Interview: Jess Van Wyen, reproductive rights advocate, on the art of starting over
On leaving the Mormon Church, surviving a termination for medical reasons (TFMR), and putting herself (and me) back together
This month, I have been writing about how to invite the mind, body and soul into the process of beginning again. Yet I also know what it is like to spend long days simply mending what is broken, rather than building something new. It has taken me a long time to reclaim the work of grief — of witnessing my endings rather than rushing into new beginnings — as a valid and necessary part of the creative process, and not an absence of creativity.
After I lost a much wanted pregnancy in early 2022, Jess Van Wyen became my teacher in the art of marking endings. Each week, Jess and her co-facilitator Betsy, working on behalf of the organization RTZ Hope, facilitated a support group on Zoom for me and several other women who had lost wanted pregnancies due to a devastating fetal or maternal diagnosis. They shared their stories of being shattered in this way, then offered us hard-won wisdom on how to put ourselves back together again.
Often, Jess would mention the Japanese discipline of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with gold, resulting in a unique new artwork that is more valuable and beautiful, if a bit more fragile, than it was before. In her way, Jess too was teaching us how to tip gold into our own broken places.
By then, Jess had repaired many shattered versions of herself. She had left the Mormon Church in her late 20s. She had to learn to discern for herself what was “good” and “bad” and “both/and,” after obediently following a prophet’s guidance since childhood. Jess had also navigated years of singlehood and then infertility before finally conceiving her son Jacob, only to have to say goodbye in her 26th week of pregnancy. Later, after a final miscarriage, Jess decided she was ready to explore the the path of living joyfully child-free, albeit not by choice.
When the opportunity came to me last year to join Jess as a grief group co-facilitator, it felt like an omen of growth for me: time to see what kind of space your new Self can hold.
The new faces appeared on our screens, one by one, just as my own face had, ashen and bereft. We said their names. We said their children’s names. And we began, piece by piece, to lay out the broken shards of our stories, and what lessons on mending we had to offer.
On the second anniversary of what we refer to as our daughter Saule’s Continuation Day, it feels meaningful to share Jess’s wisdom with you in this interview. I trust that whatever you believe about religion or reproductive rights — subscribers here are a diverse group — you will find something healing in it, and perhaps a new way of viewing your own stories.
When I asked Jess what she hoped readers would take away from her story, she offered this:
“When you imagine a certain future and that vision is your motivation, any other possibilities feel like failure, loss, consolations. But then, by choice or circumstance the future has to be different. It’s empowering to discover new possibilities and opportunities that also lead to happiness. Different, but not less.”
Ryan: How do you define “initiation”?
Jess: Breaking open. Expanding my boundaries. New points of view. Gaining community.
Inherent in initiations is the preparation to become a guide to those who will be initiated after you.
You once told me that at some point, your first big initiation was kicked off by, of all things, a friendly question about breakfast beverages. Generally speaking, Mormons can drink caffeinated soda, but not coffee, per the word of Joseph Smith. A non-Mormon friend once asked you why.
Your first answer was, “That is what our leaders told us, and it really comes down to obedience, whether we understand it or not.” But over time, you couldn’t put it out of your mind. Why shouldn’t you want to really understand? And why would you want to belong to an organization that discouraged this understanding?
Is that an accurate depiction of how things began to unravel for you? What did you learn about yourself through that experience?
Yes. It was an initiation I was not prepared for. I had a crystal clear view of my future, which included initiations I took for granted. Love and marriage to an LDS man, and then bearing children, and then raising them in an LDS home. But as I began to face more and more questions about my childhood faith to which I could not find answers, things started to crumble.
My realization that the LDS church was not what I had believed it to be my entire life, and that it would no longer dictate my future path, was an abrupt one. What was once a well-lit path with a clear map to follow fell away to darkness and a fear of what the next steps would bring, but I had no choice but to move forward anyway. Ultimately I chose to leave the Church.
Afterwards, I was so disoriented. The most important relationships in my life became strained and uncomfortable. I had to take time to mourn – mourn my lost future, the change in my relationships, and to mourn the loss of my sense of self.
Thankfully my closest friend experienced a similar change in her life soon after I did and we decided to hold each other’s hands through whatever came our way from that point on. I connected with other organizations online for women who had left the Church, and this helped too.
As I painstakingly examined the pieces of my shattered self, I was able to sit with each piece, to decide if it was important to me or if I wanted to leave it behind. Each choice was deliberate, which was empowering. It was also really painful to leave pieces behind, realizing that they no longer served me, and some of them had actually caused me harm.
Life became increasingly more gray and complicated as I became my own source of morality and agency. I emerged from this process confident in my inner compass. I emerged knowing that there was joy and happiness ahead, something I had been taught couldn’t fully be experienced outside of my previous faith.
I was also really proud of myself for being authentic, even though it involved many sacrifices. There’s a misconception among many members of my childhood faith that leaving is the easy way out. Leaving was one of the hardest things I have ever done, second only to the loss of my 26-week pregnancy. The easy choice would have been to hold onto my community, not disrupt my relationships, and keep walking the well-lit path where others had provided clear and simple definitions of right and wrong, light and dark, good and evil.
“We had no choice but to completely let go of stereotypical gender roles and expectations”
After you left the Church, you finally met the man of your dreams — a non-member. How did you and Justin come together?
My husband Justin and I met in the early days of Tinder. Justin told me the first day he introduced himself that he uses a manual wheelchair due to cerebral palsy and doesn’t walk at all. I was taken aback, but was already intrigued enough by his personality to want to continue to get to know him. Luckily, he had also had experiences that helped him to understand me too. While he had never been LDS, for example, he had spent a lot of time around his LDS friends, which helped him to understand some of my unique family dynamics, as well as how who I was had been informed by my LDS upbringing.
Once I realized that this was quickly developing into a relationship with teeth, we had many frank conversations about what our future life together might look like. Did he want kids? Yes. Could he have kids? Yes, as far as he knew. What would parenting look like when he couldn’t contribute to the physical demands of raising children? How would our household run when he was unable to help with the physical aspects? We had no choice but to completely let go of stereotypical gender roles and expectations of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.
“I have never experienced that level of pain, and I don’t know that I ever will again.”
After you and Justin got married, you learned that IVF would be the only path forward for you into parenthood. What did this path look like?
While I had let go of my previous vision of being a devout LDS mother raising children in the LDS faith, my desire to bear and raise children never faltered. This led to a 5 year path of saving money, meeting with specialists, countless doctors visits, blood draws, ultrasounds, and over 300 injections. We had 2 egg retrievals that resulted in a total of 10 embryos to try and have a child, and two failed embryo transfers. Finally, we got our bright pink double line, after our 3rd attempt. At 37 years old, my initiation into motherhood officially began.
I reveled in the milestones I had imagined for so long — announcing the pregnancy to overjoyed friends and family, hearing the heartbeat for the first time, finding out the gender, hanging ultrasound sound photos with our son Jacob’s beautiful profile on the fridge, feeling the first flutters of baby kicks inside my womb. I built my baby registry. I picked my nursery and shower theme. My husband “supervised” while we put together a crib in our freshly painted nursery. I spent a lot of time with my friends who had become mothers, soaking in their stories of carrying, bearing, and raising their children. I was excited to receive their wisdom.
What would you like to share of Jacob’s story after that?
Our lives were forever changed when a routine ultrasound at 24 weeks showed a serious abnormality in the baby’s brain. Further tests a week later confirmed several abnormalities that would result in a life of serious cognitive and physical limitations, pain, and suffering should we continue the pregnancy to full term.
My husband and I found ourselves having to make the most important, impactful decision of our lives, while simultaneously navigating crushing grief and devastation. We decided to interrupt the pregnancy, and I had an abortion, also referred to as a Termination for Medical Reasons (TFMR) at 26 weeks.
How did your previous initiations shape the way you thought about this one?
I have never experienced that level of pain, and I don’t know that I ever will again. It was excruciating. Justin and I did share publicly that we had lost our son, but I had never known anyone who had experienced a termination for medical reasons, or TFMR. I didn’t even know that terminology yet. I was terrified of judgment and stigma. So in the beginning we used vague language and were not completely transparent. Our friends and family rallied around us, and while I was incredibly grateful, I still felt so alone.
I also questioned myself because here I thought I had entered the gates into motherhood, I had experienced my initiation, and yet I had made a choice that seemed antithetical to the innate instinct mothers have to save the lives of their children at any cost. It was a strange dichotomy to feel confident that my choice was unquestionably the right one for Jacob and for our family, while simultaneously questioning whether I was allowed to call myself a mother.
That brings me to how my previous experience of leaving behind my religion and religious culture impacted this experience. While the experience of losing my son was more acutely painful, it was not nearly as disorienting. All of the hard work I had done to intentionally build my sense of self, and gain confidence in my inner compass, benefitted me in this period of devastation. I unequivocally trusted myself.
So, my heart was shattered, but this time my sense of self remained whole. I’m so grateful to my 27-year old self, for the painstaking work she did to rebuild her foundation. Having to endure my grief and make the choice that I did, while also having my entire identity stripped away, would have made this experience much harder, and my healing process would have taken much longer.
I have since come to rethink my definition of “a mother’s instincts,” largely thanks to other mothers in my life. As I tentatively and fearfully confessed the full nature of my pregnancy loss to a few trusted people, they reassured me that they recognized I made this decision because I was Jacob’s mother. My desire to protect him, to spare him unnecessary suffering, to sacrifice my own dreams and the privilege of witnessing his entire life unfold, stemmed from my maternal instincts.
I am so grateful for the fact that the community continued to welcome me, that my initiation into motherhood was valid to them. It meant that I would get to remain a part of this particular sisterhood, even though my experience as a mother looks different than most.
On the power of storytelling and listening, with “curiosity and compassion”
You have shared that the LDS community has responded with compassion to your TFMR story, which you began telling with more detail and frequency after the Dobbs decision. Can you tell us more about your experience?
I really believe in the power of advocacy through storytelling. I think that hearts and minds can be changed when we listen with curiosity and compassion to other people’s life experiences that are different than our own. I have experienced that change of heart and mind myself so many times in my own life.
Because of my LDS background, my community still largely consists of conservative to moderate Christians who lean towards pro-life views. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t very nervous about how they might judge me for the decision I made to end my pregnancy in almost the 3rd trimester. But my previous initiations — out of the LDS faith, into the struggles of infertility, and into the community of child loss parents, had blessed me with new bravery and the ability to lean into authenticity, even when it felt vulnerable and scary. And so Justin and I shared Jacob’s full story via social media, and via the Strangerville podcast, hosted by a dear friend based out of Utah (which is an epicenter for the LDS church).
We were overwhelmed with the responses. My LDS friends and family, as well as thousands of strangers, listened to our TFMR story with the spirit of curiosity and compassion I hoped they would. Almost all of the feedback recognized how deeply we love Jacob and honored our grief. So many people told us that our story had made them take another look at their stance on abortion and change their minds to varying degrees. It was powerful validation and to date one of the things I am most proud of.
Since that time, just over a year ago, I no longer fear sharing our TFMR story openly and using it to advocate for abortion rights, which are being decimated across our country. I want others to feel motivated to take action by contacting their political representatives.
Equally as important to me is sharing the reality and frequency of TFMR far and wide, in the hopes that in the future, some couple who receives a devastating fatal or life-limiting diagnosis during their pregnancy may have heard our story and know right away the language for their loss, and how to find resources quickly to help them navigate their impossible situation and grief.
“My LDS friends and family, as well as thousands of strangers, listened to our TFMR story with the spirit of curiosity and compassion I hoped they would. Almost all of the feedback recognized how deeply we love Jacob and honored our grief. So many people told us that our story had made them take another look at their stance on abortion and change their minds to varying degrees. It was powerful validation and to date one of the things I am most proud of.”
— Jess Van Wyen, reproductive rights advocate
In addition to telling your story publicly, you also use it to help others in support group settings, as a member of the RTZ Hope facilitator community. How did your earlier initiations lead you to choose these paths?
I think initiations are rarely, if ever, experienced in isolation. Inherent in them is community and guidance from others who have walked or are walking similar paths.
As I learned the language of TFMR, I sought out community on social media, where I learned that decisions to interrupt wanted pregnancies were actually much more common than I ever could have imagined. While I am so grateful for Instagram accounts and Facebook groups, I still felt I was lacking personal connection, and I felt such a strong need to process my loss verbally in a safe space. One of the TFMR accounts I followed posted a link to an online support group offered by RTZ Hope, specifically for those who had ended a wanted pregnancy.
I will never forget the intense emotions that washed over me when I logged into the support group for the first time five months after my loss and found myself looking at the faces of nine other women who were also TFMR moms. I wept in relief that I wasn’t alone, and that I had found a safe space to process my pain transparently. Those women and I spent 14 weeks together in our support group as we learned together about grief — how to navigate it and integrate it into our lives. We have stayed in touch ever since and I consider many of them to be my closest friends, though “friend” doesn’t really adequately describe the connection I feel with them.
When an email came out from the founder of RTZ Hope a few months later asking for alumni to consider training to facilitate future support groups, I felt a tug in my soul to reach out. I have since facilitated several virtual groups for the organization. It is such a beautiful privilege to hold space and bear witness to the grief and unique complicated emotions experienced after a TFMR.
I consider it a sacred blessing to have the opportunity to walk with these parents, most who are very recent in their loss, as they experience their own initiations. I do my best to share my lessons learned with them, and selfishly, I soak in the additional insights and connections I receive with every new session.
Our group included birthing parents who had experienced devastating fetal diagnoses or life-threatening conditions for the mother that led to the ending of a wanted pregnancy. I had both of these challenges with my second pregnancy, but not with my first, so I also have a living child.
One thing I noticed was how deftly you navigate working with people who had living children, like me, and people for whom this was a first pregnancy. How do you set up a container that makes space for people to talk across this sometimes-tricky divide?
First of all, I want to emphasize that the struggle and the hurt and the difficulty in seeing and spending time around other people who have children, or who are able to build their families without going through significant loss and hardship — that's very common.
In a six week support group course, we dedicate an entire session to how relationships are impacted by grief, and particularly because of infertility and pregnancy loss, because people outside of this experience don’t know how to talk to us about it. We also spend a lot of time establishing our community boundaries in terms of how we will talk to each other.
One of the more important things that we talk about right from the beginning is that if you have living children at home, to make sure they're never on camera for these groups. While you can talk about them, we expect you to be sensitive when you're mentioning them, knowing that it can be triggering. And I definitely have moments of that myself. I'm sad that it's not my reality. So I'm happy to hold space for that because I understand it.
And, I also understand and can see how disoriented these parents of living children are, because they're being rocked in such a big way, down to the very core of their identity. I understand how everything with parenting feels bigger and harder when you're dealing with that.
It’s been lovely to see those with and without living children show compassion for one another in our pregnancy loss groups, and still honor their own individual heartaches. It’s one of the many reasons we describe the space as a “brave” space. I’m honored to hold that space.
The struggle and the hurt and the difficulty in seeing and spending time around other people who have children, or who are able to build their families without going through significant loss and hardship — that's very common. People outside of this experience don’t know how to talk to us about it.
— Jess Van Wyen, support group facilitator, RTZ Hope
On living a child-free-not-by-choice life
After experiencing a final embryo transfer and miscarriage after your TFMR, you decided you were capital-D Done. You are now navigating a Childless Not By Choice path. You have been clear that this is what is best for you and your family vs. the common alternatives people will suggest in these situations.
What do people need to better understand about people who are walking this path?
I was going through infertility for seven years, so I’ve heard it all, but when we’d tell people we were still moving forward with IVF, people were able to make sense of that and make peace with it. Now the conversations are more exhausting. People think that it's an unhappy ending, which they're very uncomfortable with. And so they want to offer alternative happy endings, which is the alternative ways to grow your family.
What about adoption? What about fostering? What about surrogacy? But what about, but what about, but what about…?
And the thing is — and I'm confident in this — you have never offered those alternatives to somebody who has not already considered them. We've considered it every single time. You're not telling us something we don't know. Putting me in a position where I feel like I have to defend and explain why those things aren't right for me is really hard. Those things are not bad. There's just many reasons why they're not the right thing for me and for my family. So you’re making me very uncomfortable simply because I didn't get the happy ending that makes you comfortable.
What might a more supportive response look like?
The best conversation that I've had since I've decided to stop trying to have children is with a really good friend of mine who had been by my side through all of this. I was afraid of this whole conversation, and having to explain and justify why being done was the best thing for me.
When I told her, she took a beat, but then she was like, “I know this sounds really bad and it might come across as selfish, but I'm kind of relieved. My kids are getting older, and my husband and I are entering a period of time where we have more freedom to do stuff. And if you had a kid, it would put you in a different life stage than us. So I'm excited that you and your husband get to just keep having fun vacations with me and mine.”
I just laughed and said, “You know, people probably would think that was selfish, but thank you. Thank you for finding something to be happy about, and seeing how this can actually be a good thing, and making me laugh.”
What about adoption? What about fostering? What about surrogacy? …Putting me in a position where I feel like I have to defend and explain why those things aren't right for me is really hard. Those things are not bad. There's just many reasons why they're not the right thing for me and for my family. So you’re making me very uncomfortable simply because I didn't get the happy ending that makes you comfortable.
— Jess Van Wyen, loss parent and reproductive rights advocate
“The world is always on the other side of the door”
I think your friend’s response touches on this taboo that we don’t mention often enough: that when women do have children, they are sacrificing the opportunity to see many aspects of the world, and maybe even themselves, that are not always possible or easy to explore with children. And now you get to see those places, and to tell us about them. What are you finding?
In initiations, the world is always on the other side of the door. It always is.
There's a misunderstanding — that I bought into — if you don't get to realize motherhood with a living child, that those parts of you shrivel up and die. They just go away. We're conditioned to believe that this is essential to get to utilize some of our sacred feminine traits. Without them, you're left un-whole and unrealized, as a person and as a woman. But all of that love and energy and passion and devotion still exist, and still can be fostered, and just re-directed, at other people and opportunities in your life.
I love that this insight responds to the logistical questions — What about adoption? What about surrogacy? — with a spiritual answer. It's like Dorothy at the end of “The Wizard of Oz,” going, Oh, I guess I don’t need the wizard’s tools to get to where I need to go. I had what I needed the whole time.
I wonder, where did your ruby slippers come from? From when the tornado took you out of Mormonhood?
Yes, exactly.
It makes me think back to when I watched people leave the Church, when I was still a member. I would think to myself, “Oh, they're giving up happiness.” After I left, I felt so defensive of my own life and my choices, and I felt like I need to prove to my loved ones who were still members of the Church that “No, I am happy.”
There’s an echo of that here, now. People who have children love them so much, obviously, and are devoting so much of their time and energy on them. Of course it's hard for them to imagine that something else could make them as happy. And so they feel a sense of pity, or defensiveness, around people who don't have that.
It would be so healing for me if people would just believe me and just recognize that I am going to find just as much fulfillment and happiness as they have, in different ways. Because I always have.
