I didn’t feel bad or sad. It was one of the best decisions I had made. Amidst a range of bad ones.
I wasn’t that surprised or scared either. I knew my period wasn’t going to come. I knew I was pregnant. I knew I had had unprotected (ugh “unprotected”) sex. I knew the logical outcome was that I would be pregnant. I was regular and the day my period didn’t start I bought a pregnancy test and knew the result before I peed on the stick. I immediately called Planned Parenthood (thank goodness for its reputation). Despite a deeply embedded religious upbringing, I took a step that I had never heard of before. A decision that had never figured into my conversations, thoughts, or fears before then was a first impulse. I made an appointment, the conversation was brief but reassuring. My cat provided palpable comfort.
I told my live-in boyfriend when he got home. (After a few hours of furiously cleaning at which he said “what’s wrong?” He is a better man than I gave him credit for at the time.) It wasn’t really a discussion. Perhaps he recognized that I was uninterested. Perhaps there was an obvious imbalance; lack of an essential 50:50 balance. An abortion was the next step.
Luckily, I had a friend that, despite any prior conversation, I knew would understand. Would understand my situation without judgement. Even more luckily, I came to learn that she had had an abortion herself. Suddenly it was a thing that I had felt it was–natural.
Reflecting on my first of two abortions, I think less about the merging of a sperm (from a man I dated less than two years) and one of the eggs I have dropped each month for the past fifteen years and more about the women I know and love who have made the same decision in their life without giving any indication. I think more about the silence we’re implicitly told to keep. I am most concerned by the anonymity with which I feel comfortable writing this.
