At around seven weeks of pregnancy, a mucus glob forms in the cervix and turns it from funnel into stopper. This blood-tinged plug keeps the baby in utero and anything lurking in your vagina out. When the evocatively named “bloody show” discharges, it’s time for the main event. I learned the term a few months before giving birth the first time, after which I shoved the gory mucus plug into the back of my consciousness-closet, to live with the other unmentionable realities of being a woman. Like periods, hot flashes, abortions, C-section scars, maternity homes where girls got to labor in secret and then surrender their babies to “nice” families, sexual assaults, miscarriage, STIs, childbirth . . .
I’m attempting to commit to full consciousness. In my mind’s living room, at its hearth, The Bloody Show is on full display in all its glory. This urgent retrieval began this past March when I saw “The Last Safe Abortion,” Carmen Winant’s barn-sized piece in the Whitney Biennial, composed of 2,500 archival photos capturing everyday life at abortion clinics over the last fifty years. The reality of abortion clinic work is all over the installation: women on the phone scheduling appointments, counselors holding patients’ hands, doctors explaining IUD insertion. Many holiday staff parties where everyone is laughing and dancing. Using actual life, Winant is countering our collective-unconscious visual of clinics—protesters outside, brandishing magnified photos of gigantic fetuses—with the labor that goes on inside.
While the vagina that gave birth to a four-foot-tall fetus would have to have the diameter of a beach ball (like the kind at Phish concerts), anti-abortion photos have some relationship to reality. Abortion involves gore and terminating life that, if left alone, could develop into a baby. In her recent book Choices, clinic founder and activist Merle Hoffman refers to abortion as “the bloody part of feminism,” a phrase that startled me at first, so accustomed am I to talking about abortion in abstract terms. But, you know what? We’ve lost Roe and we don’t have time for euphemisms—just concrete, even “gratuitous,” descriptions of our daily reality. Think of how we glorify men’s battle scars in war movies, rife with arms blown off and brains spraying, yet we are too squeamish for images of birth and abortion. As part of Carmen Winant’s project at the Whitney, a seven-week manual vacuum aspiration—shot by camera phone, doctor and patient framed in profile—was presented as historic and accompanied with plenty of “I understand if this triggering” preamble. (Indeed, the woman sitting next to me told me she almost threw up.) Having this tablespoon of blood and tissue sucked out as gently as possible into a syringe looked like it would feel crampily painful, like IUD placement, but was over in less than a minute. Watching a vagina get pummeled by an eight-inch penis is just meh porn. Meanwhile, a fourteen-inch baby’s head emerging from that same capacious tunnel—well, no decent person should be asked to witness that!
Last year, the governors of both Tennessee and my childhood state of North Dakota signed laws mandating that all grade schools screen an animated film called “Meet Baby Olivia,” about a thumb-sucking fetus connected by umbilical cord to her disembodied womb. Now, I’m no big-city doctor, but a womb is an interior body part, not a free-standing dwelling or genie’s bottle. “Meet Baby Olivia” joins other inventive plays to make a fertilized egg a full legal person. I’m no big-city lawyer, either, but (as activist and lawyer Lynn Paltrow says) there is no way to add a fertilized egg to the Constitution without subtracting women.
Besides, while it’s rarely discussed, men’s lives and futures are also saved by access to safe and legal abortion. I’m eager to hear some of those stories. How much more can the women do when it comes to fighting for abortion rights anyway? It’s like household chores—endless and disproportionately our burden.
Reality check: far from being the weaker sex, the average woman endures near-death gory experiences the likes of which Quentin Tarantino himself would be at a loss to dramatize. Just today, I read this bit of horror on Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day Substack:
I remember the feeling of hands inside me. Pulling, tugging, moving things aside. My emergency c-section wasn’t painful, but that feeling of being invaded was somehow worse than physical hurt. For years, the thought of the surgery would send me into a PTSD panic, my knees literally buckling and vomit coming up the back of my throat. In my memory, my arms are tied down while I’m being cut—but I know that’s not true. It’s just my brain’s way of making the powerlessness of the moment seem tangible.
With practice, our brains can defy our conditioning into what sci-fi writer Joanna Russ (whose one realist novel is discussed in this issue) deemed the “idiotic minutiae of patriarchal ideology and behavior” and make our powerfulness tangible. Quick starter guide: read this issue of LIBER, Miranda July’s novel All Fours, and Kathleen Hanna’s brilliant and violent new memoir Rebel Girl. Watch Julia Ducournau’s bloody feminist flicks Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), the latter a gory, body-horror birthing nightmare. Keep your body in mind, the violence of it, and ruminate. We have to nurture cultural space for our reality, the entire Bloody Show.
