Ultrasound

Author's note: This post started life as a post on my Facebook wall, so you see? Facebook was good for something! This is to say: If you feel like you've already read this, you might be my Facebook friend. Aw. Hi, bestie!

I was an unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. My mother was 20, and she had no real desire to raise a baby, especially one she had conceived under rather dire circumstances. She learned of her pregnancy less than a decade after Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal in the United States. Honestly, I would have thought long and hard about it in her shoes. Instead, she gave birth to me, and she put me up for adoption. So here I am.

As a child, I fantasized about going to Congress and convincing the hard-hearted, godless lawmakers of the need to make abortion illegal by telling them, "Well, I could have been aborted." In my imagination, they would gasp and shriek and cry out because I am the protagonist of reality. Never mind that when I tried this argument on actual friends, even friends opposed to abortion rights, they would only shrug. To me, abortion was the great "what if" of my life. I almost didn't exist!!

The idea that your existence is the culmination of some destiny you can barely understand lies at the root of so much anti-abortion rights propaganda. I understand why. It's seductive to think that we were put here for a purpose, that our lives are stories constantly in motion, that after we die, those stories will make sense to somebody. But that attraction to potential above what is already happening, right here and right now, flattens people into vessels that bear meaning only to those who observe them, which is to say to those who have power over them somehow.

My transition made me realize just how many people, even people who really loved me, had flattened me into a specific sort of person, one that they were sad to see go when I told them who I really was. I learned that the grief they felt wasn't really for me but for the story they had been telling themselves about who I was. Most of them moved past that grief. I rarely talk to the handful who didn't.

At some point, "It's a boy" had become the only truth some people could see about me. For these people, it was as though the course of my life was set from the second X met Y (I assume — I've never had a chromosome panel, because why??) the night the bundle of cells that would become me first came into being. The argument that I existed from the moment that bundle of cells first showed up is also the argument that I should not be allowed the bodily autonomy to live as myself. It's all the same argument: You are not yourself; you are a train that has been placed on a track within a divine order that is just so. And you had better not question that.

Having children has been on my mind lately because I'm of an age where many of my friends are becoming parents. My wife, Libby, and I have struggled to have children for years now, and we've accepted that we will only have children via medical intervention or adoption. Whether that will happen for us is a question that doesn't have an answer yet, but not knowing the answer has helped me let go of some of those ideas I carried around about my own inevitability, my own God-given destiny. I hope that if I am lucky enough to become a mother, my kid gets so much out of the world that "Emily's child" is among the least interesting things about them. I want them to write their own story, as I've written mine.

Since so many of my friends are having babies now, I've gotten used to looking at ultrasound photographs. What strikes me is how similar they are to spirit photography from the 1800s. In spirit photography, a tricksy photographer would create a double exposure in which a living person had the shadowy specter of a dead relative superimposed over them. If the image were too distinct, however, the forgery would be obvious. So the double exposure had to suggest a person more than show a person. You saw a shadow; you imagined a loved one. And that loved one wasn't as they were in life because death robs a person of their essence. It lets those who survive them flatten them into a convenient memory, something that can be pressed between the pages of a scrapbook.

Ultrasounds, I realize, are somewhat similar. Yes, if you are an expectant parent, it is exhilarating to see the shadow that will one day be your child. You will print that photo out and put it in a scrapbook and be able to trace the lineage of your beloved kid back to when they were a collection of cells in a uterus. There is a power and a beauty in that process. I wouldn't want to rob any parents of that power or that beauty.

But these ultrasounds are still a suggestion of a person to be. They are shadows we are filling in with someone who is not yet here. Those of us who watch the being on the screen slowly but surely take on a human form are getting to know them a little bit better with every picture taken, sure, but we do not yet know them. We are flattening them into the person we assume they will be, but they will surprise us by being themselves. Children always do.

Spirit photographs always draw your eye to the ghost, not the living person. You are asked to stare at the spectral figure and miss the grief that drove someone to have the photo made. So, too, does the certainty that every clump of cells that might someday be a human being is part of a story the living can tell better than the one the story is about. If that clump of cells does become a human being, you have already created a narrative where their existence is as much about your expectation as it is their reality. The very idea privileges the eventual existence of a flattened image of a human being over the very real one who could have any number of reasons for not wanting to have a baby. It treats a shadowy clump of cells as a ghost because it is more convenient to love those who are not with us than it is to support those who might be going through something emotionally fraught or complicated.

This comparison makes for an imperfect metaphor. Yet it's the closest I've come to explaining why I don't believe that my desperate desire to be a mother somehow outweighs the autonomy of an actual living, breathing person going through something I cannot imagine. Being involuntarily childless sometimes feels like a curse; being made to force your body through an unwanted pregnancy must be a curse several hundreds of times greater than that.

And then there is the curse every single one of us places on every single newborn child, the curse that is our certainty of who they will be. Most of us are good at letting go of that certainty as the kid reveals their personality a little bit at a time, but too many of us aren't, and too many of those of us who aren't are parents.

There is a convenience to looking at an ultrasound and reading a person into what you see there. Late in a pregnancy, when there's a face and a recognizably baby-like body, it's probably inevitable. But turning every shadow into a person is a way of establishing power, if only subtly. There is an enormous gulf between looking at a shadow of a suggestion of a person who might eventually be and saying, "I wonder who they'll be," and saying, "I know this story already."

Talk back to me: What's the goofiest pop-culture name I could give a baby with the last name "St. James" that you nevertheless think that baby could pull off? I kind of think "Garfield St. James" is a great name. Tell me in the comments or via email!

What I've been up to: I have a piece that's been in edits for a bit that should finally run this week, and there's an attached Q&A that I had a blast doing. But: That's not something I can link you to! So instead, I will link you to this thing I wrote about the wonders of Microsoft Solitaire a few weeks ago.

There’s a pleasant, throwback quality to solitaire in this age of doomscrolling. For a few minutes at a time, I can look away from the rest of the world and just look for a way to get to the six of clubs that I know I need to finish this game. You can put a bunch of bells and whistles on solitaire, and you can toss it into a fancy package that’s supported by ads, but it’s still just the same game as it always was. It’s a connection to a time when these glowing screens were important, sure, but also not so heavily dominant in our lives. It might be the closest one can come to going offline while staying glued to a screen.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: A few of you have written to ask for more coverage of non-English language television. We will have several freelancer essays on that topic in the months to come. For instance, here's CT Marie on the Italian series Gomorrah's unique way of treating sexual violence.

But the series also has some fascinating things to say about the roles of men and women in criminal organizations. Women and men are not equal in the violent landscape of Gomorrah. They die equally, and physical violence is depicted often. Both men and women frequently die in the series, but the show treats sexual violence differently. As an audience, we know rape and sexual assault exist, and both could happen to the show's women characters. But the show never depicts such violence. And that choice is striking in a TV landscape where sexual violence is often treated exploitatively.

Read me: Katharine Trendacosta has been telling me about this piece she has been working on about TV's acute shortage of experienced showrunners for literal years, and I'm so glad to be seeing it in print finally. It's terrific!

But the hunger for content brought on by the explosion of streaming has stretched the old, ad hoc training system to its breaking point. There simply are not enough experienced showrunners to head all the shows being made. Moreover, shorter episode orders and script writing for a whole season finishing before production has begun has robbed new writers of concrete experience they would have gotten even a few years ago. When those writers go on to pitch their shows, there’s a chance they’ve never seen one of their scripts actually get filmed. And, again, there aren’t enough experienced showrunners to pair with them.

Watch me: Princess Weekes's amazing takedown of true-crime culture and how it's contributed to the discussion of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial is deeply insightful, passionately emotional, and nicely concise.

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And another thing... The tabletop role-playing game DIE, one of my favorites ever, is now available to back on Kickstarter! I think it's excellent! I wrote a bunch about it last year right here.

Opening credits sequence of the week: These aren't opening credits, but I did so enjoy when Green Acres characters would make fun of the credits rolling over their faces, so here's a whole video of the show doing just that.

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A thing I had to look up: I checked out so much spirit photography in writing this to capture its spirit properly, and I also had to look up my own Facebook page. A champion!

This week's reading music: "The Great Beyond" by REM

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.