This article explores the embodied experience of medication-induced abortion through a critical feminist and evolutionary lens. Drawing on personal diaries and narrative, I examine how the physiological process of abortion, particularly the unexpected intensity of the expulsion of large tissue clots, evoked associations with other adaptive ejection functions of the female body: menstruation, childbirth and lactation. I argue that the term “bleeding,” as commonly used in relation to medication-induced abortion and rooted in biomedical and risk-oriented discourse, fails to capture the agency of the process. Rather than perceiving abortion as a site of trauma or shame, I experienced it with visceral awe at the female body's self-regulating force. Building on traditions of embodied knowledge, I situate abortion within a dual lens of function and sensation—showing how the same adaptive function can be lived as pain, relief or empowerment, depending on context. By reframing abortion as a powerful act of embodied ejection, like birth and lactation, I invite a shift in how we understand reproductive physiology and its relationship to agency and language. This article contributes to feminist psychology by foregrounding corporeal experience and reclaiming women's bodily knowledge as a generative source of both understanding and cultural meaning.
Orli Dahan (Thu,) studied this question.