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…because I had an abortion.

by Beth

October 3, 2017

because I had an abortion.

 

because I got pregnant three times, and the first two times, miscarried. Once at 5 weeks. Once at 12. Both times I was given mifeprestrone so I could go home and cry and writhe and scream and sob and hurt. Not from the drugs but from the pain of losing again at the this game called “Lets Make A Baby Like Everyone Else.”

 

I changed my diet, my clothes, my life, my choices, my belief system.

 

And then I got pregnant again and nothing happened. Or at least nothing bad happened. I was 4 weeks. I was 8. I was 12.

 

And then it was week 16 and something shifted inside of me. Nobody had to tell me. Nobody needed to look at the ultrasound.

 

What was, wasn’t.

 

And this time I needed a D&C. I had had one a few years earlier, a quick procedure I never regretted, never felt ashamed of.

 

But this time it was mixed up with all this other stuff. All this anger and anxiety and disappointment. We had told only the people we knew could handle the bad news, the news that I had failed once again.

 

And then I walked into my doctors office and she performed this entirely miraculous procedure. She talked to me about fertility and my body and how this abortion would save me from medical complications down the line, ones that could impact my ability to have a baby. She never made a promise, she simply told me the truth: not all pregnancies are meant to be babies. Sometimes you decide in your head, sometimes your body decides, sometimes a combination.

 

But that abortion, more than the one that kept me in grad school, taught me something essential: abortions are a vital part of being female. They are part of how we manage our bodies. They are like stents to heart patients, or gall bladder removal or any medical procedure. They aren’t tragedies. The tragedy was the child I wasn’t having but that had nothing to do with the abortion. The tragedy was that I wanted a baby and couldn’t have one.

 

The abortion was fact. It was real. It was freedom from something that couldn’t and shouldn’t happen.

 

That ob was the same woman who delivered my son, who we send pictures to every year, the same woman who scraped the sides of my uterus and made what seemed complicated, simple:

 

An abortion was how I needed to take care of my body. And that is true for every woman that seeks an abortion. It is vital health care. We come at them for different reasons, but none of that matters. The same way it doesn’t matter to insulin how a diabetic got that way.

 

I am proud that I got that abortion. It was an important moment for me, for my life, and for my body.

 

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