I actually wrote all but one sentence of this before the Supreme Court decision leaked, for reasons that will become obvious…
Six years ago, the calendar was just the same as it is this year. April 17th—the day I must have gotten pregnant—was a Sunday that year, too. And it was the Monday after Mother’s Day, six years ago today, that I took a pregnancy test alone, long before the sun came up. And May 14th will fall on a Saturday this year, just as it did when I traveled across state lines and got an abortion. Somehow—out of all the months I’d spun pregnancy scares out of thin air and unbroken condoms—that month I hadn’t worried.
In the five years leading up to my unplanned pregnancy, the state where I lived had piled on abortion restrictions: waiting periods, shuttered clinics, state-directed counseling that's short on science and long on judgment. Across the border, getting an abortion meant spending half a day in a crowded waiting room for a five-minute procedure, no counseling, no preaching, $400.
At that point, I had spent years volunteering in reproductive health advocacy, staffing an abortion hotline in California, and fundraising for Planned Parenthood. There’s a lot I could say about abortion in the held breath before Roe v. Wade goes down. That very same spring that I found myself unexpectedly pregnant, Purvi Patel was sentenced to 20 years in prison for inducing her own abortion. She was alone and desperate, backed into a corner by bad luck on top of bad circumstances. She had no one to turn to, she tried and failed to navigate Indiana's abortion restrictions, and then she ran out of time. I’ve experienced a flicker—and only a flicker—of that desperation. Once I made up my mind, I would have done whatever it took, submitted to any risk. I won’t forget that. I won’t forget women who don’t have the choices that I had.
But about my abortion, I don’t have anything political to say. Firsthand experience is rarely convenient in that way: talking points can’t admit the messiness that clings to life as it’s actually lived. I can only say that when I found myself pregnant, the language of the pro-choice movement—some of which I had used myself—didn’t speak to me at all. What ‘potential life’? What packet of cells? (“It’s a seahorse, basically,” a friend of mine said.) To me, it was a baby. There was nothing hypothetical about it—‘the baby we could have had’—but the real living baby that we would have had, had I not taken drastic actions: a baby that was a boy or a girl, a baby that would have been born in the dead of winter, at the beginning of a new year. For me, the baby was everything that it might have been. It hurt me to kill it—and I was unable to think about going through with the abortion in any other, less loaded terms. Even now, I think—once a week or so—about that alternative timeline: how old would you be now? There’s a part of me that addresses myself to that absence in my life.
We talk about abortion all the time as a country. But in a human sense, we rarely talk about it at all. Mostly, we yell about it, in one direction or the other. Quieter voices—the ones with winding, inconvenient stories to tell—get drowned out. Is there enough room to have complicated feelings? Or in my case, to regret not the decision itself—it was still the right one—but the situation that produced it and, at the time, seemed to necessitate it?
For years, I carried that ultrasound image around in my wallet. Where I lived at the time, providers were required to show women the image on the ultrasound and describe the pregnancy in detail, whether the woman wanted to see it or hear it or not. But across the border, the nurse asked if I wanted to know how far along I was and I said yes, and when she asked if I wanted a copy of the ultrasound, I said yes. Six years later, that picture is the only evidence I have that it ever happened. But I remember.
Beautiful writing as always.
To make a comment on this seems misplaced.
I will only say this: it made me cry.
A pregnancy has only the significance the woman gives it. If the woman wants the potential child, it is a wonderful time, full of excitement and hope. If she doesn't, it is a time of fear and hopelessness. No one should tell a woman how she should feel, or what to do, about that time in her life.