An epic failure of resource distribution in the context of human reproduction.

I recently watched a fascinating, poignant, and very personal documentary (available here, in French) on women with unwanted pregnancies, the counselors who guide them as they make the decision to abort, and the medical professionals who carry out the necessary procedures. Interspersed with the pregnant women’s intimate stories are excerpts outlining the routine activities of the hospital staff treating them at what is described as “one of the principal medical centers in the Romandie region of Switzerland where women come for abortions.”

This hospital also happens to be the one where I was treated and followed throughout and after my miscarriage. In certain scenes I recognize the spaces of the hospital, the medical professionals. That’s the same room where I turned pages of a book, unable to actually read them. That’s the same nurse who took my blood the day we found out that it was over.

This juxtaposition is jarring, not only to me but also to the hospital staff themselves. At the 49-minute mark of this documentary, a nurse comments on the distressing fact that, yes, women seeking fertility treatment or undergoing difficulties with their own wanted pregnancies share waiting areas, examination and treatment rooms, and medical professionals with women seeking an interruption of an unwanted pregnancy. Women desperately wanting to rid themselves of something that women sitting next to them might give anything to have.

There is something horribly, cosmically unfair about this.

As the nurse emphasizes, each woman has the right to choose what is best for her own situation. This I recognize and support. The life of one person is not the same as the life of the other, and the fact that one woman is undergoing difficulty having the child she wants does not invalidate the choice of another woman not to have the child she doesn’t want. There are reasons in each person’s life that justify, support, or explain the choices he or she makes, including, for each of the women profiled here, the choice of ending her pregnancy. For none of them was it an easy decision to make.

Nevertheless, it's very, very difficult to watch this documentary after having been in the position of no choice. I had no choice. We had no choice.