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Sometimes the “why” is clear in the moment, while other times it can take years to unfold.
There is something powerful in taking the story of our own lives, a never ending quest to understand ourselves and why certain things happen to us–and other things do not happen.
Abortion is truly an initiation into the underworld of the feminine. It’s a secret held deeply in many people, not shared (nor visible) in the way that births are. The emotions that you are feeling now, and feel throughout the abortion process are ancient. So many women have felt it before, in the complex aspects of relating, not feeling ready to be a parent, not feeling supported by partners, not feeling like you have what it takes to do it on your own. In some cases, more extreme, and you fear bodily harm for yourself or the future child. This abortion has connected you to all of the stories and emotions of women quietly having abortions since the beginning of time.
If you notice that you feel angry at the hoops you have had to jump through to get your abortion and the difficulty in accessing pills, you are not alone. There is no other health service that is legally monitored like abortion globally. The difficulty you have faced in accessing your abortion pills is intentional on the part of anti-choice movements worldwide. Only those of us angry enough at this injustice will change the world for women accessing abortion for years to come.
As you work into your abortion healing process, it sometimes helps to feel all of those other women who came before us, who were feeling so many similar things in such different contexts. These ancient feelings we have are so deeply human. Pregnancy, sex and reproduction are at the core of what actually makes us human. To understand abortion, is to understand the shadow of birth, and to understand this shadow initiates you into the duality that is the feminine condition.
Regardless if you are preparing for your abortion, or had an abortion many years prior, you can always work into any unresolved feelings you may encounter.
It’s most important that whatever you do to make meaning of your abortion makes sense, and resonates ultimately with you.
Here are some ideas of things that have been powerful for others:
This experience was chosen for us, and it is an invitation for transformation. What parts of your life are you not living totally and fully? What do you hope to achieve with your creative energy since you are not going to use it in growing a baby? What will you do with your new lease on life?
All abortions hold this promise, but self-managed abortions, where you are taking the pills and handling the process on your own is a deeply spiritual and potentially empowering process. The container created for your abortion and working into these spaces of life and death can be conducted as a ceremony. The invitation in this course is to go deeply into yourself, into the pregnancy, and into spirit to expel the pregnancy and rebuild yourself all at the same time.
Blood has been considered a highly spiritual property for millennia. The reason that menstruation is taboo in so many cultures is the ways in which the feminine principle of creation is weaved into this special blood. Some may say that the patriarchy is rather afraid of this power, and so menstruation has been driven underground, something to be ashamed of, something to be hidden. Blood-letting rites exist across cultures in which skin is cut to release blood as a sacrifice and offering to God or to the spirits. We see a similar manifestation in Catholicism with the drinking of the wine symbolic of the “blood of Christ”. In this way, as you release the blood of your pregnancy back to the Earth, I hope you can see it as a sacrifice to Creator, in gratitude for the gift, but also in reverence of the miracle of the process of reproduction, and your recognition that now is not the right time.
Energy cannot be destroyed, it only changes forms. It can only be transformed, alchemized, and repurposed. The energy of a baby may choose to go to another pregnancy to be birthed into the world, or it will wait for you to be ready and come back to you. Traditional African religions believe that the spirits of miscarriages and abortions hang around the mother until they can be born, or until they can be released. It is up to you to really feel into what resonates with you and your belief systems, and how you sense or feel the spirit of the pregnancy.
Some pregnancies do not yet have a soul or consciousness, and abortion or miscarriage will take place with little to no impact on one’s energy field. Other times, when a soul is present—especially a strong soul, this process may take a little bit of work on your part to fully explain to the spirit why this is not time and help it to move energetically to a different space.
Another way to think of this: a baby soul came into your body knowing full well that abortion may be your choice. It could have chosen any mother, but it chose a mother who is not fully ready to carry it to full term. In this way, we could think of the baby spirit as co-creating the abortion. It understands that now may not be its time. Some say that baby spirits may come again to reunite with the parents later, and many women remark that they feel the similar energy of a subsequent pregnancy as a past abortion.
The question of the soul has always been a bit touchy within pro-choice movements. It is the foundational block for the anti-choice argument, and since Roe v Wade was passed in the USA in the 1970s, the abortion gridlock has centered around spirituality versus science. We believe that the truth is much more nuanced than this. It is not one or the other, but somewhere in between. We believe that one of the biggest reasons that people often believe that “abortion is traumatic” is because people that have abortions have very few channels of healing.
The scars are invisible and often borne only by the person who aborted herself. Miscarriage and abortions are more common results of pregnancy than live birth. In this way, the experience of passing a pregnancy that is not to full term is the most common experience of the womb.
Like miscarriage, society does not have concrete ways of handling failed pregnancies. There is a dichotomy here, between the “good” woman that has children, and the “bad” woman that has no children—the ones that kill their babies or were careless in pregnancy to cause their miscarriage. The problem is the level of shame, taboo, and self-hate lobbied on the person having an abortion—mainly by themselves. Outside society tells us so much of how we SHOULD feel about abortion, and those perspectives bleed into our own personal perspectives and frameworks. When we have our own abortions, our experience is coupled with views of the outside world, plus the complexities of our own personal context.
If you are struggling to integrate your abortion, contact a Rouge Doula Here:
Watch video to learn how to build your own ceremonial container for abortion.
We have already built our ceremonial altar. In the same room as your altar, you can prepare the space. Ideally, your altar is set up in a private, comfy place. Maybe your bedroom or living room.
Start with cleansing the room.
You can do this with sage, palo santo, incense, or the herb of your choice. If you have a fan, use it. The strong plumes of smoke are proven to clean the space of bacteria, as well as energetics lingering from days and months past. You will want to cleanse the space every day of your ceremony, or whenever you feel like the energy needs to be moved a bit.
Start at one point in the room and move clockwise. Make sure to get into all of the cracks of a room and cover all perimeters of doors and windows. Feel free to sing, or chant as you cleanse, even say a prayer.
Once this is done, sit down at your altar. Take out your pills. Cleanse them too and place them on the altar.
Before starting the abortion, sit in meditation and focus on all the reasons why you have come to this abortion today. Feel into the pregnancy one last time. Explain to it why now the time is not to come through you.
You may speak out loud to the pregnancy, explaining why you have chosen abortion. Pray or speak to whatever higher power you relate to, asking for protection during this time, asking for help and support, or whatever feels intuitively right for you.
Write a letter the pregnancy, explaining why you have made your choice, and how you feel about being pregnant at this time. Explain why you felt abortion was necessary. Write what you hope to manifest in your coming years, and any other details. This abortion is an opportunity for new things to grow and develop in the place of the baby. What will develop, perhaps, is the baby in another form?
After you have written your letter, place it on the altar as well. We will burn this letter later on, after the abortion, as we close the ceremonial container.
Yoga and movement are both amazing tools for helping to move your reproductive system and help move both physical and emotional energy before, after and during an abortion. In these videos, you are guided to move through gentle practices that are tailored to each phase in the abortion process.