"But I'm not Jane Roe, I'm Carina...": Pregnancy, Birth, and Motherhood in a Post-Roe v. Wade Era

This project is about pregnancy, birth, and motherhood during the fall of Roe v. Wade, a monumental court case granting women the right to abortion that was overturned in June of 2022, effectively snatching abortion access away. In the years leading up to becoming a parent, I adamantly did not plan to be one because the United States government gradually and almost imperceptibly stripping women of their reproductive rights. What if I decided to have a child and the fetus was not viable? Would I have access to the care I needed for the decision I’d have to make? Did I want to raise a child in a world that seems to be getting progressively more polarized? Fast-forward to January of 2022 when I found out that I was pregnant. In the midst of my pregnancy, it was leaked that Roe v. Wade would be overturned after the Supreme Court’s lean moved ever closer to the right. Then, unsurprisingly at that point, Roe v. Wade was overturned. This had a huge impact on my outlook during my pregnancy, as well as a nurse friend of mine (who I mention below as part of my narrative) that had incredible complications during and after her c-section. 

Personally, I experienced a wide range of emotions that were often impacted by political decisions regarding women’s rights and bodily autonomy. I tell my story from finding out I was pregnant to finding out the gender to my 12-week scan and birth using a platform called Twine. Twine is a platform that allows users to create their own hypertext narratives. In order to give my story more legitimacy, I chose to interweave my own pregnancy narrative with my friend Sierra’s, a NICU nurse who was pregnant at the same time as me. I allow her to tell her story through a video interview that I share snippets of throughout my narrative. Throughout the entire narrative, I use a timeline to indicate important dates that impacted women’s rights with my personal important dates.

My core narrative is my personal experience with pregnancy and birth, and how those experiences were impacted by the overturn of Roe v. Wade. The audience that is most likely to react to this transmedia narrative is women; however, the intended audience is a reluctant one - People who support the overturn of Roe v. Wade and believe in limiting or doing away with abortion access. My engagement strategy would involve sharing on my professional website, my own social media accounts which is a fairly diverse mix of people considering I live in a conservative state, and potentially through good old fashioned word of mouth because these conversations occur often, especially in the digital era. I think this narrative would potentially be shared to make my point, which is that women are not “Jane Roes,” but individuals with unique experiences that require difficult decisions to be made. These decisions should not be imposed on by strangers in a ballot box or old men that sit on the Supreme Court for more than 30 years.

Cover image by KatieK2 from Flickr (creative commons).