There is nothing selfish about wanting to live - it’s the most simple, instinctive, human desire there is. Still, most of us – men and women – feel we would lay down our lives for our children; there’s an instinct in that, too.

But there is something about the spectacle of anti-abortion advocates celebrating women who die trying to save their unborn babies that feels a bit too gleeful – they’re shockingly unabashed in their pushing the idea that the lives of adult women aren’t nearly as important as their ability to bring children into the world.

Every few months, a story will come out about a pregnant woman who ignores medical advice or refuses treatment so that her fetus won’t be harmed – like 34-year-old Kathy Taylor of Utah, who died last month after forgoing treatment for melanoma while she was pregnant with her sixth child. (Sadly, her son Luke was born prematurely and died as well.) Or Karisa Bugal from Colorado, also 34 years old, who decided to take on a riskier C-section late last year in order to save her child’s life, even though it ultimately caused her own death.



Most recently in the news is Suzanne Mazzola’s from Florida, who was diagnosed with the deadly pregnancy complication placenta accreta. Mazzola decided to wait until 35 weeks to deliver in order to give her son more time to develop even though it put her life at further risk. (Mazzola’s story has since been co-opted by anti-abortion organizations, though it’s unclear what her politics were – placenta accreta is generally diagnosed in the third trimester so she likely never considered ending the pregnancy; her choice was just the best time to deliver.)

These women’s stories are heartbreaking, and their bravery is indisputable. And while I’m incredibly glad we live in a country where women are able to make the medical choices they felt best for themselves and their families, I am horrified by the zeal with which their stories are repeated to score political points after their deaths or their deaths glamorized in the media as the ultimate parental sacrifice.

Why must the best mothers be dead mothers?



I am scared for women who have been taught to believe that the most important, beautiful thing they can do is perish. There are already so many ways in which women jump through hoops in order not to exist: we silence ourselves, making sure we’re quiet and unobtrusive; some of us starve ourselves, getting smaller and smaller as to not take up too much space. And this noble disappearing act has become so commonplace that there mere act of being alive – making our voices heard, taking up space, choosing to live – is seen as a disruption of natural order.

As Bugal’s sister told a CNN affiliate at the time: “She came to the hospital to be a mom and she did what she was supposed to do.”

To live would be selfish.

When I was pregnant and at risk of dying from complications due to preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome, I remember asking our doctors if there was anything we could do to delay delivery of my daughter and give her more time to develop - even if it meant putting myself in more danger. Perhaps it was selfless, but I also wonder if I just needed the doctors to know that I understood the social contract around motherhood, and that wanting to be “a good mother” was more important to me than my own health and life.

Years later, when I had an abortion rather than put my life at risk again, I wrote that it was, in part, because I had an existing child that needed me. That’s true – but the other piece of it is that I needed to live, too. Not because I was a mother or wife, but because I am a person and I am not done yet.

Edgar Allan Poe once said that “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world.” And from Shakespeare’s Ophelia to “Women in Refrigerators” – a website about female superheroes being killed in comic books – the trope has survived even as women in art have not.

But if there was an update to Poe’s famous quote, I’d say it’s this: the death of a pregnant woman is unquestionably the most valorized topic in the world.

Yes, these women are brave - but I hope that such a serious decision always feels like a real choice to women rather than a fulfillment of the narrative of self-erasure we’ve been taught our whole life. We are so much more than beautiful, tragic stories.