Abortion and pregnancy loss are almost always talked about in one of two ways: as medical procedures, or as emotionally difficult events to move past as quickly as possible. Both framings are true as far as they go. Neither is complete.
There's a third way to understand these experiences — one that's ancient in origin but largely absent from how we talk about reproductive health today: as thresholds. As initiations.
A Threshold Is Not the Same as a Problem
An initiatory experience is one that changes the person who goes through it — that moves them from one understanding of identity into another, often through a passage that involves loss, disorientation, and eventual reorientation. Pregnancy, in this framing, is not simply a biological process. It's a state that touches identity, perception, intuition, relationship, and consciousness — regardless of how it resolves.
Whether a pregnancy culminates in birth, abortion, or loss, the person who moves through it is often changed by the encounter itself — not only by the outcome. Treating that change as something to process quickly and move past can leave real experience unacknowledged. Treating it as a threshold worth attending to consciously opens a different kind of question: what did this encounter with creation initiate in you?
Why This Framing Matters
Culturally, abortion and pregnancy loss are often held in silence, shame, or clinical detachment. People are frequently offered very little space to explore what these experiences actually meant to them — spiritually, psychologically, or in terms of identity — beyond the immediate physical and emotional aftermath.
Approaching these experiences as initiatory doesn't require any particular belief system. It simply makes room for a more complete inquiry: not just what happened, but what did this change in me, and what is still asking to be understood?
An Ancient Map for a Modern Threshold
One useful framework for this kind of exploration comes from one of the oldest recorded myths in human history: the descent of Inanna through the seven gates of the underworld. At each gate, Inanna is required to release something she carries — until she arrives, stripped bare, before Ereshkigal. She is then restored and returned, changed by the descent.
As a map, the seven gates — identity, story, attachment, protection, control, knowing, persona — offer a structure for consciously walking through what a reproductive threshold has asked someone to release, and what comes after: death, restoration, exchange, and return. The framework doesn't tell anyone what their experience meant. It offers a structure for discovering that for themselves.
Support Doesn't Need to Wait for Certainty
Whether someone is currently pregnant, recently through an abortion or loss, or reflecting on an experience from years ago, there is no single "right time" to explore what it meant. Some people want support in the moment. Others find themselves circling back to an experience much later, aware that something about it remains unresolved or unintegrated.
Reproductive experience, approached this way, isn't something to simply get through. It's something worth genuinely meeting.
