Brace yourself. This is going to be controversial. It may make you cry, or it may make you angry, or–if you don’t believe in anything you can’t see–you may roll your eyes. In fact, if you’re not an open-minded person, just go ahead and click away from here now because there’s nothing in what I say that you will find helpful for your own wounds or worries. These are things I’ve never written about or talked about before, mainly because talking about a miscarriage at any stage of pregnancy is uncomfortable at best, but I’m being led to discuss these things now, to help someone else.
Hold the bashing. This is not a pro-abortion article or an anti-abortion article. If you think it is, you’ve missed my point because you’re looking to bolster an opinion you’ve already made. This is something altogether different that almost no one talks about.
First, a little of my own history:
I have two beautiful, intelligent, compassionate daughters who are everything I could ever wish for. The older daughter was almost miscarried at 10 weeks, and the younger one sent me thrice to emergency Labor and Delivery over the three months before she was born.
I’ve gotten pregnant more than once while on birth control pills, which my newest gynecologist believes is because I tend to ovulate unusually early. I have also miscarried several times–two pregnancies I felt ambivalent about and one I really wanted–but something rather unusual happened with the last two that made me rethink everything I used to believe about abortions, miscarriages, and incarnation.
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What I believe and why:
Over the decades, I’ve come up with my own beliefs about life, death, autonomy, trauma, and spirituality. That’s the benefit of reaching middle-age–you’ve got enough data to slot and see what shakes out if you care to look. My conclusions don’t fit cleanly into popular belief systems but then, I’m not a fan of just accepting what I’m told is true. I have to experiment and experience life for myself and draw my own conclusions. I fully admit that my brain seems to be wired a little differently and that I see things differently, but then, I’m finding more and more people have similar beliefs but are too afraid to discuss them for fear of being ridiculed or ostracized. I guess I’m used to it.
Most of the anti-abortion debates (or pro-life or whatever-rhetoric-will-best-evoke-the-required-necessary-response) center around when life begins and who has control over that life. My personal belief, based on many things I’ve experienced and observed, is that yes, life begins at conception. However, en-souled life begins sometime after that. I don’t know when. I think it’s different for each child. (Why shouldn’t it be?) From my own full-term pregnancies, I definitely felt that both babies were en-souled–the souls integrated with their bodies, in other words–definitely by seven months. Some people believe that occurs at the point of quickening, which made a lot more sense when we were less technologically advanced and didn’t have the advantages of ultrasound technology to detect a living fetus. I wasn’t able, in my own experience, to sense the soul fully integrated when I first felt my babies move. Who knows–maybe souls wait until the body is physically viable before committing. I can’t say definitively–I had no idea in 1989 and 1992 what to look for. To be honest, I was …
In working through these issues emotionally, I shall always be boundlessly grateful to shaman Kristin Madden who shared her own metaphysical experiences during pregnancy in her book Pagan Parenting and to shaman S. Kelley Harrell. I was fortunate enough to have Kelley share her profound insights into what I consider being a portal to allow these souls to enter this world. I was constantly amazed at how aware Kelley was of all the nuances of pregnancy and childbirth as she experienced them herself, and I wished that I could have been that aware during my full-term pregnancies. Maybe it’s because she became a mother later in life than I did, but I tend to think it’s because she’s one of those highly sensitive people who understand the spirit realm in ways that most people never know exists. The unusual things I experienced with my last two miscarriages, after I’d become much more aware myself, seem to be fairly common among other shamans I’ve spoken with, but other than a strange tale my mother always told me, I’ve rarely heard anyone who doesn’t have a specific gift for such things talk about it.
The spooky stuff:
I grew up hearing my mom tell the story of how, before I was born, she saw me in the processing plant where she was working at the conveyor belt. She saw the little girl coming toward her and was upset that a child was in such a dangerous place alone. Except that as the child neared, the little girl disappeared. She wasn’t in the physical realm. That child was me, and I do recall being about that age when I visited my grandmother at the processing plant with my mom.
My dis-incarnate children, at least for the last two miscarriages, did not come to me as children. Not at all. They came as adults. The first time, I was not as developed spiritually and the effects weren’t as pronounced, but holy crap, this last time was…breath-taking!
I have had this happen to me only twice in my life since I became spiritually aware, and both times, I was newly pregnant and didn’t know yet. Both times, until I figured it out, it scared the daylights out of me. This has otherwise not been a normal occurrence for me. I’ve had a lot of strange things happen in my life–things that qualify as “high woo-woo”–even early in my life when I was a devout Christian. The miscarriage experiences have an entirely different texture from anything else I’ve experienced or observed.
The first time, it was a man of about 25. No more. He was tall, wiry, with brown hair to his shoulders and much like mine. Other than that, he loo…
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