Life After Roe v. Wade for Mothers and Daughters

It has been a year since the Supreme Court in America overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the hard-won era of legal abortion rights at the federal level. In this blog I share two observations about how this loss of reproductive and healthcare rights affects mothers and daughters. The stories we tell about historical events all too often ignore the way such events impact women, and this blog is a deliberate challenge to this patriarchal silencing. I also focus deliberately on mothers and daughters, because all women are daughters, and what happens to women directly impacts the mother-daughter relationship. Focusing on mothers and daughters makes the effect of the overturning of Roe v. Wade more human.   

My first observation is that daughters who have grown up during the years when abortion was legal have been forced back in time to their mother’s and grandmother’s reality where access to contraception was limited, if at all, and abortions were illegal, and this has shaken their trust in America and the Supreme Court. These daughters have been shaken awake to how women’s rights can be revoked by powerful men, and women.

The positive effect of this rude awakening is that many daughters are drawing closer to their mother. We have witnessed mothers and daughters marching in demonstrations, voicing their outrage together as they fight against this new female reality. And in the therapy room, daughters are waking up to how little they know about their mother’s and grandmother’s lived experience. Daughters are realizing that they have not known how to “Stand in their mother’s and grandmother’s shoes” (exercise from the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model) and ask how their mother and grandmother controlled their fertility, and how they felt about the lack of control they had over when they had a baby. Stories of unwanted and life-threatening pregnancies, of loving a child conceived through rape, of having children they can’t afford, of having a child with an abusive and unreliable man, and of having children when they would rather write, paint, sing, or follow their career goals are finally being told. And through these stories, daughters are hearing about their mother’s and grandmother’s lived experience with patriarchy, how patriarchy shames mothers into keeping quiet about the harm it inflicts.    

When daughters hear, often for the first time, the conditions their mother lived in when she got pregnant, the pressures she was under, the guilt she carries about the neglect and mistreatment she experienced, the lack of choice she had, and in some cases, how she survived a life-threatening back-street abortion, daughters are learning see their mother with “soft eyes” (word for empathy from the Mother-Daughter Attachment® Model). Daughters are seeing first-hand how laws and politics are shaped by patriarchal norms that are designed to control women’s lives and bodies.  

My second observation is that the political divide between pro and anti-abortion rights is setting mothers and daughters up for conflict. The generation of daughters who grew up with abortion rights are arguing with, and not understanding their mothers’ anti-abortion beliefs. And these mothers feel hurt by their daughters’ differing beliefs.

One mother-daughter couple comes to mind where the daughter’s pro-abortion beliefs differed from her mother’s and family’s strong anti-abortion beliefs. Every time they talked, their conversation would end in an argument about abortion rights, as the mother tried to change her daughter’s mind and the daughter tried to get her mother to accept her pro-choice beliefs. For this couple, the divisive politics of abortion was causing them to become emotionally estranged, because they couldn’t see how they could have a relationship where both their beliefs were accepted.

A breakthrough came during one of their couple’s sessions, when the mother blurted out that her sister had an illegal abortion when she was eighteen years old, and that “she was never the same again”. The mother explained that her sister had arranged for the illegal abortion without anyone in the family knowing that she was pregnant. The mother said, “You must understand that we don’t abort babies in our family. My sister’s unwed pregnancy was a huge scandal, but the fact that she tried to get rid of it was unforgivable.” The mother’s sister developed a severe infection after the abortion, which landed her in hospital and outed her secret. When the daughter asked her mother how her family treated her sister after she came out of hospital, and what happened to her boyfriend, the mother said, “We were so angry with her for bringing shame onto the family. And her boyfriend left her because he felt betrayed because he didn’t know that she was pregnant.” After a moment of silent thought, the mother continued in a pensive voice, “I do think that this boyfriend was the love of my sister’s life. She never really had a boyfriend after him, and she devoted her life to the children she taught as a teacher.”

Learning about this family secret helped the daughter understand why her mother was so against abortion rights. It also helped her understand some of the other sexist beliefs and role expectations that she had hit up against with her mother and other family members. It helped the daughter accept that her mother was never going to change her mind and that as a couple they were going to have to find a way to agree to disagree and be connected as people alongside accepting their differing beliefs about women’s rights.  Sadly, the mother wasn’t able or willing to unpack the patriarchal beliefs that she had internalized or show much empathy for the trauma her sister had experienced from the shame and blame her family had unleashed on her or accept that her daughter saw life differently.  

To conclude, the hardline anti-abortion stance that the mother in the case study held onto as if it was a life raft harmed her relationship with her daughter, and this kind of behavior is also harming American society. Feminism is about giving women equal rights and choice. It is about challenging how patriarchy limits women’s power, agency, and rights to the caretaking role. And the anti-abortion debate, as the case study above reveals, can deliberately silence the systemic sexism that is inherent in its arguments and belief system. The daughter in the case study wanted to have the right to control her fertility. And maybe so did her aunt. Who is ready to have a baby at eighteen? The mother’s refusal to, or inability to, discuss the obvious misogyny in her family’s belief system, how their pro-life beliefs do not include the woman’s life, and the harm these beliefs inflict on women, were limiting her understanding of, and connection with, her daughter.

My hope is that mothers and daughters and American society in general, find a place where difference of any kind is okay, accepted, even welcomed. And I hope that therapists who work with women, which means working with mothers and daughters because every female is a daughter, learn to see women’s lives through a systemic lens and how the mother-daughter relationship is a mirror reflection of women’s generational experience with patriarchy. Women’s lives cannot be fully understood without a systemic lens. And women cannot regain their right to control their fertility or any human right without first uncovering the story of their generational experience with patriarchy, and then voicing the harm sexist beliefs, roles, and laws inflict. (This exercise is called “Mother-Daughter History Mapping” and detailed instructions are in “The Mother-Daughter Puzzle”.) Women must tell the stories of their mother’s and grandmother’s life for their own self-learning, and to uncover the sexism that hides in plain sight in political decisions and laws.