Inspired by The Great Cosmic Mother, Chapter: “The Machine”

In The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor speak of “The Machine” — the patriarchal system that devours what is alive and replaces it with control. It’s not just factories and weapons they’re talking about. It’s a mindset. The Machine colonizes everything: land, bodies, even the meaning of life and death.

When you look at the abortion debate through this lens, you realize something unsettling: both the “pro-life” and “pro-choice” camps often speak the language of the Machine. One moralizes and shames; the other legalizes and abstracts. Both flatten the deep, messy, spiritual reality of what it means to choose — or to end — a pregnancy.

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The False Binary

The binary itself is a product of industrial thinking.

It divides. It simplifies. It turns the complexity of human experience into a checkbox.

A person sitting in their bathroom, holding abortion pills, whispering to their grandmother’s spirit for strength — that’s not “pro-choice.”

A mother lighting a candle for the soul of a pregnancy she could not continue — that’s not “pro-life.”

Those are spiritual acts.

They exist outside the logic of campaigns and slogans.

The truth is, neither side owns spirituality. Both try to weaponize it: the Right with divine punishment, the Left with sterile secularism. But the real sacredness lives in the gray spaces — in the personal, the embodied, the undefinable.

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Reclaiming the Sacred

Spirituality doesn’t require a priest or a policy.

It begins with attention — with being fully present in what is happening.

A woman in Ghana brewing neem and ginger tea while she waits for her cramps to start, praying quietly for courage.

A queer person in Mexico City drawing a bath, speaking to the spirit of the pregnancy, and thanking it for coming through.

A doula in South Africa placing her hands over someone’s womb, saying, “You are still whole.”

These are not scenes of despair. They’re rituals of autonomy — each one a refusal to let the Machine dictate what is holy.

When people reclaim abortion as a sacred process — one that acknowledges both grief and relief — they are dismantling centuries of religious and medical colonization in one act of embodied truth.

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The Cosmic Lineage

Long before medicine was industrialized, before states made laws about wombs, women and midwives were the keepers of sacred technology.

They brewed herbs, sang over miscarriages, buried the tissue under moonlight. These weren’t primitive superstitions; they were complex spiritual and ecological systems that honored the cycle of creation and return.

The Great Cosmic Mother tells us that when patriarchal religion rose, those women were burned and branded as witches. Their sacred knowledge became “sin.” The Machine was born.

And yet, the lineage survived — in whispers, recipes, dreams. Every self-guided abortion, every shared story, is a reactivation of that matriarchal current. It’s a form of spiritual technology that no church or government can regulate.

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The New Myth

We are not pro-life or pro-choice.

We are pro-truth.

We refuse to be spoken for — by politicians, priests, or even well-meaning NGOs that reduce our lives to data points.

We are building a new myth — one that doesn’t separate the spiritual from the political, or the body from the sacred.

In this myth, abortion is not a wound to be hidden but a rite to be witnessed. It can be grief, it can be gratitude, it can be both.

It can be the moment someone decides to claim full authorship of their own life.

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Beyond the Machine

The Machine thrives on silence. It wants us to be afraid of naming our experiences as sacred because that’s how control works. But when we tell our stories — in whispers, in art, in community — we short-circuit its power.

At Self-Guided Abortion, we believe every person holds the right to make meaning of their own reproductive experiences. Whether you find comfort in prayer, science, ancestral ritual, or none of the above — your spirituality is yours to define.

There is no hierarchy of holiness here.

There is only the sacred act of being real.

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Self-Guided Abortion is a space for truth-telling and reclamation.

Share your story. Light your candle. Reclaim your rhythm.

The Machine has no soul — but you do.