Hello ,

I don't think I've ever felt anxious writing to you, but that is exactly what I feel right now. My anxiety lives in two places: as a crushing feeling in my chest and a strange airiness in the front of my brain.

Today I'm sharing a non-fiction piece I published exactly three years ago on a popular public blog. It was my response to the discussions/debates that politicians in Alabama (and around the USA) were having again, about whether women have the right to bodily autonomy when it comes to pregnancy, abortion and rape.

I wrote the piece in reaction to the social media conversations that were citing a statement made by Todd Akin, at the time, Missouri’s Republican Senate candidate.

He said,

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

The piece below is just as it appeared on May 17, 2019. And as I reread it, now at 56-years-old, I still weep, unbelieving that the US Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe vs Wade and that there are US citizens who support taking away a woman's right to end a pregnancy in her own body—regardless of the situation surrounding how she conceived.

If you want to skip past the story, scroll to 💜 You're still here 💜. And, if you want to remove yourself from my emails, go all the way to the bottom to find the Unsubscribe button.

My ‘Illegitimate’ Rape

And how I knew it was not ‘legitimate’.

Several years ago I wrote a story in which a young woman, Tara, loses her virginity to a man who raped her on Labor Day weekend. Tara was twenty-years-old, a virgin, and she planned to stay that way until she married. Tara had never had a boyfriend—she was too afraid he would want to have sex.

Tara believed that “girls who get themselves in trouble deserve the consequences.”

So, this character, Tara, was raped by a man she knew from her church—and she went into denial, convincing herself that the event never happened.

Because she had not chosen to lose her virginity, because she had not consented, in her heart, Tara believed that she was still a virgin. She believed that God would understand and allow her to maintain that claim. And within days she effectively erased the experience of the rape from her memory.

Days after the rape, Tara started her first year of university. She made new friends. She was happy—but she sure did drink a lot. By mid-October she started to feel unwell. She woke up nauseous every morning, so she went to a walk-in clinic.

The doctor asked, “Could you be pregnant?”

Tara said, with a pure heart, “No, that’s impossible. I’m still a virgin.”

And a month later when she was home visiting her parents, she complained about being tired and generally not feeling well. They thought she might have mono and sent her to see her family physician.

The doctor asked, “Could you be pregnant?”

Tara said with the conviction of a saint, “No, that’s impossible. I’m still a virgin.”

He took blood and tested her for mono.

And the week before Christmas, when her weight had dropped from 125 pounds to 110 and she was still not feeling like herself, she went back to the walk-in clinic, desperate to find an answer to what was wrong with her body.

This doctor didn’t ask if she could be pregnant. She asked Tara to pee in a cup. And, when she called Tara back into her office with the news that she was three months pregnant, Tara remembered, with terror, what had happened that Friday night on Labor Day weekend.

The character had to miscarry

In the first draft of that story, Tara had an abortion. But in the final version of the story, the character miscarries since it’s commonly accepted that readers will lose empathy for a heroine who “kills a baby”—and an abortion at 12 weeks is so unthinkable that readers will pillory the author of the story, likely never to read another thing from them.

None of the readers of that draft of my novel knew that Tara’s experience was my own. There wasn’t one word of fiction in the scene.

I couldn’t tell them because I carried so much shame about the entire experience—from being so naïve as to trust a man I’d known my whole life to stay on the couch when I let him crash in my apartment, to being so naïve as to think I could erase an experience by simply deciding it hadn’t happened.

I was given three days to decide whether I was going to carry the baby to term or have an abortion. I spent every waking minute thinking of all the possible outcomes for myself and that “child,” praying for an answer, for direction.

Enraged, I called the man who raped me told him the situation he’d put me in. The following night, at 2 AM, he called and told me that he was lying in bed and could hear his baby’s heartbeat. He told me that I had to keep the baby. He told me that the future of the fetus was as much his decision as mine.

That’s when I knew what I had to do. I went to the abortion clinic the next day since the thought of having my future forever tied to this violent man through a child… that was a future that evoked more fear in me than an eternity in some hypothetical Hell.

The doctor who performed that pre-Christmas abortion was the Devil incarnate. She did her job, but she made sure I knew how immoral my actions were. She made sure I felt the physical pain as deeply as the emotional and spiritual pain I had to deal with.

This morning, as I read news about Alabama’s new anti-abortion legislation, I wept. I’ve not stopped weeping all day — it’s now 4PM and I can barely focus my eyes.

I’m a wreck.

I’m angry.

And I’m tired. 

I’m so tired of worrying about being judged for having made a no-win decision.

In deciding to have that late-term abortion, I chose my life over that of a fetus. It’s true—I got to complete university without disruption. I got to be an irresponsible twenty-something without worrying that my dumb decisions were going to ruin another human’s life. My physical life was definitely easier not having to be a twenty-year-old mother.

But I also chose a path that required me to give up my faith and to lose a community I expected to be part of my whole life.

I started the process of losing my faith in God because of that trinity of rape, pregnancy, and abortion. I had no choice since I could not resolve the hypocrisy of my belief, “girls who get themselves in trouble deserve the consequences,” with my lived experience. I could not resolve having had an abortion with what the faith told me was right and what was sinful.

I didn’t feel like a sinner, I felt like a victim, not only of the man but of a god who left me entirely alone to experience each of three unholy acts. So I left him.

I was fifty-one-years-old before I could even say the words “abortion” and “rape.” The wounds I carry from thirty years of self-loathing have only just begun to heal. And now that I can speak my truth, not in a watered down, politically-corrected, fictionalized version of my truth, I can’t not speak up.

And I know that there are real risks in doing so. I know that even progressive people in my wide community will judge me. I know that I risk losing clients (now readers) for exposing my truth.

But I also know that I can’t sit quietly by while politicians and others publicly state that pregnancy resulting from rape is not possible due to stress hormones or lack of female fluids or whatever cockamamy idea they assert as fact.

I am not an outlier. My experience of getting pregnant as the result of rape was not one-in-a-million. But my experience of being raped was one of a million women’s stories.

Today I can’t stop weeping for all of the lives ruined when a baby is born into a family that is unable to care for it—regardless of the reason. I weep for that twenty-year-old who had to make an impossible decision and was so afraid of being judged, that she made it without support. And, I weep for the fifty-three-year-old woman who still carries the weight of shame and grief for a decision that she never should have had to make.

But mostly, I weep for the women of Alabama who have lost the right to make the physical, emotional and spiritual decision that, regardless of what path they might have taken, will have to live with for the rest of their lives.

He said what?

Here are a few of the ways the rape/pregnancy connection have been declared impossible by American politicians.

Todd Atkin (R-Miss.), 2012, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Henry Aldridge (R-NC), 2012, “The facts show that people who are raped — who are truly raped — the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant.”

Stephen Friend (R-Penn.), 1988, “It is almost but not quite impossible to become pregnant on the basis of rape. The odds are one in millions and millions and millions…Rape, obviously, is a traumatic experience. When that traumatic experience is undergone, a woman secretes a certain secretion, which has a tendency to kill sperm.”

Judge James Leon Holmes, 2003, “Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami.”

Here is Some Legitimate Science on Pregnancy and Rape

💜 You're still here... 💜

Romance authors and readers are, in my experience, among the most generous humans on the planet.

Charity anthologies, where authors literally work for free for up to 100 hours writing a story and donating 100% of their royalties to a cause are common in the community. Gosh, among authors I know, a dozen or more anthologies raising money to support charities in Ukraine have been organized and launched in the last two months, including one that I am in.

The charity that romance authors are mobilizing around this month supports reproductive justice. It's the National Network of Abortion Funds' Collective Power Fund.

But instead of another anthology, this fundraiser is an auction with over 200 items called Romance for Reproductive Justice that runs for three days only, May 21st to 23rd (at 8pm PDT).

Julia Quinn has donated a set of 9, signed, trade paperback copies of her Bridgerton series.

Helen Hoang contributed signed, hardcover Book of the Month copies of The Kiss Quotient, The Bride Test, and The Heart Principle.

The Ripped Bodice has pulled together an awesome basket of romance books and self-care goodies.

There are also lots of live events with authors to bid on, including three RomCom Zoom Parties with four authors each. This is where you can find and support my donation. I'm in the gang of Canadian rom-com authors with my friends Cathryn Fox, Mia Harlan and Eliza Gordon.

If you bid on—and win!—one of these parties, we'll find a date and time that works for you—and as many as your romance-loving pals as you'd like—to hang out together for an hour or so.

You can ask us anything ... have one or all of us read from our books ... or just jibber jabber. The hour is your special playdate time with four funny, generous and all-round fabulous rom-com authors.

Thanks so much for reading, for caring, and for supporting every woman's right to control her body and her life, in whatever way is best for her and her family.

With love&reproductivejusticestuff,

Danika

xo