by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
A woman who had 15 abortions in 16 years has written a book chronicling her dark past, not to warn women about the physical and emotional pain of having repeat abortions, but to “eliminate the stigma of abortion.”
On her website, Irene Vilar, 40, says her new book, Impossible Motherhood, is committed to eliminating the stigma of abortion “by creating new ways to talk about abortion honestly and publicly.”
Still professing to be “pro-choice,” Vilar’s book chronicles her life as the daughter of Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebron who served 25 years in jail for storming the steps of the Capitol with a gun in 1954. Lebron eventually committed suicide by throwing herself from a moving car when Vilar was eight years-old.
Vilar, who attended boarding school in New Hampshire, was just 15 when she left for Syracuse University, where she met and later married her first husband who she described as a tyrannical 50 year-old professor. Her addiction to abortion obviously started while married to this man who believed children ruined a person’s sex drive. In an interview with ABC News, she described the relationship as “emotionally dependent” and “riddled with shame, self-mutilation and several suicide attempts.”
She eventually ended her dysfunctional marriage and found a new husband, a writer and a poet, with whom she had two daughters – now ages three and five.
“Halfway through working on this book I got pregnant for the 17th time,” Vilar writes. “I don’t think I would have been able to give birth without the call to accountability and self reflection that writing this story demanded. My daughter became the coherence emerging from the shameful mass of 35 years.”
This incredibly conflicted woman, who describes herself as “psychologically disturbed,” is obviously angry at what she calls a “hypersexualized” society that values the perfect mother but also expects women to be accomplished professionally while remaining sexually attractive to men.
“Women have a deep need for agency, for purpose and direction and society is not providing natural and healthy channels for creative action,” she said. “In school and on TV, every message I get is what I am doing as a mother or wife is wrong. I should be thinking about a profession and not mothering. Everyone is having babies, and yet they don’t want to care for them.”
Does she regret her many abortions? Absolutely.
“Yes, I was an abortion addict and I do not wish for a scapegoat,” she writes in her book. “Everything can be explained, justified, our last century tells us. Everything maybe, except for the burden of life interrupted that shall die with me.”
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