Misconceived Metaphors: Irene Vilar’s Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict

Introduction

For years it didn’t occur to me that there was anything to tell about abortion. Quite the opposite. There was much to forget. But I discovered that many other women were hungry to come to terms with a past scarred by cowardice and the need to cloak themselves in someone else’s power. Many had a history of repeat abortions. They, like me, were eager to find a language to articulate an experience they had seldom spoken about. My testimony is not unique. Beyond the antiseptic, practical language of Planned Parenthood and the legalistic or moralistic discourse of Roe v. Wade and its pro-choice and pro-life counterparts, there are few words to articulate individual, intimate accounts.¹

For several years after finishing graduate course work in gender studies and while making initial forays into the academic job market, I worked in abortion providing as a patient advocate. During this clinical experience I regularly encountered women having repeat abortions, encounters for which pro-choice and academic discourse had not prepared me. In this sense I shared the experience of the abortion providers interviewed by feminist ethnographer Wendy Simonds, who observes that doing abortion work necessarily causes providers to rethink oversimplified pro-choice rhetoric.² Similar to Simonds I shared the sense that while I view abortion as an empowering act, most women seeking abortion see it only as failure.³ This is particularly true of repeat abortion. Popularly denigrated as “using abortion as birth control,” repeat abortion is seen as a failure by many patients, policy makers, and some providers. It was therefore with apprehension and eagerness that I approached Irene Vilar’s 2009 memoir, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.

Impossible Motherhood is the second memoir by Vilar, who was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in 1969 and is an author and editor living on the US mainland. Her earlier memoir, The Ladies’ Gallery (1996), about a turbulent period in her life during which she attempted suicide, was short-listed for the Mind Book of the Year Award (recognizing writing on mental health issues) and garnered critical attention as a Philadelphia Inquirer and Detroit Free Press notable book of the year. In it Vilar weaves her personal narrative into the histories of her mother and her notorious grandmother, Lolita Lebron.⁴ This first memoir constructs a lineage of female suffering, martyrdom, and depression in the context of colonialism, dwelling in particular on her grandmother’s single-minded focus on politics and nationalist myth-making and her mother’s suicide in 1977, when Vilar was only eight years old. Impossible Motherhood, published over ten years later, reflects at length on that earlier memoir, revealing a more complex context for Vilar’s struggles with depression and suicide as readers learn of her youthful marriage to her former professor, a man more than thirty years her senior with whom she had multiple unplanned pregnancies and abortions.

Impossible Motherhood recounts how Vilar had fifteen abortions over sixteen years while in relationships with two men. It narrates a cycle of unplanned pregnancies motivated by lack of self-care and a secret desire to defy Vilar’s first husband. Each pregnancy was a rebellion against his wish to remain childless (and his belief that freedom for women is freedom from motherhood) but presented her with the frightening prospect of becoming a single mother. Vilar diagnoses herself as being an abortion “addict,” swinging between the highs and lows of control and chaos and only “cured” later in her second marriage by motherhood. Becoming a mother was significant, Vilar suggests, because it healed the trauma of losing her own mother, whose suicide, she speculates, arose from depression brought on by an unnecessary hysterectomy performed as part of a US-backed program of sterilizing Puerto Rican women.

The memoir presents readers with a difficult, uncomfortable discussion of what “choice” looks like in women’s lives and how we are and are not the rational actors upon which pro-choice rhetoric and legislation is predicated. Considering the charged feelings surrounding repeat abortion, Vilar understandably struggled to get...