Menstrual Cups, IUDS, and so much more!
This week’s guest is Elise Michaels. She’s a mindset coach helping others to heal subconscious trauma. Her abortion experiences happened mid-pandemic after a shift in her IUD made it ineffective as birth control.
Show Notes:
9:55 “My worst fear was always to get pregnant and I thought I had taken care of that fear with the copper IUD” Abortion was a choice I didn’t think I’d have to face
11:06 “I wish there had been a warning on the box of the menstrual cup”
11:35 “I never wanted to be a person who had to abort my own child… that’s why I took the step”
11:58 “In the states the fact is that birth control is not readily available to everyone at a price they can afford”
13:40 Feels stacked against us as women
15:00 “I don’t think anyone feels good about it, but I’m happy that we get that choice”
16:00 I was so utterly confused by being human, by being a woman
17:11 “I didn’t want children… growing up I had a very dysfunctional family… my mom was never there mentally or physically … she didn’t have the tools to heal her own trauma… I didn’t want to bring a child up even to have a glimpse of what I went through” “I didn’t want to recreate that cycle”
18:40 “It’s not as simple as ‘we’re gonna keep it or we’re not’, you have to calculate out, what does that child future look like… now we’re responsible for what kind of life it’s gonna have”
19:29 Such a massive disconnect between what we are experiencing and what the world is seeing
20:21 “I did try to distract myself in any way I could… running away and shutting down”
20:49 “We really needed to connect with each other so we could build up our lives again”
21:06 “You need to be able to find a trusted person to talk with… if you’re not able to talk about it you won’t be able to process in a healthy way”
21:44 Relationships turned upside down after abortion
22:29 “You’ve made this decision, now you really have to communicate, how do you want to process things going forward”
22:55 “Not reacting personally to what your partner has to say, actively listening… let them process the way that they need to process”
23:40 “Getting on the same page with how you heal, and understanding where they might be coming from”
24:17 “ It gave me a whole different perspective on life… helped me connect with grief on a different level”
26:40 “You’re the only one who can know your own loss and pain and grief… just because we made this decision doesn’t make it any less of a loss… I still deserve to grieve it”
27:19 “It’s up to women to handle these things and to carry all the trauma and all the grief”
27:45 Politics and abortion- As if this isn’t hard enough, you’re gonna make it harder with some dumbass rule.
32:20 I had just found my voice and my freedom and my power as a woman in the world. I was discovering who I was and becoming the person I was meant to be.
33:48 Very much a lifestyle decision, that’s just not what I want
34:28 “Why is it up to the woman?”
35:09 “There’s a lot of improvement and a lot more that can go into this than ‘for or against’ abortion”
36:28 Inequality between our responsibilities in the world as men and women
39:19 “We don’t talk about sex enough… it creates these unsafe space for us to talk about our options… we can help the next generations suffer less”
41:05 To come back and remember how many emotions were there when you made the decision in the first place… it’s a lot easier to look back and think it could have been different
41:50 “Any decision you’ve ever made, you’re doing the best you can with what you know, and you can’t blame yourself for that”
