Author: Richard Dur
It began with an article.
Nothing remarkable there. She read things on her phone all the time before bed. Recipes. Obituaries. Articles about diseases she was beginning to worry about now that she was sixty-eight. This one was about pregnancy. She almost scrolled past it. Almost.
Something about cells passing between a mother and her unborn child. About how some of those cells could remain in the mother’s body for decades. They had found them in the liver, the heart, even the brain. Microchimerism, they called it. Sounded like something from one of those science-fiction novels her husband liked reading. Or a horror story. But this was science. She read on. The cells could survive long after the pregnancy had ended. Sometimes for the rest of the mother’s life.
She stopped reading.
Forty-six years. That was how long it had been. There had been a time when she counted the anniversaries. Then the years had accumulated, and the anniversaries had become more like ordinary days.
She had been twenty-two. Frightened. Alone (although not entirely alone, she now supposed). She had made an appointment. She remembered the waiting room. A magazine with a torn cover. A nurse who called her dear. She remembered being told that it would soon be over. And it had been. Or so she had believed.
She picked up the phone again. Fetal cells have been detected in maternal tissues decades after pregnancy. She read the sentence several times. Then the question occurred to her. A question she wished hadn’t. Do fetal cells remain after an abortion? She put the phone face down on her bedside table. And then another thought came to her. If her baby’s cells were still inside her, then they had been there yesterday, and the day before, and every day since she had spent trying not to remember.
She got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The light was unforgiving. It showed the loose skin beneath her chin, the puffy eyes, the face of a woman who had lived a long and, by most accounts, happy life. She stood before the mirror. There was nothing unusual about her reflection. Of course there wasn’t. What had she expected? She placed a hand against her abdomen. It was ridiculous. The cells, if they existed, might be anywhere. She took her hand away.
For a moment, she had the absurd sensation that she was being watched. Not from the doorway. Not from behind the shower curtain. From somewhere much closer. From inside.
She switched off the light. In the darkness, she remembered something the doctor had said afterward, more to himself than to her: It’s all gone. She had believed him. For forty-six years, she had believed him.
This is the remarkable biological phenomenon called microchimerism. During pregnancy, cells pass between mother and child through the placenta. Some of the child’s cells can remain in the mother’s body for decades, taking up residence in her organs and tissues long after the pregnancy has ended.
Perhaps even more remarkably, research suggests that cells originating from one pregnancy may sometimes pass through the mother to a child conceived years later. A younger brother or sister may carry within them cells from a sibling they have never met.
But there is another implication. One considerably less comfortable to contemplate. The cells of the aborted in the body of the living.
A woman who deliberately and intentionally ends the life of her unborn child may nevertheless continue to carry that child’s cells within her, as may whatever subsequent children she has. For years. Perhaps decades. The pregnancy has ended. The child is gone. But something of that child may remain, quite literally, within the mother’s body.
This is not to suggest that every abortion leaves such a cellular legacy. But science has established that fetal cells can persist long after a pregnancy ends, including pregnancies that do not result in a live birth.
A woman may choose to end her child’s life, only to discover that biology has preserved something of the very life she chose to end. She may have ended the pregnancy. She may never have held the child. But she may carry that child for the rest of her life. The human body, it seems, does not always observe the finality of our decisions.
For a mother who has suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth, there may be something profoundly consoling in this discovery. The child she carried, loved, and lost may have left behind something more than memories. Something tangible. Something of that child’s own body, still present within hers. The arms that never held her baby, or held that baby for far too short a time, may be empty. But her body may still carry a small biological trace of the life she mourns.
Of course, it does not bring the child back. It cannot make the loss less terrible. But death may not have erased every physical trace of the bond between mother and child. And there is tenderness in that possibility.
There may be those who find in this discovery a distorted sort of consolation for abortion. Your baby lives on within you, they may say, as though the persistence of a few cells somehow compensates for the destruction of the child from whom they came. But the presence of a child’s cells in the mother’s body does not undo the absence of that child from her arms. Nor does it alter the circumstances of that absence, particularly when the child’s life was intentionally targeted for death.
For one mother, the thought that something of her child may still live within her may bring comfort. For another, sorrow. For still another, an unwelcome reminder. But biology makes no distinction between a child who was wanted and one who was not. Between a life mourned and a life deliberately ended.
The same cells. The same biological phenomenon. Two very different stories.
Sometimes the body remembers what the mind would rather forget.
Richard Dur is the volunteer Executive Director of Prolife Alberta and an award-winning political consultant with experience on campaigns across Canada.