I love my body, and it's trying to kill me

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"When the draft opinion from the Supreme Court was leaked, I knew I had to completely change my Fringe show." While Knutson had originally planned to create a show about Rachel Carson, who is considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, the topic of abortion suddenly became much more urgent. 

"I didn't find out until a month after my visit to the hospital that the procedure that saved my life was called an abortion. That word was never used in the hospital," explains Katie Knutson, creator of "I Love My Body, and it's Trying to Kill Me." Instead, the hospital staff used words like "bleeding internally" and "emergency surgery." Knutson's story of her ectopic pregnancy is unique to her, but unfortunately not rare. According to the March of Dimes, about 1 in every 50 pregnancies in the U.S. is an ectopic pregnancy, meaning the fetus has implanted somewhere outside the uterus. In Knutson’s case, it was inside her fallopian tube, a place where a baby cannot grow and where the growing fetus poses a significant risk to the woman’s life.

“At first, I was excited to find out I was still pregnant and begged the doctor to ‘move the fetus over to my uterus.’ She told me, ‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. What is growing inside you can never become a baby.’ And then I mourned the loss of this pregnancy again.” (She thought she had miscarried a week earlier.)

Knutson’s experience was story-worthy as much for what happened during her journey to try to expand her family as what didn’t. She didn’t have to watch a video telling her she was ending a life. She didn’t have to travel to another state to have the procedure done. Her doctor was not concerned about losing her license or going to jail. She didn’t have to walk past protestors calling her a murder. Instead, she was seen as a patient in a hospital with an immediately life-threatening condition.

Knutson is driven to tell her story because it adds nuance to the abortion debate. “The media often reduces the issue to black and white, but there are so many shades of grey in between. My experienced helped me to see the complexity of the issue, and the more stories I hear, the more complicated it becomes. I hope my story can add to the discourse of this incredibly divisive topic.”

Unfortunately, her ectopic pregnancy was not the first time Knutson realized how much her body and the law intersected. “When I was in high school, my family got new flooring after our 80-gallon fish tank broke, ruining the existing carpet and linoleum.” Years later, I found out that the rashes and allergies I was experiencing could be connected to the toxic chemicals in that flooring.” Without warnings about the toxic nature of those chemicals, Knutson and her family had no idea of the dangers, and are still living with the results of those exposures. “It is amazing to me that government officials are so interested in protecting the lives of unborn children, but once they are born, the rights of corporations to make money seem to trump the rights of those children.”

“I hope the sharing of my stories will inspire others to share their stories and add to the discourse – not by yelling statistics or catch phrases at one another, but by actually listening and sharing stories.”

NOTE: To keep every body safe, please wear a mask to this performance.