of sympathy to women’s stories of hardship. Ingrid’s Story Ingrid was the first participant I met who heard of the study by word-of-mouth rather than as a patient at Planned Parenthood. She was intrigued by my idea, she said, and we made plans to get in touch and talk further. What followed was something of a cat-and-mouse game as I tried again and again to find times we could meet—Ingrid warned me she was very busy, as our initial difficulty finding a time to connect demonstrated. But she was also encouraging, and regularly followed up with me, and at last we were able to meet in the home she shared with her teenage son and daughter. I found Ingrid to be gracious, thoughtful, and possessed of a quiet, wry sense of humor. Through her work and from her personal life she had different connections to women’s health, and she discussed how she worked to weave these together, given the chance, into advocacy. Her commitment to women’s health in general and women’s

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reproductive rights in particular were, she explained, part of the reason she was interested in participating in this study. She spoke quietly, with many pauses for thought, and I listened carefully as her story unfolded. [Ingrid, 34, works as a labor and delivery nurse.] You want a peek at my life?

Tell you what, I’ll take you on a tour of my house. Pretty much everything in here represents something in my life. Which is why it’s so crowded.

Here, let me show you my dining room. That’s my dining room table. And…it’s covered in clean laundry. And it has been, for a week. And it seems like that is pretty consistent with how my life is right now.

You know, when we first moved here, I worked really hard to make this a really nice dining room, because I had never had a dining room before. I love that I painted it myself, and I really like it in there. It’s kind of a peaceful room.

For my laundry.

But when I walk past here, I think, “I’d really like that to become a dining room again.” I’m frustrated because it’s cluttered and it’s another thing for me to do. I think to myself, “How am I going to catch up, and how am I going to not let my busy life take over my house?”

And see back there, through the window? There’s a garden back there. And last year, my kids and I planted some seeds. Morning Glory. They’re going crazy. They’re everywhere. And I’m constantly back there pulling them. They’ve taken over everything. And they’re beautiful, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Someone should make a movie about them. They must have a brain, because they just take over everything, and they squeeze everything else out.

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Now that I think about it, my garden doesn’t sound that different from the rest of my house. My laundry…

Let’s go through here to my kitchen.

Here is a…I don’t know, what do you call that? It’s an antique sort of cabinet, where I keep my cookbooks, and flour, and sugar, there’s shelves…and on the top it’s sort of like a cupboard, a china cabinet sort of thing?

A hutch!

That’s it, that’s what it is. There’s a little toy car there, sitting on the ledge. And it makes me laugh, because I can never open the doors of that hutch without knocking something of my kids’ off of there.

I can’t think of a time when there wasn’t something sitting right there when I went to open those doors to get a cookbook out, or to get flour or sugar out. It was either a toy car, or an iPod, or a random dirty sock for some reason. And if they don’t leave things there, then my dog will bring something and lay it there.

If we continue on, we come to the front door.

Look here, in the entry. Here’s the table where most people would toss their keys.

But I have my daughter’s little first aid kit. And underneath it is some paperwork. It’s paperwork for a study I’m in, for breast and ovarian cancer.

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I have the BRCA [breast cancer] gene, which in general increases one’s chances for cancer to almost 90% for breast cancer, 40-60% for ovarian cancer. But in my family, everyone gets cancer. All the women who have the gene mutation get cancer. I’m actually the oldest woman still alive in my family with the mutation. I’m 34. Everyone else who has had the mutation has already died. I’m trying to be a part of the cure. This mutation runs rampant in families. I’m hopeful that with this research that doctors will understand something about what this is…. Before my kids are of age to have to deal with it. I waited to get tested for the mutation until I was ready. Just like any big decision in life, you need to feel confident, as much as you can, that this is the right decision for you. If you don’t feel that way, you could need a little more time, a little more thinking. A little more working out what to do…and for a long time, I wasn’t ready. So I waited, and waited. And then I found a lump. And I thought, “Oh, shit. I had all this time to do this, and now I have to go home and tell my kids I have breast cancer. I could have done something to prevent it, and I didn’t.” So I had the genetic testing done while I was waiting for the biopsy results to come back. My biopsy results came back negative. My genetic test results came back positive. So I started interviewing plastic surgeons. And a month later, I had my first surgery. I was ready. I was totally ready by then. I was at such peace with the decision. I have had five prophylactic surgeries over the past year and a half, to prevent the breast and ovarian cancer: double mastectomy, hysterectomy. And then reconstruction. I avoided testing because I thought that I was delaying stress. But I wasn’t, at all. I was living with this stress just chasing me around. I wrote something in my journal years ago, right after my mom died, something about why I was a runner. I wrote “I run because your cancer is chasing me.” I was about 23 at the time, because I was 23 when she died. And…I knew I felt that way at the time, but I guess I had felt that way for years afterward, until I had the testing done. And then once I finally knew, it was devastating, but I thought, “Well, at least I know now. At least I know.” So I could make some decisions, and change, hopefully, something for my kids. Having the mutation affects so much. It just makes becoming a woman so different, in our family. It changes what it means. It affects how I talk to my daughter about her body. And what I try to show her about being a good advocate for herself. And taking care of herself. And it seeps into everything I do as a parent. Everything. Food choices, and quality of life choices…it just seeps into everything. Everything that I do. And what kind of life I want for my kids, and for myself. In, admittedly, probably not always a really positive way. But mostly in a really positive way. So.

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It affects me as a parent so much. All the decisions I make, and how I feel about my daughter. And, apparently, how much I pack into one day. I had my kids so young…part of it was about feeling like I needed to pack as much into my life before my mom died as I could. I wanted her to meet grandchildren before she died. And part of me always knew that I’d have to deal with cancer in some way. At some point. And I guess I just wanted to pack as much life as I could into the time she had left…fast, quickly. And into the time I may have left. So I was tied down pretty young. My parents finished graduate school before they married…but I, you know, had certainly not gotten that far by the time I got married. I parented young, and I got married young. My ex-husband and I met when we were teenagers. I was almost 18 when my son was born, and I got married when I was 21. Young. And you know, it’s interesting. I was naïve enough at the time to not know what I was getting into, but intelligent enough to understand that I was really naïve and that I should be scared. I remember just reading everything I could find, trying to figure out what I should do, and knowing that there would be a lot at stake, as far as my child’s development. Not wanting to screw it up. Wanting him to feel like he could trust me, and…the world, and all that stuff. But still, knowing at the time that I didn’t know enough about all that stuff, that I was going to miss some steps along the way. It was so difficult, to be such a young parent. Oh, so difficult. I was smart enough to know I didn’t have enough life experience. And it was really scary. I was lucky that I had such a great family to help me. I look at kids now, the same age as my son, and I see that he’s only a year younger than I was when I became a parent! That’s horrifying to me! I have to talk to my kids about that as it becomes appropriate, and in ways that are appropriate for them, and that may be kind of complicated to navigate. I’ve talked to my kids about it—my son, mostly—for a while I always used to joke with him. We would talk about when he should have kids, and I would laugh and say “After you finish graduate school and have seen the whole world.” But I kind of really meant it! I love my family. But how I started my family has always been a difficult thing for me to talk about with my kids. I have to broach the subject soon with my daughter because she’s starting to really put the math together now, that I was really young when I started having children. But my son gets it. So we’ve already had to go there, and he’s…he’s very understanding. But when we talk about why I had kids so young, I’m careful to not bring my mother’s illness into it, because I’m really sensitive to the fact that just in case I do get sick, I don’t want him to feel like he needs to do that as well! But I have said, “you know…you’re one of the best things that ever happened to me.” At the same time, becoming a parent so young is quite an unfair thing to do to your kid. And that’s been difficult for me to come to terms with; I’ve struggled with it, and I felt bad. I feel like I’m a good parent, but I didn’t have all the skills then that I really needed. To give my kids everything that they deserved. And again, all parents—it doesn’t matter how old they are—are going to screw up some stuff along the way. And

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quite frankly, that’s what makes kids great in a lot of ways, is that they learn from their parents’ screw-ups. But. When you’re 17, your screw-ups tend to be a little more…substantial. Ugh. I want them to realistically have what I was only able to fantasize for them, to have what I knew was best, in theory, but wasn’t able to actually have. To actually do for them. I…I think that they want that for themselves, as well. On with the story. My husband and I separated when my kids were just in grade school, and the same year I met and started dating this other guy. And at first I was totally in love with him, and he was totally in love with me. But there was something…off, about him. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I knew I definitely didn’t want to parent with him. I wasn’t willing to destabilize my children, and my family, and myself in that way. But, at the time, I was struggling as a single parent. I had just separated from my ex-husband, and I was lonely. I was using birth control, but birth control has been known to fail, and when I became pregnant accidentally I knew what I had to do. I had done the young parent thing, and I had done the whole divorce thing, which is ridiculously traumatizing for children. And for grownups. So there was just no question in my mind what to do with this unwanted pregnancy. I know that some women struggle with this, but I didn’t. And I even thought at one point, “Oh, maybe I should really stop and analyze whether I’m struggling with this a little bit.” And so I did, for a day or two. I said, “Oh, I need to really think about this…No.” No. It was a very simple decision for me. For every reason in the world, it was the wrong decision to have a child at that moment. There was nothing…there was nothing…that could have happened to make it positive. Not for my children, not for myself. And I knew that. I didn’t struggle in some of the ways I’ve seen people struggle with difficult decisions. And I’m a labor and delivery nurse: I understand fetal development well enough. I’ve had some hard decisions in my life, but that wasn’t one of them. One question anti-abortion people always ask is, “Why not just have the baby and adopt it out if you feel like you can’t raise it?” But would that have even been possible for me? To adopt? No. No. That’s another one of those “for a bazillion reasons” answers. Let’s start with the fact of all the emotional issues that that would introduce to my children: “By the way, I’m pregnant with your sibling who you’ll never meet.” I mean, there is not enough health insurance or money in the world that could pay for all the therapy that would be needed, if I said “I’m giving this brother or sister away…(and you may be next!)” Just, no. No.

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I mean, I have such respect for women who do that, because it takes an enormous amount of strength—a lot more than I clearly had—to be able to do that. It just was never an option. It was never an option. And the absurdity for anyone to think that then that’s when the story would actually end…! “OK, the baby’s gone. Let’s move on.” As though that would be the end of the story. No! I think—this would totally not make sense to anti-choice people at all—but for me, I did feel like I felt some sort of love, for this could-be baby. But I felt like I had to love whatever this could have been enough to say, “I love you, so I’m not pulling you into this crap. That would be totally unfair.” It would just be…just be such an incredibly selfish decision as a parent, to choose to bring a child into this situation. It’s interesting, because that was my last chance to have a baby. Which I’m OK with. Now. But I did think about that, later. I have to admit, I did think about that. Once I found out about the mutation and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to have any more children… I’m still glad I didn’t. I would have been tied to this person who was…not…Not actually so great. Not so great for me or for my family, or for anybody, really, ever, anywhere. And now, now that I do know about the mutation, I think, “Gosh I could have passed this gene along to someone else!” Thank goodness I didn’t. If anything had been different, would I have made a different choice to keep the baby? Everything would have had to have been different. Everything. Everything. I knew before I got pregnant—with the unwanted pregnancy—that I wouldn’t compromise my family life, should anything happen. And if I were ever to get pregnant again, then the only way I would continue a pregnancy was if it was right. And I mean really right. For my family. Everything would have to be different. Everything. And we weren’t even close to that—it wasn’t even within reach.

Look, here, at my bookshelf. In every section of the bookshelf, there’s this really interesting combination—I don’t know that it was intentional—of so many aspects of my life.

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When I look at this collection, I am amazed. So much about my kids, and being a parent, and messages that I want to send to my kids seeps into so much of our life. When I was a little girl my parents took me to Europe. And they didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a stretch for them. But we went to France, and I stayed on the floor. We all shared one little hotel room. But it was important to them that I saw something so different from where we were. From what I had. And it totally changed me, even at such a young age. …It changed how I felt about the world. And about possibilities. So I took my kids on a trip, to Central America, last year. It was interesting—it was really good for them to see. It just adds a whole new dimension to who you are as a person, to see the way other people live. And to see the way the rest of the world exists. As other families, other men, other women, other children.... So these are all books that, I suppose, I’d like to have an effect on my children. They show that I want them to always dig a little bit deeper, question a little bit more. To find some peace at the same time, which is always such a tough balance. And to be curious about the world. And to be courageous, even when the times are really scary. And then to also know that it’s OK to be afraid. I want them to learn from history: I want both my son and my daughter to know how people have evolved, how women have evolved. I want them to know how much change is possible. And how much there is to know about the world, and to learn. Continuing the tour….

Here’s my bedside table. You know, so much of my experience—and the experience of my mother, and the experience of other women in my family—permeates my life, my daily life, and how I raise my daughter, who’s developing now as well.

When I was a little girl, when my mom was first diagnosed, I was actually about the age my daughter is now. And I remember saying to my mom, “What do I do when this is me?” And she said, “They’ll know more, then. They’re studying genes…” She must have known somehow. She said, “They’ll know more. You’ll have choices.” And she was right, amazingly. You know, I think about this now, and as a parent I think “Wow, she must have been going ‘please God, let me be right’!” Because she was probably just pulling it out of her ear. But she was right! But I feel really confident that researchers will discover a lot more by the time my daughter is old

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enough that she has to make decisions about getting tested for the mutation and what to do. But part of me is still terrified for my daughter. It’s given me such a better understanding of my own mother. It’s interesting, feeling this way, like how my mother must have felt. She must have been terrified, knowing that I’d have to contend with this at some point. I feel a little bit different, though, because I’ve never been sick. And I’ll be here to help my daughter if she has to make some decisions about her testing and her treatment. And I hope that some of the anxiety that I inevitably feel about my daughter and her future doesn’t affect her too much. I hope that … my hope is that she doesn’t look at her own body that’s developing and see something scary developing. And I…I have to admit, sometimes I do. I wonder about that. For the most part, I have a lot of faith that something will change, that something will be better for her. That, and the fact that she may not inherit the mutation at all—this may be a non-issue altogether. But what I hope for her is that we’ll talk about how exciting it is that her body is changing. And we’ll go pick out fun bras, and we’ll pick up the stuff for starting her period…I’m trying to keep it light. I don’t want this weird legacy of the women in my family to absorb her childhood and her life, the way it did mine. So. I don’t know. It’s obviously a big part of my life, but I try to make it not such a big part of hers.

So when we look in the bedside table, what do we have here? That’s my surgery bra, hidden in the back of the drawer. You know, some women have condoms and sex toys in their bedside table…I have a surgery bra. And some of my kids’ toys, and some random M&Ms. I try to be really careful about what I leave out. My daughter’s not really interested in much of my stuff…other than my nail polish, or you know, selective items like my journal there on the top, I do have to watch that—I have to put that away, because like any other kid, she’s pretty curious.

I think about my kids’ futures a lot. I always did before, but now I think about it in different ways. I think before I learned about my diagnosis I was very busy, the same way I am now. Now I’m working full time, and I run a local non-profit. And I volunteer once a week for a women’s health group. And I live with two kids, and I…I don’t clean the house. I do a lot. I do.

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I do do a lot. I’m trying to pack as much into my life as I can, while I can. But I used to be a little bit more accepting of how busy I was, and not as apt to make time for my kids in the same way that I do now. I’ve always made quality time for them, but now it takes on a whole different form. What I do now, that I didn’t do before, is I’m much better about saying “no.” It may not seem like I am saying “no,” but I actually am. If something is too much, or I really don’t want to do it, then I just say “No, I can’t do it.” And that’s OK. Because if on the night that I should be working on a project for my volunteer group, I’m instead hanging out with my kids, then that’s what it’s going to be. And that comes first. And that’s OK. I feel like I’m a different person, now that I’ve confronted my own potential for cancer. In a lot of ways. I am definitely a different mom. I value my time with my kids a lot more. I did before, but now I really do, I value everything about them a lot more. I guess… I wonder what their world will be like. And what role I’ll play in it.

In Defiance of Limits Ingrid’s story takes its shape from the limits she encounters. Chronologically it began with her childhood knowledge of her mother’s illness, and continued with her mother’s death. It ended with Ingrid’s contemplation of her own death; between these boundaries, her story burst at the seams with life. Ingrid used images to document the rich overflow of life into the nooks and crannies of a domestic scene. Her photos offer snapshots of small, intimate places that would otherwise go without notice: a pile of laundry, a moment of clutter in the kitchen, a tower of books on the bedside table, the stack of items discarded by the front door when family members come home for the day. Each image contains a collection of details that telegraph information about what is important in Ingrid’s construal of motherhood, for example: the book titles Courage and When the Breast Fairy Comes, the letter from the Mayo Clinic, the private accoutrements of surgery recovery, and the casual public display of a busy family’s mess. After spending some time with the many rich details contained in Ingrid’s story and her images, I felt the whole of her narrative could be defined by three main currents or themes. As I mentioned above, the idea of limits shapes Ingrid’s story, and the three main themes all feature elements of limits. The first broad theme is the theme of creating versus defying limits; within it are many sub-themes that illuminate how limits affect

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different aspects of Ingrid’s life. The second broad theme is the idea of identification and connection, especially the identity as women shared between Ingrid, her mother, and her daughter. Following naturally from the idea of connection is the third theme of heritage, including what Ingrid has received from her own parents and what she leaves—and hopes to leave—her children. Creating vs. defying limits. Ingrid’s process of construing what makes her a “good” or “bad” mother often depended on how she responded to limits in her life, especially, how she responded to the limits on her potential lifespan given her risk for cancer. Not knowing how long she might live and having many things she would like to include in her life meant that Ingrid’s time and energy were limited. Her parenting was shaped by related questions: In a limited life, what do I include? What do I exclude? When? How? Ingrid described the role these questions took in her life: …it seeps into everything I do as a parent. Everything. Food choices, and quality of life choices…it just seeps into everything. Everything that I do. And what kind of life I want for my kids, and for myself. In, admittedly, probably not always a really positive way. But mostly in a really positive way.

Ingrid admitted, with some exasperation, that certain things (e.g., laundry) fall outside the limits of time and energy she might have in a given day, or week. She didn’t like this, but accepted it as outside her limits. Other aspects of Ingrid’s life limits troubled her more. Ingrid recognized that in response to the limits on her own mother’s life, she imposed limits on herself by choosing to parent early: I was tied down pretty young. My parents finished graduate school before they married…but I, you know, had certainly not gotten that far by the time I got married. I parented young, and I got married young.

It was so difficult, to be such a young parent. Oh, so difficult. I was smart enough to know I didn’t have enough life experience. And it was really scary.

She accepted that the difficulty of being a young parent was the cost of fighting the limit on time, and though she was proud of the job she did raising her children, she did not want her own children to replicate her experience of naïve parenting: At the same time, becoming a parent so young is quite an unfair thing to do to your kid. And that’s been difficult for me to come to terms with; I’ve struggled

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with it, and I felt bad. I feel like I’m a good parent, but I didn’t have all the skills then that I really needed. To give my kids everything that they deserved.

Ingrid maintained hope for a full life despite her potential for cancer, and she decided to push back against the life limits her cancer risk imposed. And despite regrets Ingrid might have had about the difficulties her inexperience brought to her young parenthood, she also found ways to fight limits that enhanced her experience of motherhood. One way she defied her life limits after learning about her inheritance of the BRCA gene mutation was by electing prophylactic surgeries, in effect beating disease to the punch: I had the genetic testing done while I was waiting for the biopsy results to come back. My biopsy results came back negative. My genetic test results came back positive. So I started interviewing plastic surgeons. And a month later, I had my first surgery. I was ready. I was totally ready by then. I was at such peace with the decision. I have had five prophylactic surgeries over the past year and a half, to prevent the breast and ovarian cancer: double mastectomy, hysterectomy. And then reconstruction.

Another way Ingrid pushed against her limits was by seeking out information and a literary community to lend her support when she felt her time and energy were close to depleted. She showed this in her photos of her books, explaining: Look, here, at my bookshelf. In every section of the bookshelf, there’s this really interesting combination—I don’t know that it was intentional—of so many aspects of my life. When I look at this collection, I am amazed. So much about my kids, and being a parent, and messages that I want to send to my kids seeps into so much of our life.

The titles offer glimpses of Ingrid’s inner experience: Courage, Lessons Before Dying, When the Breast Fairy Comes, Pretty Is What Changes. The books contain information, advice, and stories about parenting, death, and surviving your child’s adolescence; through these, Ingrid learned how to integrate her life experience into being the mother she wants to be. Earlier in her life Ingrid had depended on her ability to learn on her feet to be a good mother. After those early months and continuing through the years, Ingrid’s habit of learning made up a large part of how she saw herself as a good mother. In addition to her habit of learning, Ingrid fought her life limits by filling her day to the utmost. Again, her rue about her garden and the disarray in her dining room show

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this was not a perfect solution to the limits of her life. Ingrid was forced to consider how the things she tried to make room for in her life might take over the amount of time and energy she had. Her photos show how the lives of her children overrun whatever domestic order she tries to impose, much as the morning glories overrun her garden. She described the clutter: There’s a little toy car there, sitting on the ledge. And it makes me laugh, because I can never open the doors of that hutch without knocking something of my kids’ off of there. I can’t think of a time when there wasn’t something sitting right there when I went to open those doors to get a cookbook out, or to get flour or sugar out. It was either a toy car, or an iPod, or a random dirty sock for some reason. And if they don’t leave things there, then my dog will bring something and lay it there.

By its nature, a parent’s life is always overflowing. And Ingrid’s life as a parent threatens to overflow even faster, as she packs into it everything that she wants to experience, and everything that she wants her children to experience. Ingrid has a full, rich, varied life, as she remarked when she noticed the array of books on her shelves. She described what she hopes to impart to her children from this richness: I guess, to always dig a little bit deeper, question a little bit more. To find some peace at the same time, which is always such a tough balance. And to be curious about the world. And to be courageous, even when the times are really scary. And then to also know that it’s OK to be afraid. …I want them to know history. How people have evolved, how women have evolved. How much change is possible. And how much there is to know about the world, and to learn…

For Ingrid, filling her children’s lives with learning, experience, and mental travel teaches them to defy their own limits of imagination and compassion. Ingrid risked becoming overwhelmed when she filled—or overfilled—her life in the attempt to defy its limits, but to her the benefits of the risks were clear. And in the meantime she understood that being mindful of limits on time and energy—and renegotiating these limits as necessary—made for being a good mom: Ohhhhh….I do a lot. I do. I do do a lot. But what I do now, that I didn’t do before, is I’m much better about saying “no.” Which it doesn’t seem like I am, but I actually am. If something is too much, or I really don’t want to do it, then I just say “No, I can’t do it.” Because if on the night that I should be working on a project for my volunteer group, I’m instead hanging out with my kids, then that’s what it’s going to be. And that comes first. And that’s OK.

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Having her life limited by the risk of cancer imposed a timeline on Ingrid’s desired accomplishments, and choosing to complete some of these things early— parenting, for example, and marriage—meant that Ingrid was also limited in the resources she brought to each task. Ingrid accepted that all parents have limitations in their abilities to parent well, and sometimes children can grow from overcoming the challenges these limitations pose: And again, all parents—it doesn’t matter how old you are—you’re going to screw up some stuff along the way. And quite frankly, that’s what makes kids great in a lot of ways, is that they learn from their parents’ screw-ups. But…when you’re 17, your screw-ups tend to be a little more—substantial. Ugh.

Ingrid knew that her own “screw-ups” came from having a family at a young age, when possessing limited life experience might make raising a child particularly difficult. To redress this, Ingrid pushed against the limits of her understanding as a new young parent: And you know, it’s interesting. I was…naïve enough at the time to not know what I was getting into, but intelligent enough at the time to understand that I was really naïve and that I should be scared. [laughs] I remember just reading everything I could find, trying to figure out what I should do, and knowing that…there would be a lot at stake, as far as his development. Not wanting to screw it up. Wanting him to feel like he could trust me, and…the world, and all that stuff. But still, knowing at the time that I didn’t know enough about all that stuff, that I was going to miss some steps along the way.

Ingrid recalled that, with her dearth of experience, her youth brought practical limits to her parenting as well. She realized as a new mother not yet out of high school she would be compromising her potential for well-paying employment. But she weighed this knowledge against her own experience and her rich life as a child despite the financial limits in her family of origin. She recognized she had benefitted from her own parents pushing against the limits of money and location, and decided to do the same, when she could: When I was a little girl my parents took me to Europe. And they didn’t have a lot of money, so it was a stretch for them. But we went to France, and I stayed on the floor. We all shared one little hotel room. But it was important to them that I saw something so different from where we were. From what I had. And it totally changed me, even at such a young age. …it changed how I felt about the world. And about possibilities. I took my kids on a trip, to Central America, last year. It was interesting—it was really good for them to see. It just adds a whole new

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dimension to who you are as a person, to see the way other people live. And to see the way the rest of the world exists. As other families, other men, other women, other children....

Much of Ingrid’s story was shaped by how she has resisted limits in her life. But, for Ingrid, part of being a good mother also meant establishing some limits in her parenting. Having her children may have been a decision born of the desire to thwart the limits of her mother’s shortened life, a decision made despite the limits inherent to being a young mother. But as Ingrid grew with her young children, she found herself wanting to institute limits and boundaries as a way to strengthen herself as a mother. One way she worked to do this is by passing on the values of her family of origin, in which children seek to finish their education and grow up a little before beginning their parenting: My parents finished graduate school before they married…but I, you know, had certainly not gotten that far by the time I got married. I parented young, and I got married young.

I’ve talked to my kids about it—my son, mostly—for a while I always used to joke with him. We would talk about when he should have kids, and I would laugh and say “After you finish graduate school and have seen the whole world.” But I kind of really meant it!

I love my family. But how I started my family has always been a difficult thing for me to talk about with my kids. I have to broach the subject soon with my daughter because she’s starting to really put the math together now, that I was really young when I started having children. But my son gets it.

Another limit Ingrid imposed was on how much she shared with her children about her struggle with her cancer risk and her choice for preventative treatment: I’m trying to keep it light. I don’t want this weird legacy of the women in my family to absorb [my daughter’s] childhood and her life, the way it did mine. So. I don’t know. It’s obviously a big part of my life, but I try to make it not such a big part of hers.

… when I went to have the surgeries, we talked about “it.” In a sort of vague way. But I had a really great network and we made sure to keep her busy, and keep her going with her activities. And I said, “You know”—I mean, she obviously knew that women in my family had been sick, you couldn’t miss it—“so I’m having some surgeries, to make sure I stay healthy for you, and I’m going to be fine. I’m going to feel kind of poopy for a while, but then I’ll be better. And you just have to remember that I’m not sick.”

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In this way, Ingrid worked to limit for her children some of the anxiety and fear that permeated her own childhood around her own mother’s struggle with disease. Identification and connection. Ingrid’s attempts to limit her children’s experience of the fear she felt as a child speaks to the theme of connection and identification, the second broad organizing idea in her narrative. Much of this is related to the identity as a woman: Having the mutation affects so much. It just makes becoming a woman so different, in our family. It changes what it means. It affects how I talk to my daughter about her body. And what I try to show her about being a good advocate for herself.

Positioned between her mother and her daughter, Ingrid could take the perspective of both to inform her practice of being a good mother. Ingrid saw that her mother’s limits were some of her own limits, and that part of what she regretted about her experience of parenting was the freight of anxiety that accompanied their shared heritage of the BRCA mutation. But the counterweight of anxiety is hope for the future, and this, too, Ingrid learned from her mother and wished to transmit to her daughter: When I was a little girl, when my mom was first diagnosed, I was actually about my daughter’s age. And I remember saying to her “I don’t know, what do I do when this is me?” And she said, “They’ll know more, then. They’re studying genes…” She must have known somehow. She said, “They’ll know more. You’ll have choices.” And she was right, amazingly. You know, I think about this now, and as a parent I think, “Wow, she must have been going ‘please God, let me be right’!” Because she was probably just pulling it out of her ear. But she was right! [pause] But I really believe that. Something will be different. I hope.

Ingrid had learned from her mother how to take a mother’s fear for her daughter and transform it into hope and action for the future. This was the engine behind Ingrid’s participation in BRCA research, her efforts to preserve her longevity through preventative surgeries, and the transmittal of Ingrid’s childhood dreams and curiosity to her children through shared travel and exploration. Ingrid’s childhood taught her something of how she would like her children to defy the limits in their lives: So, what messages was I trying to teach my children…. I guess what a really great, big, vast world this is, and how much exploring there is to do. How much learning. I just hope they’ll keep digging for more. More of everything. I hope

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they’ll always want more, and want to know more, to experience more, to see more.

Ingrid was able to relate to her daughter’s experience of having a mother with a health problem; at the same time, she gained perspective on how her own mother coped with the potential of having passed on the BRCA mutation: It’s given me such a better understanding of my own mother. It’s interesting, feeling this way, like how [my mother] must have felt. Knowing that I’d have to contend with [the risk for cancer] at some point. …I feel a little bit different, though, because I’ve never been sick. And I feel like so much has changed, and I’ll be here to help [my daughter] if she has to make some decisions.

Ingrid used her understanding of a daughter’s experience of fear and concern to shape how she coped with her risk and how she would negotiate conversation with her daughter about her daughter’s potential risk: You know, kids take in so much more than we think they do. She’s already taken in a lot more, and I’m sure she’s processing it, and dealing with all this in her own way. …For the most part, I have a lot of faith that something will change, that something will be better for her. That, and the fact that she may not inherit the mutation at all—this may be a non-issue altogether.

Heritage. The theme of heritage speaks both to the genetic inheritance of the BRCA mutation and to the legacy of lessons and hope from Ingrid’s family of origin. Ingrid associated her potential contribution of the BRCA gene with being a bad mother, and she strove to combat that terrible potential with the other qualities she had inherited. She bolstered hope by participating in research for her disease: I’m trying to be a part of the cure. This mutation runs rampant in families. I’m hopeful that with this research that doctors will understand something about what this is, before my kids are of age to have to deal with it.

As was mentioned above, Ingrid pushed against the limits of her time and health to be a good mother to her children and taught them, too, to push against their own limits. She talked of giving them hope and of teaching them, as she learned, to push against limits of imagination, of compassion, and of action. Ingrid elaborated on how she took the values she inherited from her parents and worked to make them part of her own parenting: [Traveling] changed how I felt about the world. And about possibilities. So, I want [my kids] to want more of that for themselves. To not to be so narrow. Because we live in a very conservative city. And we are a pretty non-conventional

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family, ethnically, and in a lot of other ways. I was raised pretty liberally. Artsy parents. Not conservative. At all. [pause] I’m not running around throwing granola at everybody, but you know…[laughs].

Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision Ingrid’s construct of motherhood was shaped by the ideas of limits, of identification and connection, and of heritage; all of these form the basis for her understanding of what makes her a good mother and when she falls short. These were the ideas that informed Ingrid’s understanding of when not to be a mother, too, as she showed in her explanation of why she decided to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. As with her description of mothering, the theme of limits was a large part of Ingrid’s story of not-mothering. To parent or not was also a big decision about limits, about what could fit within them and what could not. And in the case of her unwanted pregnancy, Ingrid found the relationship she was in had its own limitations: But there was something…off. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But I definitely didn’t want to parent with him. Not then. I thought, eventually, yes, I would. But I knew not then. I wasn’t willing to destabilize my children and my family and myself in that way.

Her sense of the boundaries she needed to maintain, of the limits she needed both to respect and to create, led Ingrid to decide she could not include either the relationship or a new baby into the existing family. She decided she could not fit another child or a flawed relationship into the boundaries of her parenting without threatening her children’s limits and her own: My daughter was just starting kindergarten. My son was in school. [pause] I just knew. I had done the young parent thing, and now I was doing the whole divorce thing, which is ridiculously traumatizing for children. And for grownups. And there was just no question in my mind.

Ingrid knew what it meant to her to be a parent, and also knew what it meant to her and to children to end a relationship. She remembered what it meant to her children to be separated from their father, and she knew the relationship she was in, with the father of her unplanned pregnancy, was untenable. Armed with this knowledge, she guarded the boundaries of her family by refusing to create ties to a man she did not intend to stay in a relationship with.

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The idea of connection also played a role in Ingrid’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. Ingrid took into account multiple relationships: between herself and her children, between her children and a potential new sibling, and between herself and the potential new child. She recalled the connection she felt at the beginning of the unwanted pregnancy, and how even this sense of caring helped her decide to terminate the pregnancy: I think even—and this would totally not make sense to anti-choice people at all— I did feel like I felt some sort of love. Or some sort of slight attachment. But it was in that I felt like I had to love whatever this could have been enough to say, “I love you so I’m not pulling you into this crap. This would be totally unfair.” It would just be…just be such an incredibly selfish decision as a parent, to choose to bring a child into this situation.

Ingrid knew she would not raise a child she had not wanted to have, and she considered what it would mean to her children to continue the pregnancy but give the infant up for adoption: Let’s start with the fact of all the emotional issues that that would introduce to my children: “By the way, I’m pregnant with your sibling who you’ll never meet.” I mean, there is not enough health insurance or money in the world that could pay for all the therapy that would be needed, if I said “I’m giving this brother or sister away…(and you may be next!)”

Ingrid realized her children were old enough to understand what it would mean if she were pregnant, and she understood that she would not be able to prevent her older children from developing an expectation of a relationship with their new sibling. By terminating the pregnancy she avoided setting her children and herself up for the loss of that relationship. Because of her own experience parenting, Ingrid knew that her sense of connection and her children’s sense of connection to that new baby would not end even if another family were raising the baby: And you know, the absurdity to think that then that’s when the story actually ends…? “OK, baby’s gone. Let’s move on.” As though that would be the end of the story. No! I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine.

In this instance, her understanding of the power of connection and of the importance of setting limits led Ingrid to terminate an unwanted and unsupportable relationship before it was fully established in her family.

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Though Ingrid was not aware of her genetic status at the time of her unwanted pregnancy, she took additional comfort from the knowledge that by terminating the pregnancy she had taken control over the more malignant part of her heritage: And now, now that I do know about the mutation, I think, “Gosh I could have passed this gene along to someone else!” Thank goodness I didn’t.

Ingrid reflected on what it meant that, because of this heritage and her treatment of it, the terminated pregnancy represented her last chance to have any more children: Which is interesting, because that was my last chance to have a baby. [pause] Which I’m OK with. Now. But I did think about that, later. I have to admit, I did think about that. Once I found out and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to have any more children…I’m still glad I didn’t.

Ingrid acknowledged, at the end, how her understanding of how to be a good mother could not have led her to continue the unwanted pregnancy at that time in her life: If anything had been different, would I have made a different choice to keep the baby? Everything would have had to have been different. Everything. Everything. I knew before I got pregnant—with the unwanted pregnancy—that I wouldn’t compromise my family life, should anything happen. And if I were ever to get pregnant again, then the only way I would continue a pregnancy was if it was right. And I mean really right. For my family. [pause] Everything would have to be different. Everything. And we weren’t even close to that—it wasn’t even within reach.

Postscript: Ingrid’s reactions to my treatment of her story. As in the beginning of our acquaintance, my attempts to connect with Ingrid toward the end of our interviews met with many missed calls, episodes of email tag, and apologies. I wondered what these difficulties might mean about her desire to continue with the study—at that time I was still wrestling with whether or not to keep Lilith’s story, despite her lack of contact—so when we finally connected, I asked her if she was having second thoughts about participating. I knew from our initial conversations that confidentiality was important to Ingrid, and asked her about that: I: It’s not so much that it’s confidential, it’s when I work with the non-profits, it’s how those [relationships] tie in. And I need to make sure that I don’t compromise anyone’s comfort with those.

S: OK. OK, that makes sense. So maybe you can kind of mull over your relationship with them and how you want to protect that.

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Ingrid mentioned, too, that she had not discussed with her children her participation in the familial BRCA study or her thoughts about why she decided to become a mother at a young age. And while she considered it unlikely that they would find this dissertation on their own, and stumble across the information here, she nonetheless wanted to be careful about what identifying details she allowed in her narrative. For example, because her ethnic and cultural identity is somewhat rare for our location she decided she did not want these identifiers included with her demographic information. And while she agreed this narrative honored the outlines of her real life, she was relieved to note that mention of ties to specific agencies had been omitted. In these ways, consistent with her values, Ingrid was able to place limits on what would feel safe for her to include in her work with me. After our discussion of privacy we talked about the process of the project. After thanking her again for her time, I made joking reference to her lack of it: S: So, what was it like for you, taking those photos? Like, other than frantic because you didn’t have time to?

I: Well, you know, it was interesting because…[sighs]…you know, sometimes I go through my days, and I fit so much into one day that I don’t know that I absorb or process much of it. Or how much I really do think about it. And when I had to stand still and take these pictures and really think about what it meant to me…I wondered: Wow, how much—if something feels stressful—how much of the stress is there during my day that I don’t even acknowledge?

S: Wow.

I: Or, [pause] if something is really funny—like some pictures struck me as kind of funny. Am I able to enjoy those at some level, in the moment?

S: Or does it all just go by?

I: Right. Or does it all just go by? Do I not process anything? Like, what am I— what am I taking in, in my busy life? It was interesting.

S: Yeah, that’s definitely the impression I’ve gotten so far, is that your life is so jam-packed…

I: It is, ridiculously so.

For Ingrid, taking the time to participate in this project allowed her to step back and let

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her thoughts about what is important in her life settle and crystallize. She allowed as she had not realized how much her identify as a mother had been formed around her experience with BRCA: I: It’s interesting, I didn’t realize—I mean, I knew it had an effect on my life—but even just talking about this and looking at the pictures, it was really—so much of it. It ended up being such a big subject, and I really didn’t think it tied into this so much. I mean, it didn’t really tie into, it didn’t tie at all into the abortion decision. But it tied into who I am as a parent now, a lot, which I guess is the difference.

S: Yeah, it seems like it’s given you a lot more urgency about who you are as a mother. And focus. And all that was there with all the things you were doing, you were doing before, but there is so much more urgency and focus now. Because there’s a questionable limit. And I guess my understanding is you don’t even know. You had these prophylactic surgeries, so now it’s just, “Alright. I did everything I could.” Sort of, “Screw you, cancer. Try to find someplace to get me.”

I: Right, right. I’ll probably get it in a finger, or something. I don’t know. [laughs].

I was grateful to have gained access to Ingrid’s private world and so pleased that she thought this project was important enough to push her limits by risking some of her privacy. And I cherish having gotten to know, a little, this accomplished and quietly humorous woman. At our last meeting, we discussed what we would name her in this final work: S: What kind of pseudonym do you think you want? Ingrid?

I: Ingrid. Good! I like that! That’s funny, I do like that.

S: We can make you be Ingrid.

I: I like Ingrid! It makes me want to braid my hair. [laughs] And wear a white dress, definitely. I need a hill, too, to dance on top of.

Maya’s Story Maya was the second participant who learned of this study by word of mouth from acquaintances at Planned Parenthood rather than being recruited as a client there. Like Ingrid, she works in the medical field and holds a strong interest in women’s health. She was interested in participating, she told me, because she was intrigued by the idea of

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exploring her story through imagery and also because she wants to help other women by sharing her story. She grew up in the city, Maya explained to me via email, the daughter of a single mother. A single mother herself, Maya considers herself a family advocate who works to support parents in their efforts to create families of all stripes, from traditional two-parent families to single parent families and same-sex parented families and other permutations. In our informal conversations before our interview she spoke of the importance of community in supporting healthy families and how she works to be an active member of her own community. I met Maya for the first time in the sunny garden of a local park, one of her favorite places. She insisted on meeting me there after learning I had never been to the park: “It’s so beautiful there! You’ll want to take your kids there sometime.” We found a private bench in a quiet corner and spent some time admiring the flowers and commenting on the unusually warm weather. The setting matched Maya’s personality: colorful, warm, and inviting. The beauty and comfort of our surroundings contrasted sharply with some of the more bleak details of Maya’s story, and when she began describing some of these I wondered if she picked the sunlit location as an anodyne to the sadness of her story. [Maya, 31, is an oncology nurse.]

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There are two different pathways here. There’s an option of going one way, which seems really pretty. But then you have this option of going through another way, which is a little bit rougher.

Raising children, and having children, is a process that can be described as a pathway. It’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful process. It’s not necessarily treacherous, or dark, or scary. Sometimes it’s really light and bright and encouraging.

But no matter which way you go, at the end is an encouraging light. There’s an encouraging place to go. And you might not know where it is, but you have ultimate faith that it’s there. And I think that’s really important in parenting, that you have to maintain a certain level of hope for your children, and the future. And in your own self.

Loss My children’s dad left me when I was seven months pregnant. I had really wanted to make it work with him. When I was pregnant with our second baby, I thought that somehow, some way, we would get it together. I thought things were kind of turning out OK. He had gotten a job working nights, so I would take him to work and then I would pick him up in the middle of the morning. I had a day job at Babies R Us, and he would watch our son while I was at work, and I’d be with the baby when he was at work. So it seemed like things were going in the right direction, the path was right. And then I got a phone call. I was seven months pregnant. I got this call from a recruiting officer at the U.S. Air Force, who said, “Can I speak to your boyfriend?” We had both been recruited after high school—recruiters stay with you up until a certain age, and we were only 20. So they get your number and they bother the heck out of you for the longest time. So I was saying, “We’re not in a position to join the military right now,” and then I explained it to him that I was pregnant with our second child. And the recruiter said, “Well, actually, he already did. He already had his signing.” My boyfriend had already been sworn in, he already had the ceremony. He had already committed. And when I explained it to the guy, the situation, he was like “Well, OK. He’ll still be able to go, he just has to sign over his rights.” His paternal rights. If the dad signs over his paternal rights, it means you don’t get anything from him. The military doesn’t have to collect child support from him. And since we weren’t married at the time—that was 11 years ago—that I was pregnant didn’t matter. None of the other circumstances mattered. And I wanted to know, When does he leave? And the recruiter said, “He leaves in three weeks.” I was just so…I…was so distraught. I had to quit my job, because I didn’t have anyone to watch my son. And my family wasn’t speaking to me, because I was pregnant again. And then I had been a sophomore in college, but I had dropped out because my morning sickness was so bad. So I didn’t really have anybody. And for him to just pick up and leave like that was just devastating.

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By the time my daughter was born, all I had in the world was a newborn and a toddler. That’s really all I could think about, and nothing else. I remember feeling extremely alone. And where I should have been really enjoying her, and marveling at this new wonderful creature, I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I had this bony two year old, and a newborn, and I didn’t see how I was going to do it. I didn’t see how any of it was going to work out. I wondered, at the time, if my baby could have absorbed all my emotions in utero. I feel like the last three months of my pregnancy were so full of turmoil, and pain, and anger, and…she was a really sad, sad baby. I have pictures of my daughter that are just heartbreaking, because she’s just—yeah, she would smile, and stuff, like most kids—but she looked so lost and far away. And maybe that’s a lot of projection, too, but I do feel like she would have been a different personality if things had been different. In a lot of what I think of when I think of motherhood, I think…it’s a little bit of messiness. There’s just a lot of messiness in motherhood. There’s nothing that’s very clean. There’s no manual, and there’s no right way, and everything seems to be kind of a mess. The good thing is that there is a mess. I mean, otherwise my life could be really clean, and it could be really lonely, so for me the mess almost a feeling of fullness…There’s a lot there. There’s a lot to do. And I think that I would probably feel pretty incomplete if I didn’t have a lot of things to do. It gives me something to work towards. So it’s a sense of comfort, too. As long as I have stuff in there, I’m going to be OK. So even though it’s not organized, I have everything that I need. But I look around the mess and I see so many things, and some of it is garbage. Because there are things that I don’t want to have to deal with. I wish that I could just throw all the clothes away, so that I wouldn’t have to do the laundry. And then I could focus on more important things, which is spending time with my kids. Or doing well at my job. Or something like that. I have this internal struggle…I know that I need to teach my kids structure, and balance, but I have a hard time doing that myself. In my own life. Which, I’m sure, everybody does to a certain extent. But…I have a hard time with that. Personally, even taking the messiness of motherhood away, I’ve always felt like cleaning my room was secondary to all the other things that I should really be doing.

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Mother versus Mother I struggle with my relationship with my kids, because I’m not like my mom—I think that’s another really difficult thing for me, is that my mom is real consistent, and structured, and my mothering style is a lot different. She is not messy. She’s a housekeeper. Her house is immaculate. She cooks, you know, meals, these perfectly balanced meals…and so I think, if you have a mother like that, and if you’re not like that, then you tend to compare yourself to her and you almost feel inadequate, in some ways. Oftentimes I feel conflict in that I want my kids to spend time with my mom because she does show them that other side…the organized side. But then that makes me question my own parenting abilities. Does that mean that I’m not doing it right? Does that mean that they’re going to be at a disadvantage? My mother’s caretaking style, to my kids, is the way she would have liked to have mothered my siblings and me. Would have liked to, because she didn’t. It wasn’t her fault, it was just that she was a single parent with four children and she had to work full time. And she understands…she understands where I’m coming from, and she understands my struggle…but…I still don’t feel a sense of approval from her. And my kids sense that. And so my kids almost feel like…like I should do things the way grandma does them. But yet I’m way more lenient…because my mom and I will always see differently when it comes to how you spend your time. My mom’s idea of time well spent would be taking care of things that need to get done, like the laundry and the dishes, whereas my idea of time well spent would be with my kids present. With the people around me present, doing activities, or having fun. I feel like life is so short, and the time that I do get with my children is so special, that I like to spend it with them. So even though I know it’s important that they clean up their rooms— and on Saturdays we do that—in the mean time, I feel like in the grand scheme of things what’s most important is that they get to learn from me, and I get to learn from them, and that we spend time together. My kids are going to know me. And I know them. I know them. I know what they like, what they don’t like, what they understand, what they don’t understand…I feel like they come to me for almost anything. They will come to me with any questions, and we have an appropriate level of honesty among us, as far as what they want to know and what I tell them. I feel like that’s more important than anything. I think they trust me. I think they’re gaining trust for me. I went through a period of time, just from being depressed, where they really couldn’t trust me, where they were kind of on their own. Because I wasn’t able to care for them, because I wasn’t able to care for myself. So my mom took the kids. After a year of trying to act normal, and be normal, it wasn’t happening. My kids weren’t getting fed, things weren’t getting done around the house, and I couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t deny that I needed help. So my mom took the kids. And that was willingly…I said to her, “You need to do this, I can’t. My kids need better care.” And it was a really difficult decision to make. To decide that they were better off without me…that was a really hard decision to make. My daughter was three, and my son was about six. And my mom took them—she took them, and kept them for almost two years.

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Trauma I was in college, my senior year in nursing school. In my final quarter. And I was in a relationship—not with my children’s father, but with someone else—who was abusive. Verbally, emotionally. Physically. And the first time hit me, he put me in the hospital. Then I graduated from nursing school. I had graduated—I don’t know how, it was a miracle—and…and then he did it again. The second time he hit me I was pregnant, with his child. On the day of my graduation we—me and him—went out to celebrate. He was highly intoxicated, and started saying just…he was really very verbally abusive. Saying, “you’re a whore, you’re a dumb bitch, you’re nothing.” And you know what? I don’t know if it was just that I had graduated that day, or what, but I didn’t care. It was like everything he was saying to me suddenly meant nothing. It was kind of like, “Whatever! You’re a loser.” Suddenly it was like “I don’t need him anymore.” And so I tuned him out, tuned him out, tuned him out. Because at that point I just wanted to go home. But on the way home I knew, in the car, that he was going to hurt me. I knew. I knew it in the pit of my stomach. I knew that he would…I knew that something bad was going to happen. I knew he would kill me. I knew it wasn’t going to be a matter of punching me, or pushing me down the steps…it wasn’t going to be anything like that. He was going to kill me. And so my first instinct when I got home was to leave. To get the kids and leave. And so I attempted that—I ran into my neighbor’s house and I woke her up. I said to her, “Take the kids away.” Because I just knew it. I knew that it…that it was going to get really ugly. I had already called my family, by that time, to come and get me. And within the time it took them to get there, I had already gotten both orbits of my eyes shattered. Bilateral hematomas, hematoma of my lip. I was knocked out unconscious, my hair pulled out, I got kicked in the stomach, the ribs, you name it. Fractured my nose. And my neighbor, whose house I was in, called 911 and just said, “She’s dead.” They played the 911 tape in court. She was just screaming, “She’s dead. And he won’t stop hitting her.” From that moment on, I was probably never the same. From devastation…the devastation that someone who supposedly loved me would do that to me. His goal was to kill me. His goal was that I would be dead. And he wasn’t willing to stop at anything. And at the time I was pregnant with his baby, but while I was in the hospital I started thinking about what to do. I struggled with that decision for quite some time even though he had beaten me. It was weeks after that critical beating that I finally went for an abortion. I just remember…I just remember it hurting so bad. And I went through a couple of weeks where I didn’t know where I was. I was so displaced, from everything, like time, space…I would get in the car and drive and get lost, and didn’t know where I was going. I was so traumatized by what had happened to me. And I didn’t understand. There was this certain level of needing to understand, “Why?” Why me? Why did he do that to me? And it took me years to get over that. And I think that level of deep, dark depression…that level of trauma changes you as a person. And oh, the guilt. The guilt that I had stayed with a man who was abusive to me while my kids were little, and how much time and attention that they didn’t get during that time—that thought was enough to kill me. It was enough to make me say, “I don’t even want them anymore.” It was almost like, “I think they deserve better.” I didn’t

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deserve them. It was that level of self hatred. Feeling horrible. Feeling like I let them down, and I didn’t protect them they way I should have. And my job as a mother was to protect them. After that, I would get into these relationships with guys who were just like my abusive boyfriend. I would actually seek out men that looked like him. And some of them was just as abusive. And at that time I didn’t have my kids, so I felt like it was OK. My kids were safe with my mom, my kids were happy…I was convinced that my kids didn’t need me, and they were actually better off. I was thinking that my kids were in a better place, and that they really didn’t ever need me back, and so I could just pretty much…you know, do whatever I wanted to do. The last boyfriend said to me, when I told him I was pregnant, “You can have it, but good luck finding me. Good luck finding me, ’cause I’m not going to be there. I’m not going to help you, I’m not going to be there.” So. I went and had another abortion. I wanted it to be different. I wanted, I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. I wanted to have a family. I never wanted to feel that alone and that devastated, like I felt after my daughter was born, ever again. And for whatever reason, every time I thought it would be different…but when you meet the same type of guys, it’s going to be the same. I thought…that maybe, that if I had a new baby and a new relationship that it would take this pain away, this never-ending, relentless feelings of loss and pain. I was willing to do anything I could to make that go away. Lucky for me, I didn’t get into drugs or anything like that. Looking back, I think how I could have turned to drugs. Which could have had a worse outcome, depending on how you think of it. Now I feel like I’m kind of limbo with my motherhood. I feel like we’re always in this state of, “what’s going to happen next?” But I think that involves my own dependence on my own mother…I depend on my mom so much for the care of my own children that I sometimes feel torn. Because I can’t provide for everything, that they require a lot of help—that I require a lot of help, from my mom. So a lot of times there is this sensation of limbo, meaning I don’t know where I am, or I don’t know where I’m going. I think of money. Control. How that impacts motherhood. Sometimes you have to decide between things you want and clothes you need for your kids. Money management is balancing your needs versus what you want. I feel like I’m sacrificing my time, and other things I could be doing….that I would want to do, like going out. Sometimes I’m sacrificing just not being needed. Not

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being needed, not worrying. I think I sacrifice a lot of peace of mind. When my kids were with my mom, I had a lot of peace of mind, because I knew they were safe. And I always felt like she wasn’t their mother, but she was the kind of mother they needed. But now I realize I’m their mother, and they need me, not anyone else.

Progress So. And so I’m transitioning—my kids have been back with me for almost two years. And during that transition process, I’m gaining their trust back. So they—I feel like they do trust me, at this point in time. Where they’re getting their needs met from me. Right when I moved in with my mom I was trying to hang out with a different group of friends, to try to make a new start. I was in therapy, I was going to the therapist every single week working really hard: To be different. To think different. To deal with what happened to me, and to reunite with my kids and to be a different kind of mother. One of my friends said, “You need to come to a Roller Derby practice. Just come watch.” I went and slapped on some rentals, you know? And was just skating around— and they were like, “Why don’t you just join the team?” And I’m like, “I can’t skate. I’m not a fighter, I’m a lover.” You know what I mean? That’s what I thought. And they were like, “No, just try it out.” And I did. I can’t tell you how much that changed my life. Being with those women who were so strong. They were so strong. And they would bring their kids to practice, and we would do things outside of practice. And then I got into shape…and it was actually like a goal I was working towards, an actual goal. And it changed my whole perspective on who I was: as a woman, as a mother, as a person in society, as, like...for once, I felt like a contributor. Like I was actually doing something. And I actually felt like my kids might be proud of me. And it changed my life. And all that anger I had…what a great outlet. It was a great outlet for me! And it gave me a sense of power. That’s where my power was! My center! And having that group of women…they kind of scooped me up and…there’s nothing like feeling like a powerful woman.

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I think that God has healing for everyone, but that sometimes there’s a choice of path that you take in that healing. So sometimes we make bad decisions that teach us something and make us stronger and make us better.

Have hope. Picture where you want to be…even if you have to make it up. Even if it’s bogus. Picture that place you want to be… and have faith in the fact that something— whether it’s God, or cosmic energy—will guide you in that way, if you’re open to it.

In Search of Family While Ingrid’s story was defined by the limits on her life and what would be included in it, Maya’s story is shaped by the idea of family, how she will build her family, and what her role in her family will be. Her choice of images provides a first- person view of the story she tells: Through her eyes we contemplate the different pathways leading to a golden distance, we glance at the jumbled clutter in a busy mother’s car, we mull over our finances, and we take in the beauty of the world. Several themes arose from the story and images, giving structure to her idea of family and illustrating Maya’s concept of how and when she is a good mother. While these themes each made distinct contributions to Maya’s construct of motherhood, they also are interrelated and reflect each other at different times. Companionship. The first theme is one of companionship or togetherness, marked at one end by loneliness and at the other by being together with loved ones. In Maya’s story, “togetherness” took into account her relationships with family, with her romantic partners, and with her children. For the most part, being alone was associated with hard times and with being a bad mother, as Maya described when the father of her children left her when she was seven months pregnant: …for him to just pick up and leave like that was just devastating. By the time my daughter was born, all I had in the world was a newborn and a toddler. That’s really all I could think about, and nothing else. I remember feeling extremely alone. And where I should have been really enjoying her, and marveling at this new wonderful creature, I wasn’t. I couldn’t. I had this bony two-year old, and a newborn, and I didn’t see how I was going to do it. I didn’t see how any of it was going to work out.

Maya remembered the devastation of being alone, and wondered what toll her emotional suffering took on her daughter: I wondered, at the time, if my baby could have absorbed all my emotions in utero. I feel like the last three months of my pregnancy were so full of turmoil, and pain,

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and anger, and…she was a really sad, sad baby. I have pictures of my daughter that are just heartbreaking, because she’s just—yeah, she would smile, and stuff, like most kids—but she looked so lost and far away. And maybe that’s a lot of projection, too, but I do feel like she would have been a different personality if things had been different.

Maya valued building a family with a partner, and sought to create that supportive structure a number of times, including with the father of her children: I had really wanted to make it work with him. When I was pregnant with our second baby, I thought that somehow, some way, we would get it together. I thought things were kind of turning out OK. ...[I]t seemed like things were going in the right direction, the path was right.

Her desire for companionship, and to avoid the crushing feeling of loneliness, also led her to maintain romantic relationships that were otherwise harmful: After that, I would get into these relationships with guys who were just like my abusive boyfriend. … I wanted it to be different. I wanted, I wanted to be pregnant. I wanted to have a baby. I wanted to have a family. I never wanted to feel that alone and that devastated, like I felt after my daughter was born, ever again. And for whatever reason, every time I thought it would be different…but when you meet the same type of guys, it’s going to be the same. I thought…that maybe, that if I had a new baby and a new relationship that it would take this pain away, this never-ending, relentless feelings of loss and pain.

Through the arc of her story, Maya’s understanding of being a good mother shifted so that being alone became a potential asset. She recognized that in order to be the mother she wanted to be, sometimes she would have to choose being alone over being partnered: And oh, the guilt. The guilt that I had stayed with a man who was abusive to me while my kids were little, and how much time and attention that they didn’t get during that time—that thought was enough to kill me. … Feeling horrible. Feeling like I let them down, and I didn’t protect them they way I should have. And my job as a mother was to protect them.

Since that time, Maya has continued to be open to meeting a potential life partner, but has remained a single mother, free of abusive relationships. The value and power of togetherness remained central to Maya’s concept of a good life and good motherhood, but the objects of her companionship changed over time. At the beginning of her story, Maya sought to be with her romantic partners, and her connection to them was paramount to her happiness. But when her children’s happiness

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and health were threatened, she shifted the focus of her concern. The value she placed on being connected to, and central in, the lives of her children was clear in her narrative: …my idea of time well spent would be with my kids present. With the people around me present, doing activities, or having fun. I feel like life is so short, and the time that I do get with my children is so special, that I like to spend it with them.

At the same time, Maya did not abandon her ideal of adult companionship so much as change where she looked for it. Maya described this transformation when she joined a competitive roller derby team: I can’t tell you how much that changed my life. Being with those women who were so strong. They were so strong. And they would bring their kids to practice, and we would do things outside of practice. …having that group of women…they kind of scooped me up and…there’s nothing like feeling like a powerful woman.

Empowered, connected, and present, Maya felt more like the person and the mother she wanted to be: And it changed my whole perspective on who I was: as a woman, as a mother, as a person in society, as, like...for once, I felt like a contributor. Like I was actually doing something. And I actually felt like my kids might be proud of me.

Order. If the first theme related to Maya’s construct of motherhood considered the presence or absence of relationship in her life, the second theme addresses the presence or absence of order and activity: the “what,” as opposed to the “who,” in Maya’s life. Loosely defined and lightly derided by Maya’s term “garbage,” the daily collection of tasks, items, goals, and intentions is the stuff of life. Like the theme of companionship, the theme of order is flexible, and different poles represent good and bad motherhood in turn. On the one side is messiness, and for the most part Maya linked this idea to her concept of being a good mother: The good thing is that there is a mess. I mean, otherwise my life could be really clean, and it could be really lonely, so for me the mess almost a feeling of fullness…There’s a lot there. There’s a lot to do. And I think that I would probably feel pretty incomplete if I didn’t have a lot of things to do. It gives me something to work towards. So it’s a sense of comfort, too. As long as I have stuff in there, I’m going to be OK. So even though it’s not organized, I have everything that I need.

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Maya acknowledged the limits of messiness, though, and that when she included too much in her daily life it got out of hand: I look around the mess and I see so many things, and some of it is garbage. Because there are things that I don’t want to have to deal with. I wish that I could just throw all the clothes away, so that I wouldn’t have to do the laundry. And then I could focus on more important things, which is spending time with my kids.

Being present and with her children was a priority for Maya, as was demonstrated both in her theme of messiness and of togetherness. But occasionally she struggled with the confusion of messiness and disorder and wondered if she was doing her children a disservice; sometimes messiness was associated with being a disorganized or incapable mother. To illustrate her struggle, Maya compared her own haphazard style of parenting to the order provided by her own mother: She is not messy. She’s a housekeeper. Her house is immaculate. She cooks, you know, meals, these perfectly balanced meals. … Oftentimes I feel conflict in that I want my kids to spend time with my mom because she does show them that other side…the organized side. But then that makes me question my own parenting abilities. Does that mean that I’m not doing it right? Does that mean that they’re going to be at a disadvantage?

In Maya’s story “order,” as represented by her mother, was desirable when the confusion of messiness threatened the welfare of Maya’s children. At certain times Maya had to forfeit her ideal of togetherness to achieve order, as when she struggled with the aftereffects of trauma and depression. To be a good mother she had to put order above being together, and as she was unable to provide her children with order, she gave their care over to her own mother: I wasn’t able to care for them, because I wasn’t able to care for myself. So my mom took the kids. After a year of trying to act normal, and be normal, it wasn’t happening. My kids weren’t getting fed, things weren’t getting done around the house, and I couldn’t deny it anymore. I couldn’t deny that I needed help. So my mom took the kids. And that was willingly…I said to her, “You need to do this, I can’t. My kids need better care.” And it was a really difficult decision to make. To decide that they were better off without me…that was a really hard decision to make.

Transition. The price of order was not being together with her children for a time. Having paid it, Maya was able to take the time necessary to change parts of her life to

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become more of the mother she wanted to be. This change makes up part of the next theme of her story: the state of being stagnant versus making progress. This theme of transition is less malleable than the previous two, with being stuck consistently associated with bad motherhood and movement toward a goal associated with being a good mother. Maya consistently spoke of her life as a mother in terms of paths, of movement: Raising children, and having children, is a process that can be described as a pathway. It’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful process. It’s not necessarily treacherous, or dark, or scary. Sometimes it’s really light and bright and encouraging. But no matter which way you go, at the end is an encouraging light. There’s an encouraging place to go.

Difficulty arose when she paused to consider where to go next, and in those times Maya felt less secure about her mothering: Now I feel like I’m kind of limbo with my motherhood. I feel like we’re always in this state of, “what’s going to happen next?” … a lot of times there is this sensation of limbo, meaning I don’t know where I am, or I don’t know where I’m going.

One important transition Maya made in her story was from being traumatized to being on her way to healing. Her guilt about the kind of mothering she gave when she was in an abusive relationship caused her to give up her children’s care for a time, as was described above. She related her state of being during the worst of her trauma: I just remember…I just remember it hurting so bad. And I went through a couple of weeks where I didn’t know where I was. I was so displaced, from everything, like time, space…I would get in the car and drive and get lost, and didn’t know where I was going. I was so traumatized by what had happened to me. And I didn’t understand. There was this certain level of needing to understand, “Why?” Why me? Why did he do that to me? And it took me years to get over that.

Maya made some false starts in her attempts to transition out of that state: After that, I would get into these relationships with guys who were just like my abusive boyfriend. I would actually seek out men that looked like him. And some of them was just as abusive. And at that time I didn’t have my kids, so I felt like it was OK. My kids were safe with my mom, my kids were happy…I was convinced that my kids didn’t need me, and they were actually better off. I was thinking that my kids were in a better place, and that they really didn’t ever need me back, and so I could just pretty much…you know, do whatever I wanted to do.

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The shock of being abandoned again awoke Maya to the futility of the path she was on. In order to pursue her desire for togetherness, to become the mother she wanted to be, she needed to find a different path: I was trying to hang out with a different group of friends, to try to make a new start. I was in therapy, I was going to the therapist every single week working really hard: To be different. To think different. To deal with what happened to me, and to reunite with my kids and to be a different kind of mother.

The theme of transition reflects the changes Maya made to her expectations of togetherness, both with her children and with the kind of adult company she sought as she illustrated in her account of joining the women’s roller skating team. In transition, progress is measured by the gaining of aspects of good motherhood. One of these aspects is togetherness, and Maya explained how one benefit of her transition has been the reclaiming of her children: And so I’m transitioning—my kids have been back with me for almost two years. And during that transition process, I’m gaining their trust back. So they—I feel like they do trust me, at this point in time. Where they’re getting their needs met from me.

Another point of progress Maya has made is her increasing ability to incorporate order into her life, as she demonstrated in her thoughts about money: I think of money. Control. How that impacts motherhood. Sometimes you have to decide between things you want and clothes you need for your kids. Money management is balancing your needs versus what you want.

Progress, for Maya, was achieved when she understood how to integrate togetherness with order to be the mother she wanted to be: When my kids were with my mom, I had a lot of peace of mind, because I knew they were safe. And I always felt like she wasn’t their mother, but she was the kind of mother they needed. But now I realize I’m their mother, and they need me, not anyone else.

Ability. The last theme related to Maya’s construct of motherhood is one of ability, marked at one end by competence and at the other by powerlessness. As with the theme of transition, this theme is not flexible in its associations with good and bad motherhood. Throughout her story the theme of ability clearly marked when Maya considered herself to be mothering well and when she did not.

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Maya’s relationship with her own mother provided many illustrations of the theme of ability, especially as Maya compared her mother’s style of caretaking to her own: I struggle with my relationship with my kids, because I’m not like my mom—I think that’s another really difficult thing for me, is that my mom is real consistent, and structured, and my mothering style is a lot different…. and so I think, if you have a mother like that, and if you’re not like that, then you tend to compare yourself to her and you almost feel inadequate, in some ways.

Maya’s progress toward competence was complicated by her dependence on her mother. Maya needed her mother’s help in caring for her children in order to have the time and ability to make changes in her life, but leaning on her mother made Maya feel “inadequate,” as she described: I think that involves my own dependence on my own mother…I depend on my mom so much for the care of my own children that I sometimes feel torn. Because I can’t provide for everything, that they require a lot of help—that I require a lot of help, from my mom.

Despite her conflict, Maya eventually decided she was competent and the greatest quality she had to offer her children was that she, and no one else, was their mother. Maya’s transition from impoverished to solvent is another illustration of the theme of ability. At the beginning of her story she described losing her job when her partner abandoned her and their toddler son. During our follow-up interview, Maya elaborated on how desperate she felt as a mother during this time: I didn’t have a car. And I got sanctioned by the department of human services, because I didn’t have my landlord paper filled out yet. So they had taken Medicaid and my food stamps away. We didn’t have any food! And the free store [food pantry] wanted this statement from the department of human services, but I was sanctioned by them, so I couldn’t get them to issue me a statement. So I couldn’t even go and get food stamps. So my son and I ate instant rice with soy sauce all the time. That’s it. That was my staple.

In contrast, her return to school and her graduation from the nursing program represented a marked turn toward empowerment and change, beginning with her realization that she would leave her abusive boyfriend: I don’t know if it was just that I had graduated that day, or what, but I didn’t care. It was like everything he was saying to me suddenly meant nothing. It was kind of

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like, “Whatever! You’re a loser.” Suddenly it was like “I don’t need him anymore.”

Though that event was followed by horrible trauma, the moment of choosing to escape rather than accept abuse marked the beginning of Maya’s transition from powerlessness to competency. Maya’s feeling of competency extended from her role as a mother to her role as a citizen. Previously she remarked on how joining the women’s roller derby team gave her a feeling of being a contributor, that it was an empowering activity that let her feel like a mother her children might be proud of. Her competency also was reflected in her decreasing reliance on social support and on her mother, so that she eventually supported herself and her children and considered herself in a position to help others. She related how she has told other women about her experiences, and how she hoped her story would help inspire women who were depressed, or in abusive relationships, or were otherwise struggling: I think my experiences have helped women who were in the place that I was four years ago, five years ago. [I could] give a different perspective on what their future could be like, what may happen to them, and that things don’t have to be horrible all the time. And that they will change, and that things will get better, and that it just feels like that at the moment. So I definitely feel like I’ve impacted the lives of others. Being there, having had that position. And I wouldn’t have been able to do that any other way.

Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision The themes of togetherness, order, progress, and ability made up Maya’s construct of motherhood and, in turn, directly related to her decisions not to mother. Maya was frank about how her identity as a mother helped her decide to terminate those pregnancies she decided she couldn’t support and how she will treat the subject as it arises with her children: I definitely think having an abortion is to protect the children that you already have. And I also think that…you know, somebody made the point to me, the other day, “Do you think you’ll ever tell your kids about your abortions?” And I said, “Absolutely!” Absolutely, I’ll tell them about it.

The theme of togetherness was present throughout Maya’s story as it is one of the values she holds most dear. The desire for togetherness, for family, was behind each

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pregnancy, as she previously described. But when she was again faced with the devastation of abandonment and loneliness, Maya’s knowledge of what that wrought on her and on her children led her to choose to terminate her pregnancy: The last boyfriend said to me, when I told him I was pregnant, “You can have it, but good luck finding me. Good luck finding me, ’cause I’m not going to be there. I’m not going to help you, I’m not going to be there.” So. I went and had another abortion.

Maya contemplated what connection and togetherness meant—what family meant—to her when I asked her during our follow-up conversation if she would have considered letting someone else adopt the baby from her unplanned pregnancy: S: You know how right-to-lifers always say “well you know, if you don’t want the baby, why not just give it up for adoption?” Could you ever imagine doing that?

M: No. I’m way too selfish.

S: How do you mean?

M: I think…I just think I am. I think….[sighs]. Although….there’s…I think that I have a great family, and if I’m going to carry to term I don’t see a reason why I won’t keep it. But there’s…that’s not the point. The point…I have the means, now, to provide. I have a great family, the school district is good, the [child] would have a nice…their own bedroom, probably. But I want more than that.

In the past, Maya was not able to provide even the basic necessities for an additional child, much less providing the nice home with an extra bedroom in a good school district, as she described the setting of her current life. But Maya wanted more than to be able to provide for a child: She wanted to bring any new child into a stable, connected family, and unless she achieved this she did not want to have more children. Messiness and order were also present in Maya’s deliberations about what to do with her pregnancies. She made progress toward becoming the stable, good mother she wanted to be; though there was still “garbage” in her life, it was just enough that she could handle it, she could allow the messiness. But Maya knew her limits, and another disappearing boyfriend, or another abusive partner, would have been too much with a new baby. She weighed her desire for family against the amount of garbage in her life, as she demonstrated after her last episode of domestic violence:

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…while I was in the hospital I started thinking about what to do. I struggled with that decision for quite some time even though he had beaten me. It was weeks after that critical beating that I finally went for an abortion.

The theme of progress was present in Maya’s account of choosing abortion as well as her account of motherhood. Her identity as a mother was central in the transition she was trying to make and in the progress she worried would have been lost if she chose to have another child when she was not ready: I considered my kids each time I had an abortion. Every single time, I thought about the kids that I had. And how…and how…at one point, I hadn’t graduated from college. And I was living in subsidized housing, and I could not fathom bringing another child into the world when I was on food stamps. I just couldn’t. I had a certain level of shame with having food stamps and being on cash assistance and living in subsidized housing. I wish I wouldn’t have been—looking back, I wish I wouldn’t have been ashamed, because I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. There was nothing wrong with what I was doing. But I did, at the time. And so I couldn’t [have another child]…I wasn’t going to do it.

Maya talked about the progress she envisioned, and how terminating her pregnancy helped her become the competent professional she is today: I had a goal, at one point. At one, point, I had a goal to graduate from college before [my son] was in kindergarten. And I graduated from college when he was going into the first grade, so I was really close!

Maya’s progress has brought her to the point where she feels she can act as an advocate for women who struggle with the issues that once plagued her: poverty, violence, abandonment, and trying to work and to attend school as a single mother. She noted that she has found a way to incorporate her faith into her understanding of what she has endured, and made a special note of how, as a Christian, she understands abortion. She mentioned the protesters at the Planned Parenthood clinic as an illustration: I wish that the protesters had compassion. And I think that’s something that they’re really, really lacking. And I think if they’re, if they’re Christian, like they claim to be, then they would be compassionate like Jesus Christ supposedly was. Because that’s something that he…the Messiah was someone who was a healer. And I feel like if Jesus Christ were to walk the Earth this day, he’d…he’d be holding those women’s [going into the clinic] hands. Not because he would necessarily want them to do it, but because he’s a loving, understanding, compassionate person. Who wouldn’t pass judgment on them, and would instead say “I’m here with you right now. I’m going to help you through this. And I wish you didn’t have to make this decision, but I’m still here.”

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Postscript: Maya’s reactions to my treatment of her story. I communicated a number of times with Maya to check details of her story and to keep her abreast of my progress on her narrative. When it was in its final form, I sent it to her for her perusal. It had been several months since we last spoke and a year since our first meeting. She responded with the following message, full of cheer: Hey pretty lady!

The timing of this is amazing. I'm two days late with my third child!! It's great to read this right now and reflect on how far I've come. How excited I am to expect my third baby and see what I went through with previous pregnancies. I must say although my circumstances are far from perfect, I am looking forward to mothering with a new sense of self.

You did such a beautiful job capturing my feelings as I spoke and also my intentions. Brilliant job!!!!

Thank you so much!

I responded with my congratulations, and a number of questions about her new sense of self. But by that time her newborn had arrived, and in reply she sent me only a photo: Maya and her older children, gathered around the tiny newborn in his hospital bassinet. There wasn’t a partner present in the photo, but Maya looked both serene and secure as she held her children’s hands. Smiling, holding each other, together: Family. Liz’s Story I met Liz through mutual friends. In the past she had expressed interest in my studies and research, and when I described my current project she expressed interest in participating. I had known from my previous encounters with her that she is an outspoken advocate for social issues, especially the struggles of single mothers, poor families, and children. As I grew to know her story better, I began to understand that, as with many advocates, her fire is stoked by personal experience. I was excited at the prospect of working with Liz to create her narrative. Because her experience of unwanted pregnancy occurred over 30 years ago, I hoped her story would contribute breadth to the collection of narratives included here. I was curious, too, how her construct of motherhood might have changed over time as she became the mother of grown children and eventually became a grandmother. I was interested in how

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her struggles would compare to the issues discussed by the other women in this project; if any would seem different, or quaint, or worse, or if they would be the same. What would Liz’s story say about progress, or the lack of progress, women and mothers have made over a generation? Liz initially expressed reluctance about participating in the photo elicitation portion of the project. When I queried her, she explained she felt she is not artistically inclined and she felt intimidated by the prospect of expressing herself through photography. I showed her some of the photos other participants had created, and shared that at least one other participant had elected not to use imagery in her interview. We discussed several options for Liz, including not taking photos at all, taking photos as a means of self-exploration but not sharing them with me, and creating images by means other than photography, including drawing and collage (because this method relies even more on perceived artistic ability, this was even less appealing to Liz). Leaving it up to her, I waited a few weeks for our next meeting. We met at her home in a quiet, middle-class suburb. Our conversation was frequently interrupted by the piercing yaps of several small dogs Liz was fostering in preparation for adoption. Liz explained some had been relinquished to shelters and others had been rescued from puppy mills. Her job, she told me through a lapful of waving tails and silky ears, was to socialize them, train them to have a modicum of manners, and keep them healthy and happy until permanent homes could be found. “It’s hard to let them go when the time comes,” she said, burying her face in one fluffy back. “But it’s so worth it to know that they will go to good homes, and I’ll have room to help other dogs.” Because their training had not yet progressed to a point where they could be counted on not to interrupt us with bids for attention, they were sequestered in separate quarters. When we had quiet, Liz brought out her photos. She had decided to try, she said, and after a lot of thought had come up with an idea to express some of the thoughts she had about being a mother. I had to smile when I saw her images: They were creative, thoughtful, and composed with a sense of intimacy and fun. “Liz,” I chided her, “Who said you weren’t artistic?” Liz smiled and blushed, and we settled down to talk. Over the next couple hours we laughed and groaned together frequently as we shared reactions to her story. Several times Liz cried, apologizing for her lack of control. At those times I

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usually choked back my own tears and told her not to worry about it. Other times she laughed and snorted and made asides about the characters appearing in her story, including herself. Her delivery was energetic, self-deprecating, raw, and touching. I left that afternoon feeling moved by Liz’s account of a full life and her hopes for the future. [Liz, 59, worked as the head of an instructional library] After my first husband was already long gone, my mother told me a story about him. Why she didn’t tell it to me at the time, I don’t know. But when we were young all our families lived by the lake, and there were ducks out on the lake. They would come over to get fed, because everybody would throw out bread for them. Well, my ex- husband caught one of the chicks. And took it home, and made a nest for it in his drawer. And it starved to death. And my mother told me, later, “That tore me up, because I knew right then he was a person who wanted things, but he wouldn’t take care of them after he had them. And that was exactly what happened with you.” I wish she had said something to me sooner. But you have to let your kids make their own mistakes. That’s the hardest thing about being a parent, is letting your kids make their own mistakes and watching them. I was 18 when I became a mother. I was married the November after I graduated from high school, and my older daughter was born the following May. And then, my second daughter was born in the second October after that. She was just six weeks old when I left my husband. He was involved with a 14 or 15-year old girl. And he had gotten into drugs. And he was not working. And…he had slapped me twice. After the second time, I left. I took my girls and I stayed with my parents for a couple years, and then I moved in with my sister-in-law. After a while my ex-husband started coming around again. And we had… relations, because I still cared about him. And I got pregnant again. I was on birth control. It didn’t work. Yep. I got pregnant again. And when I told him I was pregnant again, he walked out the door and I never saw him for oh, at least five years. Didn’t hear from him…nothing. In fact, my older daughter just recently started counseling for issues she has figured out relate to her natural father, her biological father, not being involved in her life. When I told her how he left, I said, “You know, if you want to blame it on me I understand.…” But if he were a real, caring father, he would have been there. I went to the doctor, and I said, “I need an abortion.” And he said, “There are lots of people out there who want babies…are you sure you can’t carry it until full term, and then let somebody else have a baby who really wants one?” And I said, “If I have it, I’m keeping it. I can’t give my baby away.” I just couldn’t do it. There are people who can, I’m not one of them. It was a very, very, very difficult decision. Because I loved kids, and I loved babies. But my family had already gone through my bad marriage, and two kids. We’d lived with them. They’d been very supportive. I had two kids I was living hand-to-mouth to support, as it was…I was getting no support—emotionally, psychologically, financially—from their father. And I knew, I knew having another child would put me over the edge. There was no way I could do it, personally. Now, there are lots of stronger

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women out there who could, and would, and that’s great. I admire them. But I know me, and there was just no way I would have been able to handle it. Plus, what I would have to have taken away from my two existing children to support a third child, who was none of their doing, and who wasn’t their fault. It just didn’t seem fair. I don’t even know if there is a word to describe all the emotions that you go through. Because you’re relieved…you’re devastated that you had to give up a baby that would have been special, because all babies are special. There wasn’t guilt for having the abortion, there was guilt for getting pregnant to begin with. That was the guilt that I dealt with for years. When you have two little kids…your responsibility as a mom was to just…to only be serious. That was hard. And I was pretty far along, I was actually right at the end of the time you could legally get an abortion. At the time, they gave you heavy-duty Valium, I think, to get through the process. And it was—I was fine, until…they were taking the fetus out. And it was suction…and I could…they had—those idiots—they had the bottle that it went into, they had it where I could see it. And that’s when I started losing it. Because you could see the pieces. Soooo….when I went into the recovery area, I was a mess. I was bawling, I kept saying “I didn’t want to have to do this.” …I can’t believe I’m getting choked up now. Um. I had to do it, I didn’t have a choice. If I’d had more money, so I could have afforded it, I would have kept it in a heartbeat. But, social services were not that great then. In fact, my mom was buying all of our clothing for us, that was her way of helping out. But the bulk of the responsibility was mine, which it should have been. But I felt so badly that she had to help out at all, because I wanted to stand on my own two feet. I thought I was doing so well: I was working, and because I had benefits I had sick leave, so I could be with the kids when they needed me. And vacation, which always ended up being used for sick leave. Because little kids get sick a lot! But it just wasn’t enough. I finally went to what then was called “Aid for Dependent Children” to apply for help with buying clothing. And it killed me—I was raised to believe you took care of yourself. You didn’t depend on the system. You, you know, paid your own way. And you helped other people when you could…so it killed me to have to go and ask. That was hard. And they turned me down because I made “too much” money. I am not joking. And I said, “Well, I’d like you to tell me how you think I’m going wrong, why I don’t have money for the kids’ clothing, because that’s what this money would be for.” “Well,” they said, “we have a county person who can come out and help you figure out your budget.” I said, “Bring ’em on! If there’s something I can do better, I want to know.” So then this lady came and I showed her my budget, and she practically went cross-eyed. She said, “How are you doing this? I don’t know how you are doing it.” And basically I took money out of each paycheck for car insurance, because that was paid every six months back then. I paid my doctor’s bills, five and ten dollars at a time—I had a great doctor, who was very understanding, and as long as I kept some money going in he didn’t turn us down. But I was literally watching every penny. My groceries I would buy so that I could make enough for certain leftovers, ones the kids would like, so that I wouldn’t have to cook every day. Spaghetti was a great one, you can reheat it, and it gets better. All the meals were cheap, as cheap as I could do them.

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No. I was still making too much money. I think, at the time, I was making just a little over $10,000 a year. With two kids. Which was below the poverty line, but by their scale I made too much money. I mean, I had pennies…pennies left over. At the end of a paycheck. Maybe. Eventually I did have to swallow my pride and go apply for food stamps. And I did get food stamps, for a while. And that did help. But at the same time, I was very self- conscious about using them. I was very careful how I used them. I hated getting that stuff out at the cash register. Oh, I hated it. “Here’s my play money.” Because that’s what they did back then, you didn’t have a card or anything, they actually gave you bills and change, like Monopoly money. I learned to swallow my pride a lot, back then. I always say, I grew up with my kids. And that’s why I say, when you ask what did they learn from me, that they learned that I make mistakes, too. And the only thing you can do about mistakes is correct them the best you can, and learn from them, and move on. I think another thing they learned from me was…this is going to sound really cheesy…family is the most important thing. Ever. And as long as you have love for one another, you’ll be OK. You’ll get through things. You get through them together. But that’s #1. And that’s why we’re so tight. And they’re good kids. I don’t know how they turned out so great…I tell them that all the time. I feel like I’ve been the best mom I could be. And that’s all I could do. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a bad mom. I think there are moms who…who don’t know how to take care of kids, through, probably, no fault of their own. I think there are moms who don’t know, who haven’t been educated on how to raise a child in a way that they’ll be an asset to society, instead of a detriment. Being a parent—isn’t it weird that we get absolutely no training for it? None. Zilch. And it’s the most important job anybody can have!

Motherhood, to me, has been a journey. I tried to figure out how to represent that, and I thought about stair steps. Because you start at the bottom, and then you work your way to the top.

You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And doing what you have to do and doing the best you can.

And I made lots of mistakes. But luckily we survived all of them.

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Of course, the first step has a weeble- wobble on it, because “the weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.” That represents me. I have a doll, and a little basket with a little dress, and a little baby bottle, and somewhere there’s a little spoon, to represent the nurturing part of taking care of a baby. They have to have clothing, they have to eat, they have to be safe. The picture represents family. Because family was very important. My parents, and my brother, and my sisters were very, very supportive and very involved with my kids. I was very lucky.

You gotta have a car. You gotta have one. The watch represents how time management figures into single motherhood, and how little time you always seem to have. There is an empty billfold because I never had any money. The doll has buttons to put in the button-hole, and a zipper, to represent trying to teach your kids what they need to know…and all the time you’re dealing with the car, and the time, and the no money. The little ambulance and cough syrup represent health. You’re always worried about their health. And then, the next step has the—I thought this was really cool, because it says “Mother” on it—it’s cleaning stuff. And we have the children’s book, because you’re trying to teach them to read, and you’re trying to have time to sit down and read with them. Education-type things. And there are my keys, because those, to me, say responsibility. Those are all the keys for all you have to take care of: Your car, your apartment or house, your workplace. And then there’s work…you’re trying very hard to be good at work, so that you keep your job. And there’s my good old Tums bottle. Because it’s all extremely stressful. And a lot of people don’t understand. They don’t see what’s going on behind the closed doors, how hard you’re working…and you know. You

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need time for yourself, too, no matter who you are or what you’re doing. So my time for myself was after the kids went to bed, and I’d stay up late reading, or whatever, and be tired the next day. That poster, “Children Learn What They Live,” was kind of my bible when my kids were growing up. It talks about what your actions say to children. What they learn from them. I thought it was very wise. What I hope my actions told my daughters was that everybody’s human, everybody’s going to make mistakes. And you do the best you can, you learn the best you can from that mistake, and move on. I mean, look at my abortion. What did I learn? Do Not Get Involved With Anybody If You Don’t Think You’re Going To Stay With Them. I wasn’t going to have that happen again. So I pretty much didn’t get involved with anyone, after that. I can’t say I never did, but very rarely. I mean, I was human. And I had urges. Every now and then I would meet somebody that I knew was safe. And I was on birth control…again. But I made sure they used a condom, to be double-sure. But, probably, you could count on one hand the number of people I was with, in ten years, before I met my second husband. Yeah, they were few and far between. Way over on the left is a yardstick. And that’s because society expects you to measure up. They expect you to be a perfect mother and hold down a job. And do all the things that other mothers do, whether they have a partner there to help or not. You’re being judged. No ands, ifs, or buts about it. People are watching, to see how you’re doing. I mean, it drains you. I was exhausted at night. Absolutely exhausted. And I know any mother is. Any mother. The movie Click is because you’re like a remote control. Everybody’s pushing different buttons. You gotta be something different at work than you are at home, than you are with your parents, than you are with your friends…and I think everybody does that. They call it “wearing different hats.” But I think it’s more strenuous when you don’t have anybody to be yourself with. Like, you know, who else are you really yourself with other than your partner? Who else sees you when your nose is all red and your eyes are red from crying? And you’re drooling, and all that kind of stuff? I was a single mom for ten years. And then I met my second husband and we got married. That little figure by the house is a Transformer. And that’s there because everything about me did a transformation. When you go from being a single parent to a married couple, everything changes. The first years were really difficult. I could tell you some really nice stories about when we lived in the house with the bats, and the roof that leaked, and we didn’t have a pot to pee in between the two of us, as the old saying goes.

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The only luxury I allowed myself was a weekly bottle of wine. Every week I would get myself a large bottle of Lambrusco. Because it was cheap! But after the first glass, you’re OK! But that had to last me for a week. So, we had a cement porch, and as we were carrying in the groceries, the bottle of wine fell out and broke on the porch. And oh man, that was the last straw. I burst into tears: “Oh, I don’t get my wine this week!” I must sound like a lush… But you know, you look forward to that glass of wine after the kids are in bed…you get to relax, that’s your time. But I looked out the window a little bit later, and here he was walking down the street. It was a little tiny town, and he had walked back down to the grocery store and brought back another bottle of wine for me. Times were tough…but we made it through that. We had a house, that’s when I first had a house to call my own to live in. I was always in an apartment up to that point. So the house represents how big a change it was. Once you get another person involved, it’s amazing what a second paycheck can do, isn’t it?

And this is Places in the Heart. Because, for me, all that hard work, all the stress, everything, it all paid off. Because this is where I ended up. I am a Grammy now. I was fortunate enough to be around to help take care of my parents when they needed me…it was wonderful, to be able to pay them back, to a degree. So they’re in my heart. They are the places in my heart. The top steps are about becoming Liz: I don’t have to be a mother anymore, I don’t have to be a good daughter, I don’t even have to be a good Grammy. This is about me, or what I want to be me: Finally I get time to do what I want to do. With myself. So you can’t see it very well, but my hat says “No Fear.” And I’ve been a Court-Appointed Special Advocate now for a couple of years for Pro-Kids, an organization that trains people to be advocates for kids who are in the foster or court system due to abuse or

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neglect. One of the other things I’m involved in through Pro-Kids CASA is the Steps to Peace Program: I am actually helping teach classes on how to recognize abuse in children, and what to do about it. And there is my medal for doing the walk-a-thon in Alaska, the marathon I walked with my older daughter. And Sicko is to show how I’m very involved right now in trying to get health care for everyone, universal health care. (Because I know how much it would have meant all those years had we had it! ) That brochure, of course, is from my work on the election…one of the proudest moments in my life was when Obama gave his acceptance speech. I worked hard for that. I worked very hard for that. He’s a good guy. And now…the world is my oyster.

Doing, Having, or Not Liz’s images present an array of items associated with the span of her life as a mother. Some of these items represent her activities, or things she has to do to be a good mother, and other items represent things she has to possess to be a good mother. Liz arrayed these items in space to illustrate the idea of an uphill struggle, providing close- ups of points along the way so we could see details of her successes and failures. Not wanting to keep us in suspense, she allows us to see the end of her journey and the fulfillment she feels she has achieved. As with the women featured before, Liz’s construct of motherhood is built upon several broad themes, all of which in turn contain interrelated subthemes. Also similar to the themes in other women’s constructs of motherhood, some of the themes in Liz’s story are flexible and are associated at different times with “good” or “bad” motherhood and other themes are more constant in their associations. Doing. The first theme is defined by responsibility and reflects those actions necessary to being a good mother. Being responsible is a theme throughout Liz’s story, but no more so than when she was a young, single mother struggling to bring up her children on her own. For the first portion of Liz’s life as a mother, responsibility meant caring for her children first: On the steps representing her children’s years of dependency all the props depict things Liz needed to care for her children, including money, educational items, medicine, and time. Few items reflect Liz’s needs, except as they affected her ability to care for her children (the bottle of Tums is a good example). Liz enumerated some of the responsibilities of a good mother: I have a doll, and a little basket with a little dress, and a little baby bottle, and somewhere there’s a little spoon, to represent the nurturing part of taking care of a baby. They have to have clothing, they have to eat, they have to be safe. … The

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doll has buttons to put in the button-hole, and a zipper, to represent trying to teach your kids what they need to know. … And we have the children’s book, because you’re trying to teach them to read, and you’re trying to have time to sit down and read with them. Education-type things.

Liz was not blind in her devotion to her children’s care, and she knew that the caretaker needed to be kept in working order. When she talked about the importance of family in her life, she told of the ways her sisters would take her kids for one week a year to give Liz a vacation. Liz recognized that she had to take care of herself, too, but while she allowed that self-care was an important port of being a responsible mother she knew too that it came at a cost: You need time for yourself, too, no matter who you are or what you’re doing. So my time for myself was after the kids went to bed, and I’d stay up late reading, or whatever, and be tired the next day.

Being a responsible mother meant taking care of duties in a number of arenas, and being a single mother meant Liz had no one to share in her responsibilities. Liz reflected on the multitude of demands in her daily life: And there are my keys, because those, to me, say responsibility. Those are all the keys for all you have to take care of: Your car, your apartment or house, your workplace. And then there’s work…you’re trying very hard to be good at work, so that you keep your job.

Having responsibilities in so many areas was taxing, mostly because Liz felt as a single mother she was required to meet certain standards regardless of her lack of time or support: Way over on the left is a yardstick. And that’s because society expects you to measure up. They expect you to be a perfect mother and hold down a job. And do all the things that other mothers do, whether they have a partner there to help or not. You’re being judged. No ands, ifs, or buts about it. People are watching, to see how you’re doing. I mean, it drains you. I was exhausted at night. Absolutely exhausted. And I know any mother is. Any mother.

Aside from the discrete tasks of living—work, taking care of children, taking care of the home, and keeping one’s self in working order—being a good mother meant focusing on responsibilities over time as well, attending to tasks that were never really completed. As an example of an ongoing responsibility Liz discussed the task of learning, especially learning from mistakes. Over the course of her story Liz illustrated a number

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of occasions when learning and helping her children learn factored into her responsibilities. She introduced the idea with a story about her own mother, who made herself stand aside as young Liz partnered with an irresponsible mate: I wish she had said something to me sooner. But you have to let your kids make their own mistakes. That’s the hardest thing about being a parent, is letting your kids make their own mistakes and watching them.

Liz continued to make mistakes over the course of her mothering, but she learned from them. Because she felt she had little time, money, or other resources to help recover from making mistakes, she held herself to strict standards of responsibility. For example, although she did not feel guilty about having an abortion, she felt it was irresponsible for her to have gotten pregnant in the first place and that she should not have risked having a sexual relationship with her ex-husband: When you have two little kids…your responsibility as a [single] mom was to just…to only be serious.

She factored that early mistake into her decision to remain largely celibate during her years as a single mother: You learn what you can from that mistake, and move on. I mean, look at my abortion. What did I learn? Do Not Get Involved With Anybody If You Don’t Think You’re Going To Stay With Them. I wasn’t going to have that happen again. So I pretty much didn’t get involved with anyone, after that. I can’t say I never did, but very rarely.

Another responsibility was to allow her children to learn from mistakes, as Liz’s mother did for her. Liz described how she incorporated this value into her parenting, mentioning a poster that acts as a reminder for her: That poster, “Children Learn What They Live,” was kind of my bible when my kids were growing up. It talks about what your actions say to children. What they learn from them. I thought it was very wise. What I hope my actions told my daughters was that everybody’s human, everybody’s going to make mistakes. And you do the best, you learn the best you can from that mistake, and move on.

Having. The theme of responsibility reflected what Liz felt she had to do to be a good mother. By contrast, the theme of resources reflects what things Liz considered important to have in the work of parenting. Though Liz would not characterize someone

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who lacked resources as a bad parent, she nonetheless acknowledged how much easier it was to raise her children well when she did not lack for resources. A good mother learns to make do with limited resources, if necessary, and this effort made up much of Liz’s story of early motherhood. But money is only one of the resources needed in parenting, and Liz counted off the essentials on her fingers: You gotta have a car. You gotta have one. The watch represents how time management figures into single motherhood, and how little time you always seem to have. There is an empty billfold because I never had any money. … The little ambulance and cough syrup represent health. You’re always worried about their health.

Liz explained how, even when she felt she was doing everything right, she still lacked for resources. Her pay from her full-time employment was stretched to cover the necessities of food, rent, insurance payments and, because she couldn’t afford a reliable car, frequent car repairs. In addition to these concrete necessities, Liz mentioned the more intangible but equally important resources her family relied on. Health care for her family was a particular concern: I thought I was doing so well: I was working, and because I had benefits I had sick leave, so I could be with the kids when they needed me. And vacation, which always ended up being used for sick leave. Because little kids get sick a lot! But it just wasn’t enough.

Even though she was working full time, she had little enough money so that for a time she depended on social services to make ends meet. Liz described her efforts to make her limited finances cover the expenses of her family of three: I took money out of each paycheck for car insurance, because that was paid every six months back then. I paid my doctor’s bills, five and ten dollars at a time—I had a great doctor, who was very understanding, and as long as I kept some money going in he didn’t turn us down. But I was literally watching every penny. My groceries I would buy so that I could make enough for certain leftovers, ones the kids would like, so that I wouldn’t have to cook every day. Spaghetti was a great one, you can reheat it, and it gets better. All the meals were cheap, as cheap as I could do them.

Liz made distinctions between necessities and luxuries, and was careful to limit the latter. She illustrated this with her story about her weekly indulgence in a bottle of cheap wine: …we didn’t have a pot to pee in between the two of us, as the old saying goes. The only luxury I allowed myself was a weekly bottle of wine. Every week I

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would get myself a large bottle of Lambrusco. Because it was cheap! But after the first glass, you’re OK! But that had to last me for a week. So, we had a cement porch, and as we were carrying in the groceries, the bottle of wine fell out and broke on the porch. And oh man, that was the last straw. I burst into tears: “Oh, I don’t get my wine this week!”

When I reviewed this story with Liz, she laughed and added to the tale of rationed luxuries and how her family’s current life compares to that time: I didn’t mention that at the time what my girls got as a treat was one can of Coke a week. That was a big deal to them. And now they both have Master’s degrees and good jobs and their own houses, and I’m sure they can afford nicer wine than Lambrusco. We’ve come a long way!

Both responsibility and resources are themes that are more inflexible in their associations with good motherhood: When Liz strove to be as responsible as she can be, and when she sought out all the resources she can find, she felt good about herself as a mother. The next two themes are more flexible in their meaning, with elements more variable in their associations with good and bad motherhood. Pride. The first of these more flexible themes relates, as did the theme of responsibility, to Liz’s actions. But this theme is about how Liz felt about her actions, whether she felt guilt or pride about what she has done. For the most part, Liz felt guilt for actions she considered irresponsible, or selfish, such as the time she succumbed to her attraction and fondness for her ex-husband and unintentionally became pregnant. Her pride was more understated—she never used the word “proud” in reference to herself— but it is clear that she made a great effort to act in a manner that would bring her no shame. And, self-deprecatingly, she alluded to her pride in her relationship with her adult children and in how well they turned out: …we’re so tight. And they’re good kids. I don’t know how they turned out so great…I tell them that all the time. I feel like I’ve been the best mom I could be. And that’s all I could do.

Liz began to reassess her feelings about pride in relation to motherhood when she was faced with not being able to provide for her children on her own. Asking for help went against the grain of the Protestant work ethic common to her small-town culture; Liz had to struggle between her beliefs about how to be a good citizen and her beliefs about how to be a good mother:

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I finally went to what then was called “Aid for Dependent Children” to apply for help with buying clothing. And it killed me—I was raised to believe you took care of yourself. You didn’t depend on the system. You, you know, paid your own way. And you helped other people when you could…so it killed me to have to go and ask. That was hard.

Accepting help from her family was only a little less shameful than asking for aid from the county, as Liz recounted in her description of her reliance on her parents for help with her daughters: In fact, my mom was buying all of our clothing for us, that was her way of helping out. But the bulk of the responsibility was mine, which it should have been. But I felt so badly that she had to help out at all, because I wanted to stand on my own two feet.

Getting food stamps and accepting help from her own mother hurt Liz’s pride, but her feelings of shame were trumped by her stronger sense of responsibility toward her children. In this instance, the act of taking support transitioned over time from something Liz found distasteful to something, by necessity, she attributed to being a good mother. And as I discuss in the section below about Liz’s reactions to this analysis, over the years since her single motherhood Liz has found ways to regain her sense of pride in being able to help other people in need. Personal support. Another transitional factor in Liz’s motherhood, and the last major theme of her story, is the state of being alone or of being supported. As with having the things necessary to parent well, being alone or supported is a theme of possession, in this case having personal support. Liz had described above how exhausting it was to be held up to certain standards of parenting despite her lack of support, to have so many different responsibilities and to be held to the same standards as a partnered parent. Liz raised her daughters alone for ten years until she met and married the man who became their stepfather. Having a partner in raising her children meant gaining financial support and gaining additional resources, including time, needed to raise children. But even more than these, having a partner meant gaining the company of a person who has chosen to commit personal support to you. To set off the magnitude of this change, and the positive contributions it made in her life, Liz first articulated what it meant to her to be alone:

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I think it’s more strenuous when you don’t have anybody to be yourself with. Like, you know, who else are you really yourself with other than your partner? Who else sees you when your nose is all red and your eyes are red from crying? And you’re drooling, and all that kind of stuff?

Measuring up to what was expected of her as a mother was difficult enough; it was all the more taxing when there was no one there for company and moral support. Liz did allow her family of origin to be a source of personal support, but she was careful not to rely on them too much. In her guide to the items arrayed on her staircase, she pointed to a family photo and explained how it represented the importance of family during her single motherhood: The picture represents family. Because family was very important. My parents, and my brother, and my sisters were very, very supportive and very involved with my kids. I was very lucky.

Liz went on to describe how she has made the importance of family one of the primary lessons she has tried to impart to her daughters: I think another thing they learned from me was…this is going to sound really cheesy…family is the most important thing. Ever. And as long as you have love for one another, you’ll be OK. You’ll get through things. You get through them together. But that’s #1.

The theme of responsibility highlighted the importance, to Liz, of not relying too much on anyone else for support, even family. This created an uncertain state for her as sometimes Liz was able to associate her connection to her family as an asset to her parenting, while other times she considered it a weakness. Even more precariously, there were times when Liz had to actively reject having a personal connection or the support of a partner in order to be a good mother. This was demonstrated in her account of leaving her husband, when his actions indicated he would not be a good partner or parent: I was married the November after I graduated from high school, and my older daughter was born the following May. And then, my second daughter was born in the second October after that. She was just six weeks old when I left my husband. He was involved with a 14 or 15 year old girl. And he had gotten into drugs. And he was not working. And…he had slapped me twice. After the second time, I left.

This choice represents a transitional moment in the theme of being alone versus supported, and of its associations with good or bad motherhood. Liz faced other moments

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in her motherhood when she had to come to a different understanding of what it meant to her to be alone and what it meant to be supported. Being alone allowed Liz some measure of pride as she demonstrated she could take care of her children on her own, without taxing her family’s support. But when she gained the company and support of a partner, Liz allowed there were greater possibilities in parenting. She described the change for her when she married her second husband: That little figure by the house is a Transformer. And that’s there because everything about me did a transformation. When you go from being a single parent to a married couple, everything changes… Once you get another person involved, it’s amazing what a second paycheck can do, isn’t it?

Liz mentioned the paycheck and the benefit of additional financial resources that came with a partner. But the rest of her story made it clear that the transformation was not only about money, and that the “everything” about her that changed included an increase in emotional support, in time to spend with her children, in help with the upkeep of their home, and in all the other tasks of child rearing. The support of a partner is different from the support of other family members, and Liz could take this help without dint to her pride and without feeling like she was shirking her responsibilities as a mother. By the close of her story, being supported had become associated with being a good mother. Motherhood Construct and the Abortion Decision Like the women whose stories precede hers, Liz devoted time and attention to her decision about what to do with her unintended pregnancy. And as with the other women, Liz’s eventual decision depended on her best understanding of how to be a good mother. All the themes associated with Liz’s construct of motherhood were represented in her story of choosing abortion: from responsibility to resources, from guilt and pride to being alone or supported. In turn, each theme informed her decision to terminate her unintended pregnancy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, responsibility was the first idea Liz mentioned in relation to her decision to terminate. Responsibility had factored hugely in her understanding of how to be a good mother, and she considered what would be the responsible thing for her to do both in terms of the daughters she had and for the future child she might bear. She discussed responsibility in relation to her limited resources to provide for her daughters:

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Plus, what I would have to have taken away from my two existing children to support a third child, who was none of their doing, and who wasn’t their fault. It just didn’t seem fair.

Liz decided her responsibility as a good mother was not to add to the hardship of her children by spreading her already insufficient resources to cover the care of another child. Liz mentioned at various times in her story how much she loves children, especially babies, and in her telling of her story she re-experienced some grief about not being able to provide for another child. She made it clear that her decision not to mother again was directly tied to her experience of not having enough resources for her existing children, despite her best efforts to work and accept whatever social and familial support that was available. I was bawling, I kept saying “I didn’t want to have to do this.” …I can’t believe I’m getting choked up now. Um. I had to do it, I didn’t have a choice. If I’d had more money, so I could have afforded it, I would have kept it in a heartbeat.

Her accounting of resources took into account the support she had from her own family of origin which, though she was grateful for it, Liz felt conflicted about relying on. When she realized that even with the support of her job, her parents, and social services she still was unable to provide a good life for her children, Liz knew her responsibility as a good mother to her current children and her potential child meant not continuing her pregnancy. Liz grappled with the importance of family to her, personally, and to her understanding of how to be a good mother. Part of her deliberations took into account how another child would be new family to her, and how she knew she would feel connected and attached to another child. But part also took into account her existing relationships, and her responsibility as a good mother to not depend on the support of her family. Liz described the chaos of competing claims of connection, of some sources of support that were taxed, and of others that were gone: It was a very, very, very difficult decision. Because I loved kids, and I loved babies. But my family had already gone through my bad marriage, and two kids. We’d lived with them. They’d been very supportive. I had two kids I was living hand-to-mouth to support, as it was…I was getting no support—emotionally, psychologically, financially—from their father. And I knew, I knew having another child would put me over the edge. There was no way I could do it, personally.

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As with the other women, I asked Liz what it would have meant to her to continue the pregnancy but give the child up for adoption so she wouldn’t have to support it. Liz explained that, with her understanding of how to be a good mother, this option seemed impossible to her: I went to the doctor, and I said, “I need an abortion.” And he said, “There are lots of people out there who want babies…are you sure you can’t carry it until full term, and then let somebody else have a baby who really wants one?” And I said, “If I have it, I’m keeping it. I can’t give my baby away.” I just couldn’t do it. There are people who can, I’m not one of them.

Part of the impossibility stemmed from Liz’s witnessing of the effect the absence of her daughters’ father had on them, and her feelings about how a good parent does not abandon her children: In fact, my older daughter just recently started counseling for issues she has figured out relate to her natural father, her biological father, not being involved in her life. When I told her how he left, I said, “You know, if you want to blame it on me I understand.…” But if he were a real, caring father, he would have been there.

Throughout her story the themes of responsibility, resources, pride versus shame, and being alone versus supported were present in Liz’s day-by-day decisions about how to be a good mother—and when not to be a mother, if necessary. The complexity of the motherhood construct that came of these themes reflects both the interrelatedness of the themes and how, for some of them, the themes were flexible and changed in their associations to good or bad motherhood over time. And though not directly related to her construct of motherhood, Liz’s portrayal of motherhood changed over time in a manner that reflects her transitional identity: from new mother to single mother, to partnered mother, to mother of adult children, to grandmother. The theme of responsibility made a temporal transformation as Liz’s duties shifted from care of her children to her grandchildren and eventually her elderly parents. And being full versus empty was another temporal, transitional theme: At the beginning of motherhood, being full meant being busy, making sure everything needed was gotten, and having time crammed with responsibilities. By contrast, emptiness represented a lack

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of resources, such as an empty wallet. But by the end of Liz’s transition over time, empty came to represent the end of responsibilities and the time to explore her own desires: I was lucky enough, again, that with my second husband we could afford for me to retire when I reached retirement age. And so this is my time. I didn’t get this when I was younger. My own fault, but still…and it’s exciting. The world is my oyster!

Postscript: Liz’s reactions to my treatment of her story. Liz was my only participant who wanted to use her own name. Before committing to this, I contacted her again to give her a chance to read my version of her narrative and reflect on her decision to use her own name. She responded quickly: Hi!

Just read through the script. Made me cry! Silly. Brought back some memories and feelings. Nope - still no problem with using my name. I am what I am, and am not ashamed of my past - though I'm not eager to have everyone know my personal life, it wouldn't be unbearable if they do.

Our conversation segued into a discussion of how Liz has responded to the struggles in her life by, when she is able, turning around and helping others get through similar situations. Since her retirement she has been working full-time in a number of volunteer and charitable endeavors, among them advocating for children and coordinating Democratic support and outreach in local and national elections. As with her decisions about how to mother and when not to mother, Liz’s work in other social arenas is indelibly marked by the difficulties she encountered in her earlier life. In our initial interview we discussed, at length, Liz’s feelings about accepting social and familial support in providing for her daughters. In our follow-up interview we discussed her position relative to assistance at the present time as compared to her past: S: I love how you set [the display of items] up on the steps like that, and just looking at the contrast between the top and the bottom…but also, just how related these things are, still, to the rest of your life…like the health care, and the social change that you want, and all that is informed by what you’ve been through. And that you’re not just kind of turning your back on your life and saying, “There, I’ve gotten through it now.” But, it’s like your parents say, you turn around and you help when you can. And now you’re in a position…

L: Yeah. In fact, if I’d a had a copy of the DVD…what is that movie? There’s a movie about a kid who gets something from somebody, and they say, when he

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wants to pay it back they say…

S: Pay it Forward?

L: “Pay it Forward”! That’s it! I would have put that on the steps. So that’s what I’m trying to do, in my own way. And having a ball, I must say.

One of the ways Liz “pays it forward” is by discussing family planning and parenting with other teens at risk for unplanned pregnancy, sharing her own story as an example. She had done this years before, for her own daughters: L: And you know…I…the only way that I could, that I felt that I could make a difference was to do everything that I could to keep my girls from getting pregnant before they were ready. And I used to check their purses before they went out on a date, to make sure there was a condom in their purse.

S: All right! As opposed to looking for condoms, then taking them away and saying, “Don’t do that!”

L: I…[laughs] And I also talked to them about birth control. I talked to them about what happened to me…They know. And I told them, “You don’t want to go there. It’s a horrible situation to be in. You do not want to experience that. And I don’t want to see you experience it. So whatever we have to do to avoid it, I’m behind you 100%.” And [my younger daughter] was married three years in a steady relationship before she had her first daughter, and [my older daughter] was married four years, I think, and their marriage was good before they decided to have children. So I feel like I did my part for society.

While her conversations with her daughters worked out well, Liz confessed she had worse luck with the teens she supports through CASA. She described her struggle with the teenage girl she has worked with for a couple of years: L: My CASA girl just had her baby. It weighed 2 pounds 5 ounces. Its intestines and liver are on the outside of its body. [pause] And she is, she just turned 16 in February. And she was offered an abortion when they found out what was wrong with the fetus. And she wouldn’t even consider it. [pause] So I talked to her. And she knows I’ve had an abortion, because I was pressing hard on birth control from the moment I got to know her. And she’s been sexually active since she was, I think, 12? So I [pause] I just told her, I said, “You know, there’s…now you have to think like a parent, not like a teenager. And I want you to think about what this baby is going to go through.” She listened to me. And I said, “I want you to think about it. I want you to have the whole picture. I am not encouraging you to have an abortion. I want you to see the whole picture before you make your decision; that’s all I’m asking you to do.” She wanted to keep her baby, so…she’s got it.

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S: I hope she…gets enough support for it.

L: The father so far is very involved. And he went and got a job—he’s 17—and he went and got a job at McDonald’s as soon as he found out she was pregnant. So hopefully, you know. That’s a good sign. Maybe it will work out. I hope so.

Liz admitted to me that the struggle to pay her social debts through activism isn’t always cheering, but she considers it essential to keep working toward the sort of social support and social justice she feels would have helped her in her past. She explained this was behind her decision to participate in this study, specifically: But you know, that’s another thing about the abortion issue, is that they’ve put such a stigma on it, to use it politically. I mean there’s always been a stigma, but it was kind of in the background. It was just something you did and you didn’t talk about. [pause] And that’s one reason I want to speak out about it now, because I think what we need to do is get it out in the open and let people know it’s not a bad thing. You’re not going to go to hell because you had an abortion.

My conversations with Liz ended, as they began, full of humor. Her concluding comments show the strength of Liz’s personality and how important motherhood has been in her understanding of her life and her struggles: L: It’s the neatest thing I’ve ever done.

S: Having kids?

L: Yeah. I wouldn’t change one minute of it. Not one minute. I always said the only thing my ex-husband did that was good, was he gave me two wonderful girls. That’s the only good thing he ever did for me. [pause] And he took my virginity! …Turkey.

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Discussion I began this project with, admittedly, a catholic assortment of questions, motives, expectations, and hopes. At the end I find myself with an equal collection of answers, additional questions, and a queer feeling of mixed satisfaction and renewed curiosity. In the following section I will discuss the significance of women’s constructs of motherhood in their abortion decisions and how women’s constructs and narratives of motherhood showed important commonalities. I will review the answers to the questions I proposed about constructs of motherhood and will reflect on the new questions that arose from those answers. I will discuss the utility of the photo elicitation approach I used and participants’ reactions to this non-traditional method of evoking personal narratives. I will then explore the current changes and directions in reproductive rights policy and how the personal narratives herein highlight potential problems in these policies. Finally, I will discuss some of the limitations of this project and suggest the potential directions this work indicates for future feminist constructivist research. Feminist Constructivism and Narratives of Motherhood At the outset of this project I put forth a number of questions I wanted to address: How did women’s constructs of motherhood play a role in their decisions to terminate unwanted pregnancies? How were women’s personal constructs of motherhood wrought? How were they alike each other, and how did they differ? What effects did personal, social, and political contexts have on how their stories unfolded? Some of these questions were addressed in the preceding section, as the individuality of each woman’s construct and the life context from which each arose were illustrated by the personal narratives and the interpretations that followed. What the narratives reveal, over and over again, is that women make critical use of their constructs of motherhood when they decide what to do with an unwanted pregnancy. More to the point, women use their understanding of what it means to them to be a good mother when they make these decisions, and in each case, in different ways, how each woman understood she needed to act as a good mother led her to decide to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. Below I describe how the constructs of good motherhood derived from the narratives upset such familiar social assumptions as “If a woman knew what it meant to be a mother, she would never choose abortion,” and “A

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woman who really cares about children would never choose to terminate her pregnancy.” These and other dominant social discourses are discussed in light of how each fit, or fail to fit, individual women’s lives. Motherhood constructs and dominant social discourses. At the start of this project I proposed that women’s narratives of motherhood and abortion would cast light on the ways common social discourses of motherhood, pregnancy, and abortion are heard and responded to by different women. The individual narratives in this project do contain details of personal experience that disrupt the assumptions of dominant social discourses in the present culture. One of the primary dominant social discourses, the Motherhood Mandate, I have referred to already in the section above discussing commonalities in constructs of motherhood. In all the five narratives of motherhood, there were details of how each woman compared her own mothering to what she felt were general social expectations for how she should mother. Liz described this as a feeling of being held up to a yardstick and how exhausting and demoralizing this sense of scrutiny was for her. Jane, too, made reference to how others judge without knowing what effort is taking place behind the scenes in the attempt to mother well. Maya’s story reflected her struggle between her desire for more children and her sense that she should only build her family in the context of a two-parent household; part of her transformation as a mother came from her realization that she could be fulfilled and happy in something different from the traditional nuclear family. Lilith felt different and displaced from her mothering peers and wished others would be able to understand her struggle better, and Ingrid made reference to her decision to become a mother at an early age in despite the expectations of her family’s culture of origin. In all, these stories show how women choose to become mothers according to the context of their own lives despite the feeling or actual occasions of judgment by the others around them. The dominant social discourse about pregnancy, as I mentioned previously, is that it is uneventfully concluded with the birth of a child. Anything other than that outcome is seen as an aberration, or a problem, by much of mainstream American culture. But the assumptions of the dominant discourse are made without consideration of the contexts of individual lives, and what these five narratives illustrate so well is how much more

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problematic these women’s lives would have been if they had continued rather than terminated their pregnancies. Another complication of the dominant discourse is Jane’s story of infertility followed by unintended pregnancy: Some would assume that anyone who struggled so to get pregnant with a child would welcome any subsequent pregnancies, intended or not. But Jane’s story shows us a more complicated experience, and though she did entertain fears that she was forfeiting her last chance to become pregnant, she ultimately decided that a pregnancy “at the wrong time, with the wrong person, in the wrong situation” was not a boon at all. Readings outside the mainstream culture provide a surprising source of support for this conclusion; for example, a common thread of discussion in online infertility support communities is pregnancy termination after treatment for infertility (e.g., see Ford, 2010). Much of the dominant discourse around abortion centers on issues of culpability. Women are largely seen as at fault for the problem of abortion for various reasons: because birth control is widely available and always effective, so if a woman uses it she will never need an abortion; because a woman should not have sex at all unless she is married, whereupon the assumption is that a child will always be welcome; because if a woman is responsible she will never have an unintended pregnancy, and will always be able to provide for any children she conceives. The five narratives in this project disrupt the assumptions behind the dominant discourse of abortion, with the women themselves denying or comprehending this disruption to varying degrees. For example, most of the women recognized the fallibility of birth control. Several wrestled with the feeling of “fault,” from Liz who felt fully responsible for her unintended pregnancy to Ingrid and Lilith, who accepted that their best efforts sometimes fail. What these women did not feel at fault for was their decision to terminate their pregnancies: All recognized that there were aspects of their lives, outside of their control, that conspired to make having another child an unrealistic proposition. Whether economic, medical, relational, or social, these aspects were acknowledged as real and unyielding factors in their decisions to terminate their pregnancies. Common social discourse about pregnancy and about abortion is couched from a feto-centric perspective, as though the experience of the fetus in question can be and is separate from the experience of the gestating mother, her family, and her world beyond

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her body. But while these women’s narratives of pregnancy and abortion did take into account the welfare of the potential child, their accounting was within the context of the family and life outside the mother. These women’s narratives of mothering—including their experiences of pregnancy and abortion—were constructed from a family-centric rather than feto-centric point of view: They indicate being a good mother means accounting for the welfare of all members of the family. Commonality in constructs of motherhood. The five women who shared their stories came from different stations in life, were at different points in their lives as mothers, and referred to events from 1979 to 2010. Each narrative tells a story about mothering in different times, in different places, and in different circumstances. The stories unfold in different voices and from different points of view. But, taking the collection of narratives as a whole, certain shared elements come to light as well. This would be expected in personal constructs as an example of commonality, or the similarity in constructs between individuals making sense of a comparable experience (Kelly, 1955). One of the most notable of the commonalities is the theme of limits related to mothering, which was represented in various ways in the women’s stories. This theme featured prominently in Ingrid’s narrative, where limits defined both self- and life- imposed boundaries on what could be included in her mothering life. For Liz, the theme of limits was represented by her lack of resources—financial, social, and personal—at different times in her experience as a mother. Maya encountered similar limits in concrete resources, and discovered limits in her ability to function as well: At different times, she found herself unable to care for herself, for her children, and for their home. Jane did not have the limited resources of the other women, but instead had to negotiate limits in relationships in her efforts to be a good mother. At different times, Jane declared herself “done” with her ex-husband, with her boyfriend, and with judgmental members of her community. Finally, Lilith demonstrated her limits as a mother when she described her lack of physical and psychological wherewithal for work, schooling, and the challenges of mothering. For each of the five women, the theme of limits appeared in their accounts of their perceptions of themselves as mothers. Limits shaped the course of how and when, with

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whom and whether they would mother. At times limits appeared as obstacles in their accounts; at other times the women defined their own limits as a means to take control over their mothering. These themes of limits amplify the short answers listed in the Finer et al. (2005) study on reasons given for having an abortion, where 74% of women said they chose to terminate because having a baby would interfere with education, work, or caring for dependents, and 73% responded they couldn’t afford a baby at that time. A related aspect of limits in the effort to be a good mother was the theme of limiting parenting with an unsuitable partner. This theme commonly arose in the women’s accounts of when and how they chose to terminate an unplanned pregnancy: Indeed, a feature of each woman’s narrative was that her unplanned and unwanted pregnancy arose in the context of an unstable relationship. Ingrid made it clear that one of the reasons she chose to terminate was so she would not establish an ongoing bond or relationship with a man she did not want to be part of her family. Jane made a similar decision based on the desire to not cement a relationship with a man whose association with her caused her grief. Liz terminated a pregnancy that would have tied her to her irresponsible ex-husband, and Maya terminated two pregnancies that would have tied her to abusive or absentee partners. While Lilith chose to terminate her pregnancy in part in a bid to stabilize her troubled relationship, her marriage also eventually faltered anyway and she expressed relief that she did not have to try to parent with a partner she was divorcing. These stories reflect common concerns with the women in the Finer et al. (2005) study, with 48% of respondents naming “relationship concerns” as one of the primary reasons they chose to terminate. Another commonality in the women’s constructs of motherhood is related to the “Motherhood Mandate” introduced in the beginning of this work, i.e., the social construction of when, and especially how, women should mother. The Motherhood Mandate most often appeared in these stories in the guise of social judgment as each woman considered how she feels evaluated by the perceived quality of her mothering. Liz made reference to this sense of social judgment by including a yardstick in the display of items representing motherhood and with her flat assessment: “You’re being judged. No ands, ifs, or buts about it.” Jane alluded to this idea, as well, structuring her story of motherhood around the idea of “keeping up appearances:” No matter what her struggles

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are, Jane told us, a mother has to make things look fine to the outside world. “I think of the duck paddling,” she says. “You don’t see anything above water, but the little feet are really going underneath.” Lilith, too, alluded to feeling judged in her account of the “strangeness” she shared with her daughter and how she felt like she didn’t fit in with the other mothers in her community. There is a common theme that develops from the thread of judgment in the Motherhood Mandate: the idea that women should not be having sex for any purposes other than reproduction in the context of marriage. Jane made explicit reference to this in her narrative, saying “...there’s something people don’t know about women: They like sex. Whether they admit to it or not, we really like it.” Part of Jane’s “keeping up appearances” as a good mother meant hiding her sexual relationship—and the pregnancy that came from it—with a man who was not her husband. Liz, too, described tension between her desire to have a sexual life and her feeling that, as a good, “responsible” single mother, she should abstain. Ingrid admitted she wanted to have a sexual relationship with the man who made her pregnant, but that she did not want to parent with him. And Maya described a mix of wanting to enjoy sexual relationships while also wanting to have more children; however, when it seemed to her that her sexual life hindered her ability to be a good mother she curtailed her sexual experiences. Following the theme of guilt and judgment around sex is the theme of teaching responsible sexuality to one’s children. Both Ingrid and Liz mentioned conflicted feelings about sharing their own stories as cautionary tales about young motherhood and yet not wanting their children to feel like they were regretted. To be good mothers, both had to find a way to walk the line between advocating for careful and timely motherhood and making their children feel loved and valued. Constructs in transition. In addition to features of individuality and commonality, personal constructs tend to have aspects in transition, to change over time in order to accommodate experiences that challenge preexisting constructs (Kelly, 1955). All the constructs of motherhood presented in this work contained elements of flexibility or change over time, as women had to make different sense of things at different times in their lives.

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For example, Lilith’s original construct of good motherhood contained the element of managing her distress through psychotropic medication. For some time this measure had helped her maintain her composure, but as she recalled the course of her life and her vision for her future, Lilith recognized that to be the woman and the mother she wanted to be, she would need to rely less heavily on her prescriptions. Jane demonstrated some aspects of transition in her construct of good motherhood, as well. For some time she had maintained a certain put-together, affluent appearance as a means of establishing her identity to the outside world as a competent mother. Over time Jane began to revise her evaluation of the importance of this perception and found different ways to feel confident about her mothering, including letting the apparent happiness of her child reflect on her abilities as a mother. Another aspect that began to change was her evaluation of being alone, which went from being a marker of a very negative experience, and one to be avoided, to a state she willingly chose in order to better focus on her self-care and care of her son. Ingrid’s construct of motherhood changed, by necessity, to incorporate the idea of limits as a positive feature of good mothering. Initially limits were featured in her construct of motherhood as those boundaries imposed on her life and health by her risk for cancer. But in order to fight those limits, Ingrid made decisions about what she wanted to include in her life and what she would need to exclude to allow her vision to come to fruition, essentially creating and enforcing limits of her own. Maya’s construct of motherhood demonstrated flexibility in the aspects of companionship and of messiness. Both of these, at times, had been necessary parts of being a good mother, as Maya valued company and relationships and relished the messiness in her life as proof of its fullness. However, during the course of her mothering she had to shift her evaluation of these qualities from time to time in order to make necessary adjustments in her mothering: choosing to forego certain relationships, for example, and deciding to incorporate more order instead of messiness in her life as a means to better care for her children. By the end of her story, Maya seems to have made an additional transformation by adapting her ideal of companionship so that it is fulfilled by her family rather than by any partner. Having done this, she decides she can be a good

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mother to her existing and future children when she decided to continue a recent pregnancy. Liz’s construct of motherhood, like Maya’s, was transitional in its valuation of having personal support or companionship. At times the support of others, especially her extended family, was necessary to Liz’s ability to parent well. But she was careful not to rely too heavily on this support as she was also convinced a good mother must stand on her own two feet. This points to the idea of pride, another transitional aspect of Liz’s construct of motherhood: Pride drove her to be self-reliant, but when it threatened her family’s welfare because of her lack of resources, pride became an unaffordable luxury. Instead, Liz found different things to be proud about, such as how well her daughters turned out and in Liz’s ability to give back to her community later in life. It is unsurprising that these five women’s constructs of motherhood all contained aspects in transition. These stories show that when women contemplate themselves as mothers their imagination does not rest on one moment in time: Their vision stretches to encompass the entirety of the lives of their children, even as that surpasses the length of their own lives. Their constructs reach into the past to incorporate elements of their experiences as children with their own mothers, and then bend and shift to fit the circumstances of their subsequent lives as mothers. The one aspect that doesn’t change is their pervasive desire to do right by their children, to be good mothers, and they find that they must continually reevaluate how to do this in terms of the understanding they have about what it means to mother well. Though I did not direct them to do so, all the women defined their constructs of motherhood using stories and ideas taken from the span of their lifetimes rather than from a single moment (e.g., giving birth). This tendency illustrates the ongoing and fluid building, testing, and reconfiguring of personal constructs and the futility of attempting to elicit constructs by using only one point in time as a reference. Confining the construct of motherhood to a single instant—say, of deciding to terminate—would have been meaningless in this project, because women don’t make their decisions or define their constructs based on their experience at a single moment in time. But though the nature of women’s constructs did not differ largely from each other, there is a difference in how seamlessly these constructs fit into the fabric of each

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woman’s life: All of these women made their abortion decision based on their constructs of good motherhood, but those women whose narratives recounted abortion decisions in the more distant past (e.g. Liz’s, 30 years before our interview, and Ingrid’s, 7 years before) demonstrated a more layered understanding of what the decision to terminate meant to them. The women whose abortions were further in the past were more able to express sadness about having to terminate a pregnancy, more able to describe the complexity of emotions they felt about that occasion, though their certainty that they had done the right thing did not waver. By contrast, women whose terminations were more recent described relief and resignation more plainly, and did not yet seem to have the space since the time of the termination to explore more fully what the import of that event was on their lives. It is worth noting, too, that none of the constructs of motherhood changed directly in response to the crisis pregnancy and the decision to terminate. Though constructs changed over time, and in some cases incorporated the experience of having an unplanned pregnancy, none of the women found themselves having to change their understanding of what it meant to be a good mother in the moment of deciding to have an abortion. Rather, each woman’s existing construct of motherhood played a primary role in how she made sense of her decision to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. Power and the construct of motherhood. While some of the commonalities in women’s constructs of motherhood can be attributed to similar experiences, some of the individuality may be accounted for by the varying degrees of power women possessed in their experience of mothering. At the start of this project I accepted that a feminist constructivist analysis of how women built personal constructs of motherhood would take into account issues of inequity, privilege, coercion, and oppression. The extent to which a woman either experiences or is free of these issues accounts for her power to construct and enact the role of a good mother. Each narrative in this project featured an interplay of resources and deficits that, together, made up the individual’s reserve of power. This interplay shaped how each woman would reconcile her ideas of how she would like to be a good mother with her ability or limitations to do so. For example, Lilith, Maya, and Liz lacked financial resources, and so lacked the power to provide for their children they way they would

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have liked, or the way they understood more affluent women could. Effectively, their power to create and enact a construct of good motherhood was limited by the deficits in their resources. And though Jane was more economically privileged than the other women, her affluence was tied up in her ability to maintain the appearance of good behavior (e.g., of being a humble single mother who had no personal desires beyond raising her child). Jane’s power to provide for her child in the manner she was accustomed was limited to the extent she could soothe the mores of others: If her family or her estranged husband discovered proof she was having a sexual relationship with another man, her financial support would be threatened. Jane’s social support was already lost when members of her community suspected and disapproved of her relationship, a loss that curtailed her power to bring up her son as an accepted member of that community and restricted her power to have others in the community accept her choices as congruent with being a good mother. None of the women talked of explicit coercion in how they created their constructs of motherhood. However, the experience of being judged and of being held up to a certain social standard—hallmarks of the Motherhood Mandate—were implicit forces that shaped how each woman came to understand she should mother. Women acknowledged these forces, obliquely, with comments such as “I was being the best mother I could be.” When a woman explains or defends her position, she is demonstrating the gap between what she can, or what she wants, to do and what she feels is expected of her. Feminist constructivism and the abortion decision. My secondary focus for this project was to consider the question: What contribution does feminist constructivism make in the exploration of personal constructs of motherhood? The part of my approach informed by constructivism showed how women’s constructs of motherhood were individual but with aspects of commonality, showed elements of transition, and were the critical piece of women’s decision-making when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy. Feminist analysis added to this a consideration of how different environmental forces including economic status, relationship status, and cultural mores affected a woman’s power to construct and enact her idiosyncratic version of good motherhood. The particular approach of feminist constructivism has been instrumental in

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finding, analyzing, and sharing this collection of narratives of motherhood within a personal and political context. Assessment. The narratives collected for this project show that women’s personal constructs of motherhood demonstrate individuality, commonality, and elements of transition. Because they were built from information gathered over a lifetime, women’s constructs of motherhood were complex and made of a collection of related themes and links to other constructs. These five women responded to and refuted dominant social discourses of motherhood, pregnancy, and abortion in their narratives and constructs of motherhood; their responses were determined by the amount of power each possessed to meet, bend, or transcend social constraints. In this work, each woman’s construct of motherhood was strongly represented in her account of how she chose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy; indeed, the motherhood construct played a primary role in how each made sense of her decision. More to the point, each woman’s understanding of how to be a good mother led her to decide, upon an unintended pregnancy, that to be a good mother she must choose not to be a mother that time. Utility of Photo Elicitation as Method Imagery and construct elicitation. Before I began this project I was curious about the utility of eliciting complex constructs through exploring participant-selected images. I had a sense from my preliminary research (e.g., Clark-Ibáñez, 2007; Frohmann, 2005) that this would yield rich material for exploration and discussion; the narratives presented earlier are testament to that. Working with images taps non-verbal structures of representation: Memories, stories, and ideas that might not have been verbally associated with “motherhood” tended to rise to the surface as each woman and I struggled to interpret and make sense of the images she associated with being a mother. Of course, these ideas were then translated into verbal representations to accompany the images. But the women agreed that by starting with representation through imagery they discovered aspects of their identities as mothers that they had not realized were there. Participant comfort with using images. I was also curious how the participants felt about the method, and so part of my follow-up procedure included talking to them about their reactions to the process. I included some of their responses in the narrative analyses; these indicated different degrees of comfort with the process for different

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reasons. But despite the range of inclination—from eagerness to trepidation—all the women who elected to use photos in their self-exploration expressed surprise and delight at the themes and ideas that emerged from the process. Lilith embraced the opportunity to explore her self-identity through photography, a medium she already used frequently in her work as an artist. Liz, on the other hand, was initially cowed by the thought of participating in an artistic pursuit. Once she took the risk, however, Liz discovered she enjoyed exploring her ideas through imagery and in fact staged an intricate production to model her thoughts about motherhood. Jane initially expressed interest in using photos to explore the meaning of motherhood in her life, but ultimately decided including images in her self-presentation was too much of a risk. She wanted to be able to control the perception readers would have of her, and she thought images would be more prone to subjective interpretation than would her verbal explanations. Maya admitted she had a slow start in taking the photos, but when she sat with the task the ideas began to coalesce and she enjoyed the exercise of capturing images. And Ingrid, once she shoehorned the task into her busy day, confessed she was surprised and delighted by how taking photographs froze in time moments that would otherwise have been missed. Reflexivity and photo elicitation. In the interest of reflexivity and an egalitarian process, I decided I would need to share my own story and images of motherhood: both with the women participants, as an example, and in the final work as a reflexive guide to my position in this project. I felt it was important to know firsthand what I was expecting my participants to do: to feel the risk of it, how my friends, therapy clients, bosses, and others would potentially have access to this very personal part of my identity. It felt risky. Part of the risk came from the greater degree of exposure I face, compared to my participants: After all, they used pseudonyms and fictionalized details of their personal lives, whereas I am publishing this under my own name. But the real risk, I felt, was in sharing such a personal and intimate slice of who I am. The other women shared this risk as well, and because their stories contained details of ending pregnancies, they opened themselves up to even more potential criticism and censure. Having felt part of the risk they took, I am now even more grateful for the gift of trust and confidence these women gave me by choosing to participate.

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Assessment. Using photo elicitation as a means to explore women’s constructs of motherhood yielded moving narratives rich in detail. By their own accounts, the women felt that beginning their exploration in a non-verbal medium allowed them some freedom to pursue ideas that didn’t, at first, make sense on a conscious level, but which settled into coherent meaning after reflection and discussion. Most of the women agreed that they would not have come up with these ideas if they had not approached the question (“Who am I as a mother?”) from the unaccustomed direction of expression through images. As a feminist researcher, it was a valid and valuable exercise for me to approach the same question in the same way as did my participants. Doing so allowed me to share my experience with the other women, and through this I was able to build trust with them and also show them how the interview process might work. Doing so also gave me an irreplaceable point of entrée into the experience of the participants as I confronted my own feelings about myself as a mother and about sharing the grittier details of my experience with strangers. Not the least of the benefits of photo elicitation is ending up with compelling images to include in my future public distribution of this work. While the cost of including color images in paper publishing usually prohibits their inclusion, it is neither more expensive nor more difficult to incorporate color photos in an online publication. The added appeal that images give to online narratives is not negligible: One goal of collecting these narratives was to distribute them widely to disrupt the usual discourse about abortion, and to do so readers’ eyes must be attracted and their attention captured. Personal images, accompanying personal narratives, accomplish this handily. Constructs of Motherhood and Potential Reproductive Policy In the beginning of this work I described how the common cultural discourse about motherhood and abortion was reflected in recently proposed and adopted state policies on reproductive issues. These widespread policies—such as the requirement that abortion providers perform and discuss ultrasounds of the pregnant women—reflect the common but misguided notion that women seeking abortions do not understand what it means to be pregnant and would not choose abortion if they knew their pregnancies were destined to produce a child. The personal narratives in this work belie these assumptions,

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and others as well: that women seeking abortion are acting selfishly, without thought for the welfare of children; that women who care about children would rather surrender a child to adoption rather than terminate a pregnancy; that women who choose abortion are doing so thoughtlessly and would likely changer their minds after a day’s deliberation. Much of the aim of this work was to generate narratives that could disturb the complacent assumptions that give rise to restrictive reproductive policies. Indeed, the details of precisely how each woman makes a sensitive, contextualized understanding of what it means to be a good mother, and then how she uses that construct to inform her decision to not mother, make many such policies seem ridiculous in their aims. It is instructive to use women’s narratives of their lives as mothers to examine public policy, but what happens when we do the reverse? If we look at current proposals in reproductive policies, what effects could we imagine they would make on women’s lives? As an exercise in imagination, we can take the narratives of the women in this project and explore the implications of recently proposed policies; to see, if these measures had been in place at the time when these women were seeking abortions, what effects the policies would have had on their lives. Abortion and mental health restrictions. One recent measure points to a new direction in which mental health concerns are being used to justify restrictions on abortion. While researchers in both mental health and in reproductive health areas have debunked the notion that abortion is likely to cause a PTSD-like condition called “Post- Abortion Syndrome” (PAS; Boonstra, 2008; Major, Appelbaum, Beckman, Dutton, Russo, & West, 2009), lawmakers seeking to restrict abortion have returned to the idea that women should be protected from the putative mental health risks of having an abortion. In Nebraska there is now a measure that requires a mental health assessment prior to abortion. The text of Nebraska Legislative Bill 594 reads: At least one hour prior to the performance of an abortion, a physician, psychiatrist, psychologist, mental health practitioner, physician assistant, registered nurse, or social worker licensed under the Uniform Credentialing Act has: … (b) Evaluated the pregnant woman to identify the presence of any risk factors associated with abortion; (c) Informed the pregnant woman and the

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physician who is to perform the abortion of the results of the evaluation in writing. This is despite the evidence there are no “identified risks.” Critics note that the measure requires abortion counselors, after having made their mental health assessment, to inform women of any research showing that some groups of women (based on their “physical, psychological, demographic or situational” characteristics) may be at higher risk of complications associated with having had an abortion. The bill does not specify what quality of research must be used, and in the absence of reputable evidence it is reasonable to assume that discredited information about PAS may nonetheless be presented as “identified risks.” The bill went into effect October 2010. What are the ramifications of measures like this one? Who are the women “at risk,” and what are their characteristics, according to the lawmakers in Nebraska? They do not say, but leave this distinction in the hands of providers. But consider how this might have played out for the women in this project, had this bill been enacted in Ohio before their crisis pregnancies. What would this have meant for Lilith, who had a long and complicated mental health history? Would she have had the characteristics of “risk,” and would she be counseled not to have an abortion? Would the next step in the logic of such policy be to deny her access to abortion, on the grounds her mental health must be protected? What would this mean for Jane, who was seeing a therapist about the ending of her marriage? What would this have meant for Maya, who was working hard to recover from the trauma of domestic violence, and who was seeing a therapist, too? At this time the measure does not keep women with mental health “risks” from obtaining abortions, but it is not inconceivable that lawmakers who drafted this bill would see this as a logical next step; the stories in this project shed light on how obtrusive and paternalistic such provisions for mental health would be. Spousal notification. Another trend is to require the notification, and sometimes the consent, of a woman’s spouse or partner before allowing her to have an abortion. Such laws are unconstitutional and so are currently unenforceable, yet eight states have such laws on their books: Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina all have existing laws that require a woman to either gain the written consent from or give notice to her spouse prior to

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receiving an abortion (NARAL, 2010a). Measures such as these aren’t just legacies of a more restrictive past: In 2009, Ohio introduced a new spousal-consent bill that would have required a woman seeking an abortion to gain the consent of the man involved in the pregnancy. She would be required to pay for a paternity test if she did not know the identity of the father, and if she attempted to do an end-run around the requirement of written consent by having a man other than the one involved in the pregnancy sign the consent form she would be guilty of first-degree misdemeanor “abortion fraud” (NARAL, 2010a). Earlier I confessed I did not understand how a “right to privacy” would be a central argument for the ongoing legality of abortion. But spousal notification laws would be intrusive enough to threaten a woman’s privacy in matters beyond what she chooses to do with an unplanned pregnancy, extending into realms of her relationships, her family, and her sex life. If this bill had passed in Ohio, what would it have meant for Jane, whose estranged spouse was not the father of her unplanned pregnancy? Would Jane have been required to prove paternity, and would that have been possible? If spousal notification were a requirement, what would it have meant for Liz who had not contact with her ex- husband, or for Maya, whose partner abandoned her? What would it have meant for Maya to have to notify her other partner, the man who put her in the hospital? Would notifying an abusive partner have put her at risk for more violence? These questions are only conjecture, but it does not take a stretch of the imagination to understand the additional oppressive hardship such laws, if actionable, would put upon many women. Federal health care reform. Federal health care reform, while it contains the potential for making health care more accessible for millions of Americans, also has the potential to make abortion more difficult to obtain for many low-income women who would otherwise benefit from this coverage. Many states have introduced and passed legislation to prohibit abortion coverage in any health plan that is subsidized by or receives tax credits from the federal government. (Guttmacher Institute, 2010b). This is an extension of the effects of the Hyde Amendment of 1976, which prohibited women receiving federal health care from using those funds to have abortions. Because one aim of health care reform is to provide federal funding for all Americans’ health care, this could have the effect of restricting any health plan from covering abortion.

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In 2004, 73% of women in a national survey said they were seeking an abortion because they could not afford a[nother] child at that time, with 23% of all respondents giving this as their most important reason for seeking an abortion (Finer et al., 2004). In this project Liz, Maya, and Lilith spoke extensively about their lack of financial resources for another child, and Ingrid and Jane also described having financial concerns at different points in their mothering. When women who seek abortion because of financial hardship are required to pay out of pocket for that medical service, it is difficult not to see this as a punitive measure: Poor women seem to be punished financially for deciding to terminate pregnancies they cannot afford. In the quandary of facing raising another child without the resources to do so versus paying for an expensive surgical procedure, it would seem a poor woman is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. Adding to the impression of punitive legislation is the increase in restrictions on and attempts to prohibit the relatively less expensive option of medical abortion (mifepristone, also known as RU 486 and by the trade name Mifeprex®; NARAL 2010c). What effect would these current restrictions have on the women featured here? Though, if enacted, currently proposed restrictions in health care reform would make abortion restrictions more uniform across the country, they would not represent a great change from what the women in this project experienced. At the time each decided to terminate her pregnancy only Maya was using Medicaid health care, but she was not the only woman who had to pay most if not all of the expenses out of her own pocket. Their situations were already constrained at the time of their unwanted pregnancies; the difficulties their stories highlight might give an indication of what it could be like for other women who need to obtain an abortion under current health care reform laws. When I sat behind the reception desk at Planned Parenthood, a good portion of every phone call I heard workers take was about payment options for low-income women; one employee explained to me that private grants provide financial aid for some women, but that there is not enough private support to provide help for all the women who are experiencing financial hardship. Current increases in insurance coverage for abortion would not have affected the women featured in this project very much, it seems, beyond the hardship they were already negotiating. But our glimpse into their private lives can help us understand what hardship is like and how it leads to deciding not to have another

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child, and how public policies not informed by personal experience might have unintended effects of harm on women and their families. Limitations of This Project Participant demographics. I did not intend this project as a means to generalize about the experiences of all women who receive abortions, and I did not seek to recruit a representative sample of women who receive abortions. I was pleased that the final group of participants was made up of women from a range in age, socioeconomic status, and stage in life. However, all of the women but one (who preferred not to say) identified as European-American, heterosexual, and from a Judeo-Christian background. All identified as able-bodied, and none were raising children with physical or medical disabilities. Initially I received preliminary interest in participating from two African-American women, but none followed through with the project. The number of ethnic or racial minority women, especially, who showed even initial interest in participating was not representative of the population of women seeking services at Planned Parenthood; why did these women volunteer at a much lower rate than their European-American counterparts? The potential participants did not see or meet me or even learn my name before they heard about the study, so I do not think my own race was a factor in whether a woman would show preliminary interest in participating. The counseling staff who approached potential volunteers were Latina, African-American, and European- American; all of them had success in finding me potential participants, though most of those participants were European-American. What I missed, in the lost opportunity to speak with diverse women—be it diversity of ethnic group, or religion, or ability status—was the chance to talk about what “dominant” or “mainstream” discourses in the majority culture are and their effect on those who identify as outside that culture. It is likely that women outside any majority group must respond both to the dominant discourses of their own cultures as well as those from outside. How do mothers make sense of different claims about what it means to be a good mother? And what might these differences be? Essentialist discourse. One of the dominant discourses I identified in the beginning of this work was the essentialist conflation of womanhood with motherhood. I

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wondered, initially, how narratives of motherhood and choosing abortion might shed light on how someone would grapple with the idea that motherhood is an essential and inseparable part of being a woman. Instead, I found this theme to be largely absent or unacknowledged in these women’s constructs of motherhood. It is possible that the theme of essentialism was absent or distantly peripheral because these were stories of women who had already decided to become mothers prior to the pregnancies they decided to terminate. To get at the conflict of identity as a mother and identity as a woman, it might be more fruitful to interview women seeking abortion who do not already have children: With those women, the difference in identities might be more salient. Personal biases. Earlier in this work I mentioned how it would be necessary for me to recognize my own state of privilege and how it might affect my reception of women’s stories. Some privilege I had anticipated, such as my level of education, my financial security, and my membership in the majority European-American culture. Some of my privilege I became more aware of during the course of my association with the five women: having more-or-less sound mental health, my relative ease with fertility and pregnancy, and the security of my marriage. All these aspects of privilege colored how I heard and responded to the women’s stories, and while I worked to reflexively examine my position and how that affected my interpretation, there are undoubtedly aspects of my bias to which I remain blind. For example, one aspect I became aware of was a sort of confirmation bias: In looking for instances of oppression in women’s narratives of motherhood, I found myself paying greater attention to hardship in the stories of underprivileged women, so much that at first I failed to note their comfort and successes in life. A related aspect of confirmation bias was a tendency to not see the struggles of more affluent women: I had to get past my initial feelings about Jane’s economic privilege to recognize how detrimental the lack of a supportive relationship was to her experience of mothering. These biases I was able to recognize and attempted to redress; still, any reader with an outside perspective will likely identify more questions about the interpretation of this work.

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Future Directions Implications for political change. One of my orienting questions at the start of this work was: What would women’s stories of motherhood and abortion tell us about meaningful change in reproductive rights activism? It is clear from these women’s stories that having continuing access to legal and safe abortion will always be an essential part of reproductive rights activism. But embedded in the women’s narratives were details that would indicate women’s choices to have a child or not were also constrained by forces outside her control: Real reproductive freedom would not be so constrained. Liz put it baldly: If she could have afforded another child, she would have kept her pregnancy. But, as she said, despite her full-time job with benefits and additional assistance from social services, she could barely make ends meet for her existing family. Liz’s story tells us that a meaningful goal for reproductive rights activism continues to be fighting for equal (better) pay for women. Though President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on January 29, 2009, women in the U.S. still earn only 77% of what men earn. Women of color fare worse, with African American women earning 67.5% of what all men earn, Latinas earning 58%, and Asian women earning 90% (National Committee on Pay Equity, 2010). Worldwide, the U.S. ranks 19th in equal pay for women (World Economic Forum, 2010). Benefits for working parents that included subsidized day care would also go far in promoting financial wellbeing for working families and thus less constrained reproductive choice. When Maya was abandoned by her partner and her children’s father, she had to quit her job because she could not afford to have someone watch her son while she was at work. What would it have meant for her to have been able to continue working? To continue going to school? Some universities, like Lilith’s, have affordable day care programs for the children of students: If such programs were widespread, fewer women and men would have to make the choice between working or schooling and parenting, if they wanted. Single mothers know firsthand something that many others do not acknowledge: Having a legal right to child support from the partner in the pregnancy does not mean that she will receive that support in raising her child. Liz’s and Maya’s narratives of absent partners illustrate the reality of many single mothers in America today: Even when

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legally granted child support, most women do not receive it, or do not receive enough of it. The U.S. census of 2009 gives data on the rate of child support payments, and what we learn from them is that of 7.8 million single parents awarded child support only the minority, 46.8%, received all of that support. Some (29.5%) single parents received some of the due support, and the rest, 23.7%, received none of the child support money (Grall, 2007). These figures are for only those parents who have sued for and won child support, but there are many more mothers who do not or cannot pursue financial support from the partner in her pregnancy. Real reproductive freedom, it would seem, would also mean that women would not have to base their reproductive choices on the reliability of the father’s support. This could mean increasing other social support for pregnancy and childrearing, taking steps to ensure men support the children they father, or a combination of both. Elements in several of the narratives indicate that social attitudes about women and parenting remain problematic features of women’s reproductive experiences. Jane explained in her story that a large part of her reason to terminate her pregnancy was to deflect criticism from those who judged her extramarital affair: “There’s something people don’t know about women,” she explained, “They like sex.” Yet after her affair, Jane’s experience was that she and her child—but not the children of the man she had an affair with, or the man himself—were shunned by their community. In part, though she wondered if she were squandering her chance to have another child, Jane chose to terminate in order to squelch further gossip and to protect her son from its bite. Researchers studying gender and stereotypes have already amassed overwhelming data about how attitudes and expectations of gendered behavior (e.g., poor performance on a math exam, see Kiefer & Sekaquaptewa, 2007) can and will shape women’s behavior: Future research could address social constructs of motherhood as they relate to attitudes about female sexuality to get deeper into this question of how women reconcile motherhood and sexuality. For advocates of mothering and mothering issues, knowing more about discourses of sexuality versus domesticity would illuminate potential areas of oppression for redress in political and socio-cultural arenas. Women’s constructs of “good mothering” suggest concrete goals for meaningful political change around reproductive issues, as described above. Despite this, federal and

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state funding has become increasingly devoted to so-called “alternatives-to-abortion” services, e.g., adoption services and limited pregnancy assistance. Most of this limited assistance is available only for women 200% or more below poverty level and does not provide assistance beyond the child’s first year. More disturbingly, much of the “alternatives-to-abortion” funding is allocated to agencies calling themselves “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs). CPCs are not required to be regulated or licensed like medical clinics and do not maintain privacy protection for their clients. They are the most active promulgators of fiction about abortion, telling prospective mothers that abortion causes breast cancer and infertility (NARAL, 2010b, Guttmacher Institute, 2010c). But funding continues to be denied for family planning services and the social services that would support larger families and children older than one year of age (Guttmacher Institute, 2010c). None of the women featured in this study, when confronted with a crisis pregnancy, considered putting the child up for adoption to be a viable choice. Their choices, as informed by their constructs of good mothering, were keeping the child or terminating the pregnancy. Their narratives of motherhood demonstrate the implausibility of many mothers choosing to surrender a child to adoption instead of terminate. If the majority of women seeking abortions feel similarly, what is the utility of continuing to press for adoption services instead of abortion services, or instead of increased social assistance for families? What would it take for public policy to reflect and support the real, complex needs and desires of women who want to be good mothers? Directions in research and publication. From the outset, I wanted to work to disrupt the dominant social discourses about motherhood, pregnancy, and abortion. The first step toward this goal was to find the stories that contain disruptive potential, as I have done with this project. The next steps involve sharing the narratives with a wider audience, as I proposed in my introductory remarks, and seeking additional voices to add to the disruptive chorus. With this work, a provocative next step would be to find an accessible social outlet for sharing these results. The narratives and images furnished by this research can easily be shared online: The collection can stand by itself as a webpage, and links to it can be distributed through social media such as Facebook and electronic mail. Including a

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section for online readers’ comments and ideas could provide a forum for online discussion, agreement, disagreement, and reconciliation; in short, alternative discourse. But this is only one thread of alternative discourse. Future academic research and public discussion of results needs to find, and take into account, other voices. One flaw in this project is the lack of diverse women’s voices and their stories of motherhood. I suggest future feminist researchers seek specifically to recruit multicultural participants in the effort, as I described above, to further explore how the dominant discourses of the majority culture are heard by minority women, and what the dominant discourses of their own cultures are. Seeking these diverse voices is essential in order to not make assumptions about the meanings of “mainstream” discourses, multicultural discourses, and the presence or absence of difference within and between them. As I suggested in the introduction, the voices of women struggling with or having a history of infertility are also indispensible in our attempts to understand how women create constructs of motherhood and how these constructs direct their lives. Their stories reflect on reproductive policy, as well, as treatment for infertility is routinely un- or under-funded in medical insurance and funding for research. What mores are these, that say a pregnancy is too precious to terminate when it is unwanted, yet too dear to support when it is yearned for? The voices of infertile women can complicate and enrich the alternative discourse begun here even as they trouble the dominant discourse about pregnancy, abortion, and the “essentialism” of motherhood. A significant addition to research on women’s constructs of motherhood and abortion would be to review the stories of women who chose to raise children who are not “able-bodied” in the mainstream sense. Because the technology of reproduction is moving more and more toward identifying genetic and physical “problems,” the testimony of women who are raising children despite predictions of hardship would be crucial to determining how women hear and respond to the ableist discourse as it intersects with pregnancy and motherhood. These stories, too, would be crucial to understanding what kinds of social structures of support would be necessary to advance true reproductive freedom. Finally, seeking the stories of women without children, both those who seek abortion after unwanted pregnancy and those who have never been pregnant, would add

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layers to our understanding of how constructs of motherhood are created and what role, if any, they play in women’s lives. These stories, along with the others, could do much to disturb the casual assumptions in the dominant discourse and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the personal and social construction of motherhood. Concluding comments. When I presented an early version of this project at a conference, an audience member commented that my proposals for future directions in research and advocacy resembled the anti-abortion arguments by the so-called “pro-life” feminists, who say that abortion should be illegal but who also abhor the oppressive conditions that contribute to women choosing it. I sympathize with her concern, but at the conclusion of this project I recognize a different problem which, I hope, this work can begin to address. It seems that despite the implications here of what would be meaningful political goals for reproductive freedom and for reducing the need for abortion, activists on both the pro- and anti-choice sides of the debate continue to keep their aims limited to narrow agendas: Outlaw abortion. Keep abortion legal. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to reduce the stories in this work to the sort of bare outline that could be meaningfully concluded by such bumper-sticker taglines. It is hard to imagine that these five narratives are the only examples of the complex and personal decision women make about how and when to build their families. What would it take for public policy to more faithfully reflect the complex and contextual needs of women and their families? While I agree that abortion should continue to remain legal no matter what social ills are redressed, I worry that some pro-choice activists have held on so tightly to the necessity of legal abortion that they neglect the socio-political, economic context abortion comes from. The stories in this project illustrate that, for these women at least, the legality of abortion was the least of their concerns when they debated whether or not they could keep the child they conceived. Feminist activists must continue to attend to context and direct their action accordingly. And yet, no matter what social services are created for the support of women and their families, no matter what attitudes change about women’s sexual activity, there will always be other reasons women will need to not be pregnant. Lilith’s treatment for her psychological distress speaks to that, as do the stories of all women who seek to limit or

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end relationships with the men who got them pregnant. Even in these five stories there were a multitude of details that spoke to the impossibility, for each woman, of continuing that pregnancy at that point in time. Feminist activists must always remember that, outside of perfect contraception, perfect judgment, and perfect foresight, there will never be a time when abortion will not be needed as an option for pregnant women. Anti-choice activists could do much to achieve part of their aim—reducing the number of abortions—if they attended to the need for abortions. What would it mean if they understood that women were choosing to terminate pregnancies, not because of a lack of thought about what motherhood meant at all, but in order to be the best mothers they could be? What would it mean if they understood that, for many mothers who dearly love their children, surrendering them to adoption would be worse than choosing abortion? What would it take to redirect the zeal, to channel the fervor, of both pro- and anti-choice activists so that both groups work to help women be the best mothers they can be? The first step must always be consciousness-raising, so in that spirit I submit this work. Here are five voices—few but powerful—who speak to the need to better understand how women use the rich context of their lives to make sense of the roles they play in it. These five voices speak to how, at any moment, women will draw on their life experience to decide how to be the best mothers they can be. I found these women strong, thoughtful, caring, fallible, humorous, and kind: I am honored to have been let into their lives and grateful for the opportunity to take their stories out into the world.

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Appendix A

Mothers and Abortion  Hello, my name is Siri. I am a pro-choice activist, a graduate student of clinical psychology, and a mom. Recently I have become interested in combining my involvement in reproductive rights with my research in clinical psychology. I am here today looking for women who might be interested in participating in a study about the experiences of mothers who have chosen to have an abortion.

I would like to listen to the stories of mothers who have had to make this choice. I am hoping to gain a greater understanding of how feelings about being a mother, or beliefs about what it means to be a good mother, might have played a role in the decision to have an abortion.

If you think you might be interested in learning more about this research project I would be happy to talk to you more. Please let your staff counselor know if you would like to speak with me. She will help you set up a meeting with me today, or you may use the phone number/email address below to contact me at your own convenience.

Whether you decide to participate in this study or not will have no effect on your receiving services here at Planned Parenthood.

All information is kept confidential.

Thank you for your interest, and I hope to meet you soon!

Contact: Siri Hoogen (513) 461-9727 [email protected]

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Appendix B INFORMED CONSENT FOR PARTICIPANTS STUDY TITLE: Mothers and Abortion (working title)

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Siri R. Hoogen, M.A. FACULTY ADVISORS: Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D., and Larry Leitner, Ph.D.

Description of Research

This pro-choice research study focuses on the experiences of mothers who have chosen to have an abortion. The majority of women who have abortions in the United States already have children, but too often their perspective on abortion has not been heard. The purpose of this study is to examine how feelings about being a mother, or beliefs about what it means to be a good mother, might have played a role in the decision to have an abortion.

You are asked to be in this research study because you are a mother age 18 or older who has chosen to have an abortion. Your participation in this study is strictly voluntary and does not affect the services you will receive from Planned Parenthood now or at any time in the future.

Research Process

If you choose to participate, you will meet with me (Siri Hoogen) for 2 to 3 private, confidential one-on-one interviews of 60 to 90 minutes each. These interviews will be held at a time and place convenient to you. If you give permission, the interviews will be audio recorded. I will ask you questions about what being a mother means to you and how (if at all) being a mother played a part in your decision to have an abortion. Before I publish any results from this study, I will show you my work with your interview material for you to review and to make any corrections or additions you would like to make.

One additional option for participating is that you may, if you wish, bring personal photographs to the interview as a way to talk about and show what motherhood means to you personally. The various ways you can participate in this project are outlined below:

Option 1: You may choose to meet for interviews without the use of photos.

Option 2: You may choose to meet for interviews with the use of photos.

In addition, if you agree, material from your interviews may be used in a number of research presentations including: publication in my doctoral dissertation, presentation at a professional psychological conference, publication in academic journals, and publication in online resources. I will ask for your specific permission for each type of research

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publication and presentation (see Consent for Recording and Quoting Interviews and the Consent for Use of Images).

You will be asked to give specific permission for types of publication and the use of quotes and photos in the following Consent for Recording and Quoting Interviews and the Consent for Use of Images.

Respect for Participants’ Rights and Well-being

Participation is strictly voluntary and you may decline to participate in any interview at any time during this study. There will be no penalty for discontinuing participation.

The services you receive at Planned Parenthood will not be affected in any way if you decide to withdraw from this project.

Talking about personal experiences may be upsetting for some people. If you experience distress, you are encouraged to contact any of the following free or low-cost resources:

• Exhale Hotline (nationwide free phone hotline for confidential, nonjudgmental post-abortion counseling): 1-866-4-EXHALE (1-866-439-4253) • Community Counseling and Crisis Center (24-hour, free crisis hotline, referrals for services in Butler County, and low-cost counseling): 513-523-4146 • Hamilton County crisis hotline (24-hour free crisis hotline and referrals for services in Hamilton County): 513-281-CARE (281-2273) • Miami University Psychology Clinic (low-cost psychotherapy in the clinical psychology graduate student training clinic): 513-529-2423

Your confidentiality will be protected. I am the only person who will have access to your name and contact information. All material from your interviews, including digital audio recordings, photos, and transcripts will be filed under a false name (a pseudonym). Audio recordings and photographs will be kept in a locked cabinet for the duration of this study, after which they will be destroyed.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America has reserved the right for members of their Research Department and/or their Review Board to review the final results of this project before publication.

My project is intended as final research for a Ph.D. dissertation in Clinical Psychology. I am working under the supervision of Dr. Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D. ([email protected]) and Dr. Larry Leitner, Ph.D. ([email protected]). Any questions or concerns you may have regarding this project may be directed to me at 513-461-9727 or at [email protected]. You are also welcome to contact my faculty advisors, Ann Fuehrer at 513-529-6827 or Larry Leitner at 513-529-2410.

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If you have any questions regarding your rights as a research participant, contact the Miami University Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship at 513-529- 3600.

Signature of Consent

I have read the above statements and I agree to participate in the following option below. I understand I may change how much I participate or may withdraw from this project at any time (until the publication of this research), and that such changes or withdrawal will not result in any penalty to me:

I consent to Option 1. I consent to meet for interviews about my experiences as a mother and what motherhood means to me without the use of photos.

______Signature of participant Date

OR

I consent to Option 2. I consent to meet for interviews about my experiences as a mother and what motherhood means to me with the use of photos.

______Signature of participant Date

In addition, I have received my own copy of this consent form to keep:

______Signature of participant Date

______Acknowledgement by primary researcher Siri Hoogen Date

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Appendix C

CONSENT FOR RECORDING INTERVIEWS

STUDY TITLE: Mothers and Abortion (working title)

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Siri R. Hoogen, M.A. FACULTY ADVISORS: Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D., and Larry Leitner, Ph.D.

Recording Interviews

There are two options for the researcher (Siri Hoogen) to record information from the interviews—manually with pen and paper or with a digital audio recorder. Please sign your name on the line beneath the option you prefer.

Option A: Manually (with pen and paper). I consent to the content of my responses being written down for use in this project:

______Signature of participant Date

OR

Option B: Digitally (via digital voice recorder). I consent to the recording of my responses for the purpose of transcription for use in this project:

______Signature of participant Date

In addition, I have received my own copy of this consent form to keep:

______Signature of participant Date

______Acknowledgement by primary researcher Siri Hoogen Date

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Appendix D CONSENT FOR USE OF IMAGES

STUDY TITLE: Mothers and Abortion (working title)

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Siri R. Hoogen, M.A. FACULTY ADVISORS: Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D., and Larry Leitner, Ph.D.

Photo Publication

I understand that the photos I bring to the interview(s) are mostly for use as visual aids in our conversation. However, some photos may be included in future publications or presentations of this research.

Photos of people, which might useful as conversational pieces in an interview setting, may not be appropriate for publication. While I may bring the following kinds of photos to the interview, I understand that in order to preserve confidentiality and anonymity they will not be used in their original form in any research presentation.

My signature(s) below indicate my understanding of and permission for the use of photos in academic, professional, and/or online publications of this research. • I am free to withdraw this consent at any time for any particular photo or for the entire set of photos. • There is no penalty for withdrawing my consent.

I give consent for the photos I bring to the interviews to be used in presentations of this research in an academic and/or professional setting (including PowerPoint presentations at professional conferences, articles in professional journals, or book chapters). I understand that the researcher (Siri Hoogen) will not publish photos of clearly identifiable people so as to preserve anonymity and confidentiality. This may involve the researcher (Siri Hoogen) digitally editing the photos so that no persons are identifiable in the photos.

______Signature of participant Date

In addition,

I understand that the primary investigator will maintain copyright of all photos as they appear in published form (print and/or online):

______Signature of participant Date

I have received a copy of this consent form: ______Signature of participant Date

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Appendix E CONSENT FOR QUOTING INTERVIEWS in Writing and/or in Audio Recording

STUDY TITLE: Mothers and Abortion (working title)

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Siri R. Hoogen, M.A. FACULTY ADVISORS: Ann Fuehrer, Ph.D., and Larry Leitner, Ph.D.

Quoting Interviews in Written, Print-Based Publications and Presentations

Please sign below if you give the researcher (Siri Hoogen) permission to use anonymous quotes from your interview in written, print-based (not online) publications based on this research. • I am free to withdraw this consent at any time for any particular interview or for the entire set of interviews. • There is no penalty for withdrawing my consent.

I give my permission for the researcher to quote from the transcripts in written reports of this research (including papers presented at professional conferences, articles in professional journals, or book chapters):

______Signature of participant Date

Quoting Interviews in Online Publication

Please sign below if you give the researcher (Siri Hoogen) permission to use written and/or audio quotes from your interview in online publications on the Internet (such as in an online journal, as clips posted to pro-choice websites, etc.).

I give my permission for the researcher to use written and/or audio quotes from my interview in online publication. I understand that: • If audio quotes are used, it may be possible for people who know me to identify me by my voice. • In online publications, it is also possible that people may illegally copy my audio or written quotes for their own unauthorized use. • I am free to withdraw this consent at any time for any particular interview or for the entire set of interviews. • There is no penalty for withdrawing my consent.

I recognize these risks and I give permission for written quotes to be used in online presentations of this research:

______Signature of participant Date

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Quoting Interviews in Online Publication, continued

I recognize these risks and I give permission for audio quotes to be used in online presentations of this research:

______Signature of participant Date

I have received a copy of this consent form:

______Signature of participant Date

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Appendix F Interview Questions about Motherhood and Abortion

Guiding Ideas for Photo Project: 1. What images reflect who I am as a mother at this point in my life? 2. What images reflect how I believe others see me as a mother at this point in my life?

Potential Topics for Face-to-Face Dialogues: 1. Before you had children, how did you imagine you would like to be a mother? 2. How has being a mother measured up to your ideas of what it would be like? 3. How did you become a mother? 4. How, or have, your ideas about “good” mothering changed since you had a child/children? 5. What was going on in your life when you became unintentionally pregnant, or decided you didn’t want to/couldn’t be pregnant? 6. How did you make the decision to end your unwanted pregnancy? 7. How has ending that pregnancy helped you do what you need to do to be a good mom? 8. Do you think your ideas of what a good mother is are different from those in your family, friends, community? 9. Would you have, or did you, consider surrendering your child to adoption rather than choosing abortion? 10. Who do you feel understands you about how you are acting as a good mother? 11. Who do you feel doesn’t or wouldn’t understand your decision?

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