beavers and abortions.

the complex power of fertility. essentially, whoever holds it, holds us all.

I’ve been doing a lot of swimming lately, letting water teach me to listen. I like that swimming is a quiet activity, yet full of motion. In my underwater dives, I’ve been making connections between beavers and abortions, of all things.

Let’s start with beavers. Beavers are both celebrated and hated. They’ve been brought to near extinction for their unsavory power to flood a farm or move a river. They’ve also been heralded as a keystone species for their amazing abilities in making space for water to pool and diversity to thrive. Essentially, beavers make it tricky for us to root down and pave the way for all the rest to follow: moose, ducks, fish, insects, songbirds. Life thrives at the edges of diversity, and they are the great diversifiers of a habitat.

We also have beavers to thank for so many of our first aid fertility plants. They bog up the land for plants that know how to live in fecundity and direct their own creative waters into stem and flower. At the edge of the bog we find red trillium, or birthroot, that supports a stalled birth and stops a hemorrhaging uterus, saving a mother’s life. Nearby grows trout lily, a plant that when eaten fresh, is known to stop conception. Trillium, blue cohosh, black cohosh, wild yam, partridgeberry, trout lily, bloodroot, the list goes on and on of endangered plants that can stop a threatened miscarriage, empty the contents of a womb, ease birth pains, stop bleeding, and support the flow of life as a mother chooses.

With these delicate plants, a uterine body wouldn’t need near the interventions that have medicalized birth in this century. A uterine body includes all women, but also people who don’t identify with that word any longer…trans men, non-binary, gender expansive people inviting flexibility into our binary thinking. Diversity. Flexibility. Complexity. Life thrives at the edges.

Unfortunately, beavers and humans share a common superpower - we are both able to change our surroundings to suit our needs. We humans desire an unchanging land to build, drive, and plow on, and insist on a rigid ecology that isn’t flexible enough to hold these species, both animal and plant. It’s true they destroy farmland, wreak havoc on some of the more lovely trees like beech and alder and birch. But it’s also true that beavers invite us to live with flexibility, constantly in relationship to the flow of water. Their presence creates a landscape able to nourish the soil enough to grow food further down the road…beavers make endometriums, just like uteruses. It seems to be a matter of trust: do we trust their intelligence, intention, and care in tending a landscape? Do we trust our own?

Now on to abortion, equally complex in the landscape of our hearts. Sometimes the body chooses miscarriage.  Sometimes the heart.  Sometimes the world chooses for us.  Sometimes the circumstance and story we live inside make it impossible to imagine a carriage that isn’t mis-aligned.  Sometimes we want so deeply to carry and conceive and make a life out of a few tiny cells, but no amount of wanting can make it be. They are all miscarriages, all misaligned.  Why is a miscarriage of the heart called an abortion?  Why doesn’t the heart of the mother matter? Whether a heart says no, or a uterus, there is only one word for the ceasing of this creative bodily project in Spanish: aborto.

In addition to this peculiar delineation in the english language, we have a story that a baby is a baby is a baby. I remember counting every Tuesday until I was 24 weeks with my second child, and exhaling deeply then, knowing they might survive if my womb decided to kick them out, like my previous two pregnancies. Did they become a baby then? Or when I stood out under the stars in gratitude for the positive test, or for years before their coming? Fetuses are a part of the mother’s body, through and through, a creative act ‘in process’. Doesn’t it seem silly to simplify and politicize such a nuanced, unknowable process? I remember thinking I’d be able to ‘time’ and ‘choose’ when I had children (to say nothing of ‘manifesting’ my desired temperaments and gender preferences). Horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.

I’ve endured three miscarriages, two abortions, and the birthing of two gigantic, beautiful children. All left scars (and gifts) on my life in ways I could not have imagined, but the one where I had to turn a possible human away to protect my own health was by far the deepest. When I asked my doctor for the “contents of my womb“ after this unwanted abortion, he looked at me curiously. No one had ever asked him for such a thing. These baby parts get thrown in the trash, or possibly used in research that is questionable and dubious. The contents of my womb went into a wide kind river, surrounded by my grief, my tears, and my gratitude. I did not want to choose what I had to choose in choosing myself and my already born children, but I’ve learned that uteruses have their own desires, and there is a dark mystery there that can only be honored.

Whether it’s chosen from circumstance, the heart, the uterus, or something else, having an ‘aborto’ could be as sacred and act as having a baby. It is something that needs more weight in our culture, it is not something that needs policing. Most all of us know that when we add force into any situation, we are met with resistance. When we get vilified, we tend to act more aggressively and defend ourselves, and grief gets buried in the dark. Grief is what fills uteruses around the world, and grief is what needs tending, releasing, and reflecting, when a womb sheds it’s possibility of life. If abortions were made sacred and supported by the hearts of those around them there would be a much less trauma in a uterine body, all the uterine bodies. A body wrapped around trauma is a body unable to open and stand and its power. Perhaps this is the real unconscious depth of what we are dealing with. The ones who hold the power of fertility are the ones who are ultimately, always, in charge.

There is such complexity in this story, but our religions, governments, and societies were not built to operate with such complexity. Maybe this is because they are mostly run by men, perhaps? Whose reproductive systems can be covered in a couple of hours, compared to the world of the uterus? Perhaps this is the ultimate mis-carriage. I don’t mean to be cheeky, but truly, imagine what conversations we’d be having if uterine bodies were never cast aside, belittled, undercut, or erased. Where would patriarchy be without our erasure? Unfortunately, patriarchy is not gender specific, it’s the pond we’ve built for all of us to swim in. Patriarchy is a supremacist model of living that is extractive, destructive, and power-needy. And the ultimate power source of all life? The oceanic fertility of uterine bodies.

The menstrual cycle is round, like a pond, a tear, an orbit. Tracking the menstrual cycle is what gave us cause to track the moon, the sun, and create time. Out of these observations our capacity has grown and grown, but our hormones remain our compass. Choosing when and when not to birth is something every single procreating creature does - through food, ingesting the proper plants, even delaying or spurring on hormonal responses when there is danger, illness, or the wrong partner. We animals protect the plants that support our fertility and trust each other’s choices. I would venture to say that it’s only a matter of time before scientists define not only the ‘gut brain’, but the uterine brain as well. If we who have one - about half of us - protected it’s circular intelligence, imagine what linear, binary systems might become suddenly less relevant.