I have had four abortions.

I felt the air pressure change from the collective in sucking of breath you readers just performed.

Miscarriages, pregnancy loss, ectopic pregnancies–on paper they are labelled as abortions.

It was a punch in the gut when I saw this.

I don’t think I consider myself pro-life or pro-choice. At least not in the framework of the political world by which the word abortion has been adopted.

It, simply, just isn’t that simple.

But this isn’t really a political post. At least, I don’t envision what I have to say as being political. But, then, nowadays, everything seems to be tinged with politics whether you really want it to be or not.

This is a post about personal experience with the word abortion and how the word has been reduced.

I have lived in a world where abortion was associated with women who didn’t want their babies. And their right to not want their babies was protected. That is how I saw the word.

Then I had abortions. . .spontaneous abortions, missed abortions. . .and I realized that the word is not that at all.

Like many words its complexities run much deeper and wider than we give credit. We have allowed the word to mean just one thing, and therefore, diminished it while also giving it this incredible power. Talk about paradoxical. Now this word divides families, communities, countries.

It is an ugly word. No matter what, its meaning is ugly. I lost four lives that started within me. Abortion…the tiny babies, the hope of the future, the imagined lives, the joy, the innocence. And though that is exactly the ugly word that describes my experiences on my medical charts, I am not allowed to call it that in conversation because it no longer fits the narrow definition to which a complex word has been reduced.

My body did it four times. Three of those four times, my body needed medical assistance so that I would not die as well.

Or the life I live now would have been aborted.