Pro-Birth

A flash fiction on the sanctity of life.

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Breathe in. Breathe out. As beads of sweat drip down my pulsating forehead, I can feel the short, intense bursts of air woosh through the gaps between my teeth. My respiration syncs with the mechanic rhythm of the clock near the ceiling of this cavernous room, ticking with a grim and hollow resonance. It’s not keeping track of the minutes and hours, but counting down to something dire — something total and ultimate. Time takes on a rubbery quality, bending again and again as I wait. An hour? Fifteen minutes?

The OB-GYN repeats, “keep breathing, keep pushing.” I watch him stare at the monitors while his hands bury themselves between my legs. Scanning his face and body language, there’s calmness in his demeanor, but an undercurrent in his apprehension. “You’re doing great, keep breathing,” he insists while I keep pushing and grunting into the burn.

I remember the physician at my childbirth education class telling us moms-to-be that a woman’s ability to handle pain is greater than we think. That it’s OK for some women to go a little crazy during labor, to scream or curse to cope with the unimaginable tearing and torturous imprisonment inside pure biology’s crippling clutches. Chandler is standing a few feet to the side, staring at this portrait of determination, looking like Bambi facing a fleet of 18-wheelers. He splashes water over his forehead to hide the puddles of sweat gathering along his half-dozen skin creases. He paces back and forth before joining the choir of nurses chanting, “she’s almost there, you’re doing great,” as if I needed the affirmation.

The head begins to emerge as a knuckle on a fist, a pearl of bone and white bulging forth, stretching the threads of my labia so thin and fine, crevices leveled smooth. I look closer and I see a face upon a face, a skin upon a skin, shimmering and leering down as from a great depth, a hidden life beneath the surface roils. I part my lips for a heavier exhale but a shriek of rage and sharp hot pain emerges from my very core, somewhere deep and troubled. The skin around it pulled tighter, tauter, red and raw, and in anticipation, I burst into tears on three separate occasions, ready to break down.

In the final moments, the rain outside clears, the wet gym sock of a sky surrenders to the bold beams of sunlight searing through the grim grey clouds. If there is a God, He certainly has a postmodern sense of humor.

The stubborn clock’s hands read 1:00 PM. The date is July 9, 2022. And the doctor is holding my daughter in his outstretched arms, another trophy to add to the annals of successful child delivery. My face beet red and my body depleted from writhing in agony, I hang my translucent head over the edge of the bed and rake my fingers through my sweat-dampened hair.

You always hear stories of faces pressed against pillows or buried in their partners’ necks, and finally, women holding their brand new infants to their breasts. Birth, these images suggest, is a surpassingly intimate event, animal and violent and mysterious and beautiful. It is also ordinary, universal. But nothing about this should be possible.

The doctor wraps my beautiful, slippery, wailing daughter in a towel and places her on a stool in another room with three other babies. I can see their precious and innocent faces through the clear partition that separates the edge of my bed with fragile new life. Her blue eyes taking their first gaze of the world, her tiny toes, downy head, crimped nose, colorless lips, she squirms and cries loudly. 

The burden of propping up my strained eyelids proves too heavy. I am bone-tired, feeling completely at the mercy of nature. Numbness washes over me as I marvel at my weightlessness. The world around me begins to fade away.

BOOM!

Ears ringing, I jolt out of my brief reprieve, perched at the edge of my bed to observe the mess I made. Blood and brains splattered all over the walls like an apocalyptic food fight, my decapitated daughter’s corpse slides off the stool along with the other mangled newborns. The doctor stands weak-kneed and hunch-backed across the room, 12-gauge shotgun, hand tenuously gripping the pump, smoke still billowing from the barrel. The nurse hands Chandler a clipboard full of forms.

The doctor returns to my room and turns his gaze to me. There’s a deadened blasé look in his eyes, as if I can see the continuum of countless lives that have flashed before him and those who are sure to come. He sighs in bland existential defeat, and warbles, “the NRA will be billing your insurer for the procedure, Ms. Clark.”

We eventually leave the Planned Parenthood clinic only to be greeted by the usual mob of anti-choice protestors that frequent the front entrance. Only this time, their jeers replaced with joy, their snarls substituted with smiles, and a dash of gun enthusiasts sprinkled along the crowd. Ever since this new bipartisan mass shooting bill passed, the typical Defund Planned Parenthood and Abortion Kills signs have morphed into banal punchlines about celebrating life and liberty. But I’m not sure how this bill is a compromise when, in their own way, they got everything they ever wanted.

We get to the car and almost instantaneously turn on our phones, the bright ding of pseudopleasure providing a subtle narcotic to my morbid dejection. Minutes upon minutes of scrolling through my Instagram, pictures of happy children, loving families, rattling through all the wholesome content like half-connected dopamine Chiclets. Abruptly, my partner stops and suggests we check out this new cafe that has a four-and-a-half star rating on Yelp. What felt like a permafrown is shattered by the corners of my lips pushing the apples of the cheeks toward my eyes, my eyebrows reaching skyward toward my hair in optimism. “Yes, I’d like that.”

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