Former ‘abortion addict’ ended 15 pregnancies in 17 years
Irene Vilar, aseries editor of the Americas at Texas Tech University Press, is now the happy mother of Lolita, three, and Loretta, five, but that wasn’t always the case.
When she was 16, Vilar met a man 34 years her senior, whom she would eventually marry.
This event began her rollercoaster ride of conceiving and terminating pregnancies over the next 17 years, she explains in her new memoir, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.
Vilar describes her first husband, Pedro Cuperman, as “a disturbingly handsome man” who believed “families are a nest of suffering” – and says having children with him was off the table.
She said he chose her to be his wife because he thought of younger women as “unformed . . . unfinished, with not too many wounds”.
Vilar rebelled during her relationship with Cuperman by “forgetting” to take her birth control pills. When she would find out she was pregnant, she would feel joy at first, then panic – because she didn’t want to lose her husband.
So each time she got pregnant, Vilar would have an abortion, always feeling a mix of relief and despair. She also tried committing suicide several times during her marriage.
“Of course, this did not mean I wanted to do it again and again,” Vilar said. “A druggie also wants to stop every time.”
Even before her memoir was published last week, Vilar’s story unleashed a wave of emotion in the anti-abortion community. Reactions have included pity and – at least in one blogger’s case – a call to put her behind bars.
On the abortion rights side, reaction has been muted.
“The majority of pro-choicers – and I don’t blame them – are somewhat confused,” said Vilar. She believes that access to legal abortion saved her life because she says she would have found a way to end her pregnancies.
“Abortion exists everywhere, legal or not,” she said. Latin America, she noted, has a relatively high abortion rate and stringent anti-abortion laws. Most abortions in the region are considered “unsafe” by health authorities, which estimate that up to 5,000 women in the region die each year from abortions.
Vilar is well aware of the horrific reaction her story may inspire.
For years, she resisted writing Impossible Motherhood for fear that she could be misunderstood, or that her confession might endanger the legal choice that she exercised so compulsively.
She received 51 rejections, though many were complimentary.
One publisher wrote: “I should want to publish it, I know but it’s just too painful for me . . . even with its somewhat happy ending.”
In 2008, the manuscript found its way to Judith Gurewich, a Lacanian psychoanalyst who taught at Harvard and runs the publishing house Other Press.
These days, Vilar is raising her daughters and two teenage stepchildren with her second husband, whom she married less than two months after they met in 2003.
She spends many hours each week reading up on child development. “I try to be very aware of what I lack, and what I need to learn. I read a lot of books to see what ways I can protect my girls from the world, including me.”
She is working on a new memoir “In the Middle of the Night” It is, she said, about motherhood.
