When Jex Blackmore, chapter director of the Satanic Temple of Detroit, found out she was pregnant in early November, she decided to blog about her abortion experience.
The reason: though there is plenty written about abortion, she didn’t see a lot of matter-of-fact accounts of what it takes “for the uninsured woman navigating the medical system to obtain an abortion in Michigan,” she told Jezebel.
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Blackmore launched her blog, the Unmother Project, on Nov. 14 and documented the process of her Thanksgiving Day abortion, with straightforward posts like “The pregnancy test,” “The clinic” and “The abortion.”
“Like most medical procedures, getting an abortion is not a simple process. I think that I’ve always somewhat assumed that early-term abortion was nothing to bat an eyelash at,” she wrote in “State mandates” before launching into the paperwork process in detail.
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“I was told that I must print, receive by fax or physically pick up state-mandated informed consent materials at least twenty-four hours in advance of my procedure,” she continued.
“Informed consent materials are written by the Michigan Department of Community Health rather than medical professionals and are intended to ‘provide a woman with accurate and unbiased information,’ under the assumption that the medical professional selected by the patient cannot be trusted to do so, and that the state is more qualified to inform a woman about medical procedures than her doctor.”
She described the actual abortion — taken in pill form as a cocktail of mifepristone and misoprostol — as a pain that “didn’t resemble typical ovulation pain. It was more substantial. Deeper. Lower. Buried…. At first, it was like a large fist slowly pressing out against my uterus, moving across one hip to the next and back. Then, a boulder rolling between my ovaries. I applied more heat and felt heavy. I fell asleep for a little.”
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Afterward, she wrote about the physical pain and noted that though everyone’s experience is different, she views her abortion as “not a difficult choice for me. I’ve never felt sad, or depressed, or unsure. I haven’t shed a single tear.” But she added: “My perspective does not detract from the physical and emotional hardship of the abortion itself.”
No matter how you feel about a woman’s right to choose, Blackmore’s straightforward blog entries— though Michigan-centric — are a necessary guide for all women making this decision. No grandstanding, no vilification… only information.
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