We Don’t Talk About Pregnancy
My heart pounded conspicuously in my chest as my husband and I approached the clinic. I was terrified. What if there were protesters outside? What if they talked to me? What if they asked me why I was there?
Fuck. What if I knew them? It was a small community, after all. Liberal, yes, but the odds that I might know someone here were markedly not in my favor.
My decision already rested on a precarious house of cards. The tiniest breeze might send me plummeting back into a torrent of raging tears, a child caught in an overly emotional tantrum, twisting uncomfortably in my big girl bed. And nothing was more terrifying than the thought of having to explain why I’d ended up there. Except, of course, the thought of a tiny human suddenly dictating every previously free moment of my day.
Happily married, thirty-two-year-old women don’t get abortions. Happily married, thirty-two-year-old, cis-het, financially stable, physically healthy women, who are decidedly undecided about raising children, do not have abortions.
But when the test read “Pregnant,” I still collapsed into a ball of uncontrolled anxiety, a burnt out star folding in on herself, loud, wet tears suffocating me as I buried myself in blankets, my shaking hand still clutching the stick I’d peed on.
I thought I was ready. I thought I was open to this. I thought I could do it. At least, that’s what I told myself–and my husband–a year ago when we started being cavalier and come-what-may about birth control. And then we returned home from a somewhat impromptu excursion to Europe, where I’d invited myself along on my husband’s business trip so I could roam the streets of London during the day and sip Highland Park whisky on a tiny island in Scotland over the weekend.
Somewhere between Stonehenge and Orkney, I remembered that I hate my job and that commuting sucks the life out of me. I remembered that I once had hopes and dreams for myself and that I was supposed to be doing something. I realized that I needed to make some major changes in my life before making this particular major life change.
But by then it was too late; a cruel joke played on me for having the audacity to change my mind while existing as a female. I wasn’t stupid. I understood how biology worked. But it still came as a major shock. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel pregnant. The timing was all wrong. Everything about it was all wrong. Every fiber of my being resisted it, and I wished my body would make it go away. But my body did not comply.
***
The second time I got pregnant, I knew right away. I remember glancing at the app that I was using at the time to track my cycle right after we’d had unprotected sex and thinking, “Oh shit.” But it wasn’t the freakout I’d experienced the first time. Two years had passed. My job still sucked, but the commute had disappeared and I’d come away from both a therapist’s office and a psychiatrist’s office with a bevy of new tools to manage my severe anxiety, my major depressive disorder, and my newly diagnosed ADHD.
Hyper aware of my altered state from the start, I noticed symptoms right away–the breast tenderness set in first, and the exhaustion hit me shortly after my first confirmed positive test. I made an appointment with my doctor, wrote out a list of questions, bought a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting, and started comparing the bizarre little cluster of cells growing in my uterus to fruits of various sizes.
But at eight weeks pregnant, just as my tiny embryo should have tottered on the verge of fetushood, I was doubled over on the living room floor, gasping in the very pain I had longed, hoped, wished, and begged for two years earlier. In the bathroom, amongst blood and tears, a soft, pink, shapeless bundle of tissue slid out of my shaking body. Another cruel joke.
***
To my great relief, no protesters blocked my path on that first visit to Planned Parenthood. No one stopped me at the entrance. No one asked me why I had made my decision. No one donned a condescending voice to make sure I had considered “all of my options.” No one forced me to justify my choices, my medical needs, or my existence. None of my greatest fears were realized.
I don’t know if I saw a doctor or a nurse practitioner or a physician’s assistant that day. I don’t remember her name. I do remember the concern that she and the nurses showed me as they made my husband stay in the waiting room until I’d confirmed privately that I wanted him by my side. I remember how, just before she left the room, the MD or NP or PA or whatever she was hugged me. She didn’t say anything. She just silently wrapped her arms around me. And though I’d managed to hold myself together for the entire appointment, the tears started to flow as the door closed behind her.
Girls like me didn’t turn up in places like this, not as patients anyway. Doctors, nurses, volunteers–sure. But not patients. I was that high-achieving, college-bound, drowning-in-extracurriculars, never-been-kissed teenager who damn sure wasn’t going to screw up her life with an unplanned pregnancy.
Only I wasn’t a teenager anymore. Or a college student. But I was obviously still tightly clutching my internalized misogyny. Despite a degree in sociology, years of calling myself a feminist, and a full-time job that requires me to think and act in ways that support progressivism and diversity, I was still a victim of some patriarchal bullshit where taking control of my own body somehow made me a less worthy woman, with remnants of elitist crap and religious trauma from my childhood still hanging out somewhere in the back corners of my brain.
These thoughts were so ingrained in me, in fact, that I became uncomfortable using the term “abortion” at all, instead referring to the experience as “terminating” or “ending” the pregnancy as I worked through my emotions in therapy. Abortion was too strong, too real, too political. No, this was personal; it was a shapeless bundle of cells inside my body; a process; a growth that I needed to remove before it was too big to control.
Because my hypothetical children deserve better.
***
When I started dating my first real boyfriend as a freshman in college, my mom offered me only one piece of advice, though it was less advice than it was a directive: “Don’t get pregnant,” she said. For thirteen careful years, I dutifully followed her instruction. When I married that boyfriend, children remained neither a priority nor a certainty for either of us; and we did not face the possibility of producing mini versions of ourselves until I started to lean one way and he started to lean the other.
I toyed very briefly with the thought of telling my mom about my first pregnancy, and the end of that pregnancy, but ultimately–thankfully–decided against it. I was just seven when my nephew was born, too young to be privy to any conversations that may have taken place between my then eighteen-year-old sister and our parents, my sister and her boyfriend, or my mom and dad. I don’t know if my sister believed that she had any options. I don’t know if she would have wanted to exercise them if she did. I don’t know if my parents would have supported them.
But I have a strong suspicion that the answer is no in all cases.
My sister went on to marry her high school boyfriend and have two more children with him. When they were little, her kids spent a great deal of time with my family, and I love them dearly. They were like siblings to me as we grew up together. They were all members of my wedding party. I attended all of their graduations and I see them almost every Christmas. After I moved away from our hometown, I invited them to stay with me each summer. It is hard to imagine a life without them.
And yet, it’s not hard. Sometimes I picture the life my sister would have had if she had chosen to terminate her first pregnancy. I would not know any difference, and the hypothetical children she would have had instead, when the time was right for her, are the ones I would know now.
I did choose to tell my mom about my miscarriage. “Were you drinking?” was one among a barrage of unintentionally hurtful questions she asked, fraught with misunderstanding and a desire to explain the unexplainable. Needless to say, I won’t be discussing any future unsuccessful pregnancies with my mom.
For several months after miscarrying, my eyes stung with tears at any mere mention of pregnancy. I mourned both this unexpected loss and the one I had chosen a few years earlier.
I grieved both the perceived moral failure of my abortion and the perceived physical failure of my miscarriage.
On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, I broke down again. Nothing has made me more intensely pro-choice than suffering a miscarriage. I called in sick to work, with as honest an admission as I’ve ever offered any supervisor: I needed a day to process the devastating loss of bodily autonomy and gender equality that had just occurred. The immense privilege that I possess in being able to take this time off work–and especially in plainly admitting that it was for this reason–in addition to freely accessing an abortion in the first place, cannot be overstated.
Because the reality is that we don’t talk about abortions in a real, normalized way. We don’t talk about miscarriages. So why would we talk about both? And how would we know that for many, like me, the experiences are essentially the same? Loss, grief, shame, and uncertainty swirl together in an unsavory mix that I’m still working to overcome. Perhaps never truly certain what we want out of life, my husband and I remain open to possibilities, but committed only to each other.
-Anonymous
