Vox Populi
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Christine Rhein: Miscarriage
I want to talk to you—Alito, Barrett,
Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts, Thomas—
tell you how I woke that day to vanished
morning sickness and—at the doctor’s office—
how the lights and ceiling tiles hovered
over the exam, the absent heartbeat,
the soothing words—At ten weeks,
nature might make this simple,
but call if you need me.
I want you to know I was young—
I stopped for ice cream, something sweet
to take home to my husband
and our napping son. Please understand—
the pain waited for midnight to churn,
the spilling, fierce—on the bathroom floor,
the kitchen rug, in the car, in the maze
of Emergency—and how I shivered—
my body cold, teeth clattering,
my doctor—rushing in, out—
shouting for an operating room.
If it happened now, a hospital could
turn me away—doctors afraid of arrest—
bans insisting on delay, on risking sepsis,
infertility. Listen! I lived. I was blessed
with a second child—born decades ago—
a different time, as if a different country.
~~~~
Christine Rhein, a prize-winning poet and a former auto engineer, is the author of
Wild Flight (Texas Tech University Press, 2008). She lives in Michigan.
Copyright 2024 Christine Rhein. First published in Poets Reading the News.
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Poignant. How vulnerable we are in the face of these punishing restrictions!
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Yes, whole families are vulnerable, not just young women…
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How many of us know this poem from within. How important it is, especially in countries now passing laws that should never have been imagined… Only women have the right to decide about their bodies.
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I couldn’t agree more, Noelle.
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Before Roe my friend and her husband had to go to Mexico because they were told the LSD they took would cause a deformed child. The marriage didn’t survive. She never had children. I wonder how different her life would be if she could have received a legal abortion in the US
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These restrictive laws change and sometimes ruin lives.
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I was there. Exactly there. But in a country where even today I would be cared for as needs be.
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You mean England or Ecuador?
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In the UK.
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Thank you, dear Christine, for this poignant and most important poem. How I still remember 52 years later, the teeth-clattering pain, the sorrow churning, the feeling of such helplessness. I can not imagine how I would have felt if — like so many women, SO many!!– I would have been turned away.
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As a man, I cannot imagine what this experience would be like. Christine’s poem speaks to all of us.
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My best friend nearly bled out from a miscarriage on her Pittsburgh dining room floor. Her heart had stopped. It took a sort of village to save her. i wonder, “as if in a different country,” if someone in that dire position would be saved now. How do we ask that question to those six supremes? The poem itself makes me grateful for Christine Rhein: her survival, her love, her poems.
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Given the crude dangerous ignorant bigoted philosophy behind the MAGA anti-abortion movement, I’ve come to believe that the government should play no role at all in women’s healthcare. Decisions about pregnancy should be made only by the woman and her doctor.
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i stopped and read all her thoughtful well-made poems and am grateful how they’re all presented together in reprise and offer her very fine craft and regard for indispensible things. Poetry reigns!
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Yes, Christine, a former automobile engineer, is a master of craft and design.
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