News of the crazy new restrictions to abortion rights in Texas has triggered memories of the abortion I had at seventeen. I’d been living in London for a little over a year and I was deep into a relationship with a 21 year old student. I don’t remember what I was doing for birth control, but it obviously didn’t work.
I remember bring surprised, but pleased. I think I thought it was romantic to be a teenage mother, and it awakened my urge to nurture. As an unloved kid, I harbored the fantasy of a loving mother-child bond. At first the boyfriend adjusted to the idea of fatherhood and said he was up for it. But then he changed his mind. I had to have an abortion, or we were through.
I called my mom in California, and asked her if I could move back in with her and have the baby. She whined, “Can’t you get him to marry you?” She wasn’t up for it either. So the boyfriend arranged an abortion with his family doctor, and I went to have the procedure in a daze, courtesy of the National Health system. You know the phrase “railroaded into” something? I was railroaded into the abortion.
I awoke from the anesthesia in a recovery room, next to a few other girls in hospital beds. The boyfriend came to visit me later in the day, and sat on my bed. But he couldn’t stop ogling the girl next to me, who wore some kind of sexy baby doll pajamas. I struggled miserably to get his attention. He informed me that a guy we knew had overdosed and died.
Fifty years later, I recall my hurt feelings as if it were yesterday. Why do our painful moments have to cling like this, to be etched so deeply that they can come to life in a flash? Why don’t our happy moments flood our brains like the bad ones? When my Mexican-American mother-in-law was 103 years old, she still recalled the little girl who called her a “beaner” in elementary school, and told me the story again and again.
I am staunchly pro-choice like any normal person, but it occurs to me that at 17, I didn’t have a choice. No one offered me one. I didn’t have the money to take care of myself, and my boyfriend threatened to leave me. I think I should have had a choice, even though I was not equipped for motherhood. It still bothers me.
Many years later, I was unhappily married and having an affair with an amiable stoner who was good at sex and had a lot of free time. I was horrified to find my self pregnant, evidently still a moron about birth control. Having the stoner’s baby was unthinkable. I had a young child at home. And my husband would find out about the affair.
So I went to have an abortion from a doctor who asked me when I showed up, “What’s the matter with you? You look depressed.” Afterwards, I had to get home before my husband returned from work. To my furious contempt, he never noticed that I lied on the couch all evening, barely able to contain my “discomfort” as they say in the medical trade. What a fucking dope. He was the same guy who railroaded me when I was seventeen.
That second time, I was very depressed but not in any doubt about the decision I’d made. I wouldn’t want to imagine a world where I would be forced to have that stoner’s baby. It’s just unthinkable.
Girls and women should have real choices about whether or not to get pregnant and whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy. It should be their decision alone to make. Ideally, no one would be as stupid or lax about birth control as I was, but things happen. Fetuses aren’t babies and seeds aren’t trees. If the pro-life people would adopt all the world’s unwanted children, disabled or starving or orphaned, then we might take them seriously.
As it is, we all know that the unborn are way more important to them than the born.
Girls, my best advice is to find a means of birth control you can live with, keep some Plan B handy, and stay away from guys who won’t have your back in your worst moments. Wait, also remember to vote sane people into office, or you end up with Gregg Abbot, Kristy “I’m Batshit Crazy” Noem, and Ron DeSantis, who in a better world would all have been aborted before or after the sixth week.
If you have a story you want to share, step right up. xo
Abortion is the business of the woman and the doctor. Nobody else!!!!
After a traumatic birth a few years ago I recently found out I was pregnant. It triggered a trauma response. Knowing that I had the option to terminate this pregnancy saved my sanity. I’ve chosen to go ahead, but I know how fortunate I am to be able to make this choice. Decades ago, when she discovered she was pregnant with a second child (after ten years avoiding pregnancy) my grandmother begged her doctors for an abortion. She had experienced awful mental health after the birth of her first son. The doctors refused. She stepped in front of an underground train after the baby was born and died horribly. Abortion is vital healthcare.
Andra Taylor – God damn right.
Ellie – I hope this childbirth experience is an easier one! Nothing is as wonderful as a baby, when you want one. Your poor grandmother…what a horrible situation. I hope we can stop the US from returning to that ignorant, regressive era, despite our fucked up Supreme Court.
I was 30, and the guy was an idiot. Fortunately I had figured this out already, and had an abortion having not even told him I was pregnant. He was a bad dad to one already. I knew I didnt want kids, or to be tied to him forever.
thank god I had the option to get out of what would have been the biggest mess of my life.
no one should be forced to live with an accident and an unwanted child. Its not fair to either.
Kellie – Thank god is right! Best not to be chained to an idiot for the rest of your life.
I had 3 abortions and didn’t doubt them for a second because I never wanted a child, as I used to say to myself. In reality, being too young, without steady income, or in immigration and bad relationship, meant that I had no other choice. You are right, choice should not be one way street. If there was infrastructure and support in place, my choice might have been different and I would have been mother to at least one those unborn bastards. Abortion was my only choice.
This expands the problem back to basics of capitalism and distracting the masses with half problems. Pro or no choice, the outcome for capitalism is the same because all-choice, including pregnancy and child’s support for ones who make that equally brave decision, would be too “socialist” (meaning human) and would bring no profit.
I missed this so much ??.
“…who in a better world would all have been aborted before or after the sixth week.” I had a communist friend who said fewer but better. And anytime someone mentions population control in connection with the teeming masses (the poor), I like to suggest it start with the Bush’s, et al.(the rich).
I love this perspective and so GLAD to read it. It is a tough choice for any woman and no one can judge. I know situations I would’ve opted for this but was lucky enough not to have to choose, and sometimes “birth control luck” is the only factor separating two women in this experience. I hope you have a storm of GOOD MEMORIES flooding your thoughts.