The backlash is in full swing against Kayla Boyd, the wife of Brisbane Broncos player, Darius Boyd and 29 year-old mother to 1-year-old Willow. Boyd wrote candidly on her blog this week about enduring both a miscarriage and an abortion just months apart last year. The post soon went viral. By Wednesday Boyd had to explain herself to the Courier Mail. And then again on social media.
The stereotypical view of abortion is that it's the domain of single women who are sleeping with a number of men; women who are careless and void of emotional depth. Nasty women, selfish women. But women in families? Women with children?
In her original blog post, Boyd spoke of what she called her "selfishness" but it might be more accurate to call it self care. Boyd suffered a miscarriage in April, around the same time she lost her grandmother. When she found out she was pregnant in August, she terminated the pregnancy. "I had about ten reasons," is how she explained it on Instagram. The worry about miscarrying again was a factor, "but it wasn't the sole reason" she said.
As she wrote on her blog, Boyd suffered from severe morning sickness for almost her entire first pregnancy. She also had a child who was nine months old – and felt that she would suffer, as would her marriage, if she had another child so soon.
This is the hidden, psychological labour of pregnancy and child-rearing. The feelings of being overwhelmed by pregnancy, by miscarriage, by the idea of having to delve deep into personal trauma, with no guarantee that you'll make it out. The understanding, often so implicit as to be invisible to other members of the family, that the woman will endure the loneliness of loss silently, and simply get on with it.
There's an old myth women are told over and again about the pain of childbirth. And it's not that childbirth is without pain; we know the pain exists. The real lie is that women are supposed to be strong enough to bear it.
Abortion remains illegal in Queensland, unless the pregnancy poses a significant threat to the woman's life or mental health. In August last year, an amendment to the bill was proposed but ultimately rejected. Still, academics are calling it the start of a conversation.
Abortion has not become as politicised here as it is in the US where President-elect Donald Trump said publicly that women who had them should be "punished". Still, one in three women have had a termination and in reality many will not fit the stereotypical view people hold in their heads about women who have abortions.
Kayla was brutally honest, and the topics she touched on – the trauma of miscarriage, the potential effect on her marriage (and likely too, his career) is not something we normally hear about outside of whispered conversations. But contrary to sanctimonious public opinion, this doesn't mean it's not going on.
The loss of a pregnancy is officially called a miscarriage up until 20 weeks gestation. 20 weeks – that's four months pregnant. Yet, the current Queensland law calls an abortion the "killing of an unborn child."
This, right here, is part of the problem. While the majority of Australians remain in favour of legal abortions, women who get them often have to go to great lengths to explain exactly why they wanted one; they have to prove to their communities that they're not selfish, horrible people. And in Queensland, they have to prove that carrying a baby to full term is likely to send them insane.
Yet if a woman suffers a miscarriage, it's still seen as a blip on the radar; something she should and will quickly recover from. Moreover, miscarriages are viewed as "one of those things" that women just have to accept the mystery of. Most doctors will not carry out any tests if women miscarry as the belief is that a miscarriage is not cause for concern until you have three of them.
The fact is, if we can hold these two disparate views of pregnancy, that one is a mere shrug on the way to an eventual child and the other is murder, we might have to admit to ourselves that our grievance is not over the loss, but rather a woman's self-determination.
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