Irene Vilar: 15 Abortions in 15 Years

Irene Vilar is telling her story, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.

From the Washington Post:

The two little impossibilities want Mami's attention.

Loretta, a self-assured and quietly focused 5-year-old, hides squiggly line drawings under the furniture at a relative's home in Alexandria. Lolita, a high-spirited 3-year-old, sways to Beethoven's "Für Elise."

Mami scoops up both daughters. They tumble into the soft embrace of the couch, all squeals and nuzzles and squirmy delight. The girls start wriggling loose, and Mami pulls them back. One more hug. For an instant, it's as if releasing them would somehow make them disappear, would confirm their utter impossibility.

That Irene Vilar embraces the role of motherhood is a grand incongruity, a mind-blower. She has just published a precariously nuanced, intellectually ambitious and unnervingly frank memoir titled "Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict." In the book, Vilar writes about a "shameful" period in her life -- before she became a mother -- when she says she underwent 15 abortions in 15 years.

...The almost unimaginable claim -- vetted by her publisher's attorneys, who say they have been able to confirm all but two procedures done in now-defunct clinics -- places Vilar at the outer extreme of the phenomenon of multiple abortions. It has also made her a sudden target of blogospheric vitriol and disapproval.

Yet, in Vilar's deft hands, her story of serial abortions mostly bypasses the volatile abortion rights standoff, instead plumbing her "self-mutilation," her "pregnancy fantasies" and multiple suicide attempts, her conflicts over submission and control, and, ultimately, her healing. She wants to steer readers to a subtler point: that abortion was, for her, an addiction, a warped and tragic vehicle to assert control over her life.

Vilar's serial abortions were really just a "vehicle to assert control over her life"?

She seems to be forgetting that her "vehicle" had the consequence of asserting control over the lives of 15 others. She exerted control over their lives when she chose to end them. She didn't permit them to be born.

What's so jarring about this write-up is the way Manuel Roig-Franzia romanticizes motherhood, describing what a wonderful parent Vilar is.

"One more hug. For an instant, it's as if releasing them would somehow make them disappear, would confirm their utter impossibility."

Are we really supposed to be impressed because she loves her daughters?

Vilar wants to take the morality out of her actions and medicalize what she chose to do. She was an addict, a victim of a disorder.

I have trouble with the application of "addict" in this case because the language of addiction provides an out, a way to shift responsibility for one's actions on to a pathological condition rather than being held personally accountable.

Vilar's addiction was serial killing. She became pregnant 15 times and ended those 15 lives.

Of course, that admission to sell books would make her a "sudden target of blogospheric vitriol and disapproval." What did she expect?

I don't condone spewing vitriol and rage on blogs, but the disapproval certainly seems warranted.

What does she want? Approval? Indifference?

As a human being, I am repulsed by her behavior, such disregard for the sanctity of life.

The Post article details her relationships, marriage, and affairs in a very matter-of-fact manner, as if such promiscuity and recklessness is a reasonable way to live.

...Finally, in 2003, Vilar begins to bring order to her life. She meets another writer at a conference in Vermont. Within months, they marry and settle in Colorado. He is a father of two, and he wants more children. Amazingly, despite the abuse Vilar says she has inflicted on her body, an exam shows that her cervix is healthy. She can conceive, and for the first time, she sees the pregnancy through. Loretta arrives six weeks early. Vilar writes that, to comprehend it all, she had to sit and rock the infant "until I understood she was born."

"UNDERSTOOD SHE WAS BORN"?

...As reflective as she is, Vilar says she doesn't dwell on what might have become of the fetuses she aborted or the lives each could have led. Only twice, she says, did the little possibilities inside her seem more tangible to her; those abortions took place 16 and 17 weeks after conception. "With one, I felt movement" inside her, she says matter-of-factly. "With the other, I almost died."

Indeed, Vilar says if abortion were illegal, she would probably be dead now, because she would have resorted to unsafe, unsanctioned abortionists or perished after a self-induced puncture. (Did she consider finding adoptive parents as a way out? "Many times," she says.)

She's unabashedly supportive of abortion rights, but says her addiction to the cycle of pregnancy and abortion meant that she wasn't really choosing to end her pregnancies. "In a pathology, you don't have choice," she says. "I come from a culture that cultivates mixed messages," she says, quiet for a moment on the couch in Alexandria. Then she softly starts to sing.

"Te amo muchisimo/Por tu bien te digo, 'Adiós.' " -- I love you very much. For your own good, I say goodbye.

"You see?" she says. "Mixed messages, even in our songs."

She says children are the great joys of her life now. She bought supplies for two full Montessori classrooms, and used them to convert a large portion of their house into learning spaces to home-school her daughters. "I just so much enjoy being with them," she says. "Very shortly, they'll be grown up."

Vilar says she is working on a book about motherhood, and she would like to have one more child. She feels the tug.

Vilar is using addiction as an excuse.

"[H]er addiction to the cycle of pregnancy and abortion meant that she wasn't really choosing to end her pregnancies."

What? I don't buy that. She chose to abort her 15 children.

Being addicted doesn't mean one loses free will. Overcoming an addiction IS a choice. She chose to end her addiction. She has two daughters as proof of that.

I don't know why Vilar went public with this, other than the attention and potential financial profit it would bring her.

She's sort of a reverse Octomom.

Does Vilar have a conscience? I really can't grasp her lack of guilt and her willingness to exploit the deaths of her 15 children.

When she hugs her daughters, when she feels "the tug" to give birth to another child, doesn't she ache for the 15 she killed and never hugged?

The reality is Vilar is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame. The price? The lives of 15 innocents.

What's so sad is that Vilar isn't mourning the many lives she ended. I guess she's too busy working on her book about motherhood.