I was seventeen when my first boyfriend broke up with me. I was about to leave town for college and it was an emotional mess of a time for me.
Someone I thought was a friend took this time to declare they loved me and wanted to be with me. I was too overwhelmed to stand my ground and say that I wasn’t interested. Really, I was just looking for any sort of affection and didn’t realize that he was manipulating me into an unhealthy dynamic.
I suspect he tampered with the condom I made him use, and two months later the nurse at my new college and I were discussing my options. There was no alternative to abortion in my mind. I was just eighteen in my first year of college, I wasn’t in love with the sperm donor, and I was in no way emotionally or financially prepared to raise a human life.
I am also a transman. I knew that to carry a pregnancy to term would be nearly impossible for me to cope with. I was on the verge of my medical transition when this happened. This was not a route I was going to go.
So I used the other guy just like he had me, as a means to an end. I told him he was going with me to the hospital to have a medical termination. He gave me some hassle about thinking it over, so I told him I was going with or without him and would ask another guy to go with me. He changed his tune quickly.
We had to travel to a third city (in between the two we now lived in). There was four other people having abortions that day in the clinic. None of us interacted with each other, we just sat in the same waiting room in our pairs (you had to bring someone to take you home at the end).
The staff were fantastic. I caught them off guard more than once by cracking jokes. I think they appreciated the different tone that I brought as a patient. I was likely the oldest one of the day at eighteen years old (I very clearly remember one person looking no more than fifteen at the oldest).
The actual process of removal of the fetal tissues was emotional. I cried a little. I was relieved and grateful that living in Canada means I didn’t have to face horrors that you hear about in the media to get to a safe and sound medical process. The only pain I felt was momentary when the technician bumped against my ovaries with the equipment. I sucked hard on the nitrous at that.
The absolute worst part of the whole situation was not something that happened to me. It was that young girl. She went through the process before me. Her “partner” stayed in the waiting room. A nurse came and told him she was asking for him to come to the recovery room. He refused. The nurse told him that he really should be there with her because she was becoming distressed. He still refused. If I wasn’t half sedated already from the pill they’d given me the hour earlier I like to think I would have given him shit. He was the worst part of the experience. I wanted to go to that girl and reassure her, to comfort her, and still feel a bit bad that I wasn’t able to at the time.
If I had carried to term, I would have a ten or eleven year old child now. I would still be stuck interacting with that other man (who I stopped having in my life about a year after my abortion for a hundred other reasons) for the rest of my life.
I wouldn’t have graduated college (twice now). I would probably not have the job and stability I do now. I know that my transition would have become way more complicated than it already was if I had a child. There’s a chance I would have lost custody of the child too (I know a few guys this has happened to).
I told myself at the time it wouldn’t have been fair to the child. The reality of it is that it wouldn’t have been fair or healthy for anyone involved. Me. Him. Or what that fetus could have become.
My cousins are all having kids now. I’m having complicated feelings about that, like I gave up on having kids of my own. But really. I haven’t given anything up. I’ve still got the means to reproduce if I chose to. It’s a whole different world now too in terms of parental rights for those who are trans. It will be a choice if I decide to have a biological child of my own now. It won’t just be a thing that happens.
I have zero regrets about my abortion.
