It’s a familiar story. It started with suspicion—shouldn’t I have started my period?—followed by a few days of silent, churning worry, and then the two pink lines on the urine-soaked pregnancy test. The bathroom—what an oddly appropriate place to find out I was pregnant, since that was where it had happened: an ecstatic, hushed fling on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor a few weeks earlier while my brother and his girlfriend, visiting for the weekend, watched TV in the other room. We’d used contraception, but apparently they’re not kidding about those failure rates.
So then, like the unlucky main character in every after-school special about the Girl Who Was Stupid and Got Herself Pregnant, I cried for three hours.
Except, unlike those after-school special girls, who always decide to either keep the baby or give it up for adoption, I wanted an abortion. Even more unlike those girls, I was also an adult (31), and in a stable relationship: Walter and I had been married for five years. This was not an ideological dilemma for me. I’m an outspoken feminist who rode on a bus for thirty hours with a bunch of students to march for reproductive rights in Washington. I get dirty looks from fellow motorists because of my bumper sticker that says, “Keep Abortion Safe, Legal, and Accessible.” I do clinic defense. Starting in high school, I’ve always kept a few hundred dollars tucked away in case I ever needed to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.
I made an appointment at the abortion clinic for the next week.
And yet, as a happily married couple in our thirties, in good physical health, with jobs and health insurance, Walter and I were pretty good candidates for parenthood. But we didn’t want a baby, a state of affairs that made us feel a bit ungrateful, as if the universe had shown up at our door with a gift—a package full of possibilities—and we were slamming the door shut without even taking a look. I had girlfriends who had gone through agony in a quest for children, had miscarriages and invasive, crazy-making fertility treatments, and here we were, experiencing effortless fertility and then planning to toss it. Magical thinking kicked in, and I wondered, are you even allowed to reject a gift like that without disastrous consequences?
So Walter and I decided to think about it for a while; I canceled the first clinic appointment and made another for a few weeks later.
I don’t know how other people go about deciding whether or not to stay pregnant, but Walter and I tried a lot of different approaches. We weighed our options: How would we feel about having a baby right now? (Scared out of our minds.) Do we want a baby now? (No.) Could we afford it? (No, but who ever can?) Would Walter have to drop out of graduate school? (Probably.)
We felt it out: I would think, “I’m pregnant right now. I wonder if it’s a girl or a boy.” Walter would say, “You’re such a cool pregnant person!
It’s amazing that you’re not having morning sickness.” I sometimes felt a little like a secret agent. When a colleague commented that she always knew the minute a coworker was pregnant, I thought, “You don’t know that I’m pregnant.” But Walter knew.
And Walter and I talked to each other about our childhoods, our hopes for the future, what drew us together. We revisited one of my favorite stories, about how an incredibly depressed mutual friend once said to Walter, “Alison Piepmeier has the world’s best family life,” and at that moment—before we had ever met—Walter decided he wanted to marry me, something he characterizes as the first healthy impulse of his life.
I slowly realized that, even though I was spending part of every day trying to will my uterine lining to detach, I did probably want to have kids someday. I was really clear, though, on the fact that “someday” was not now. I thought about all the selfish reasons I wasn’t ready for a child—I want to write another book, we might need to move for my job—and wondered whether it was okay for me to decide based on my own desires. Walter had tumultuously mixed feelings; he has children from a previous relationship and didn’t think he wanted to be a father again, but he wasn’t sure he believed that abortion was an ethical decision. I listened intently to him even as I talked back in my head: “It’s not your decision to make! I can’t keep being pregnant!” We talked about adoption, but I knew we couldn’t do it—we can’t even walk by a pet store without getting attached, so I knew if we spent nine months with this being, it would be ours for life. So where did that leave us?
I went to the clinic on a Thursday and sat in an inner waiting room, through the doors marked “No Men Allowed Past This Point,” with a dozen other women also having abortions. We didn’t make eye contact. During the ultrasound to confirm that I was, in fact, pregnant, the screen was turned away from the exam table—not like in an obstetrician’s office, where the mother-to-be eagerly gets a first glimpse of her child-to-be. I craned my neck toward the screen and was relieved to see only a marble-sized blob: no visible heartbeat, no tiny fingers like in the anti-choice propaganda.
“There it is,” the technician said. “Looks like you’re about six weeks along.” I thought of Walter, sitting in the lobby, and wished that he could see this too.
Back in the waiting room, a nurse explained the process: one pill today to stop the pregnancy from proceeding, four more within 24 to 72 hours to induce a miscarriage. She, like everyone else at the clinic, was blessedly non-judgmental and matter-of-fact.
On Sunday, the morning of the abortion, Walter and I woke up together. Over coffee at the breakfast table, each of us wrote a letter. Walter had brought me a bunch of yellow daisies, and we each took one. Then we went to the river.
Sitting on rocks on the riverbank, on a sunny, cold January morning, I read my letter aloud. “Dear potential person,” I said. “Thank you so much for coming along.” I started to cry. I wished it well, told it I hoped it found another home, and pulled the blossom off my flower and threw it into the river. Walter cried, too, as he read his letter, explaining why now wasn’t the right time for us but inviting this being to come back later if it wanted, and then he tossed his blossom out into the current; yellow petals on the green water. Both our flowers floated away, and I was surprisingly relieved to watch them go. “I hope to God they don’t wash back ashore here,” Walter said. We burned our letters but kept the flower stems to take home, as a reminder. It was a good ceremony: earth, air, fire, water, and words.
When we went home, I took the remaining pills, and had a little pain and a lot of bleeding, but it was over pretty quickly, and Walter was there the whole time. In the days and weeks (and now years) since, I felt a little grief, but mostly gratitude. It wasn’t just the relief of not being forced to give birth (although that was considerable); it was also what the decision did for our marriage.
There are other stories that go along with our abortion—the story of telling my family, of my brothers’ conflicted yet supportive reactions. There are the stories of the other women having abortions that day, women whose insurance (like mine) wouldn’t cover the procedure. There are the stories of other children these women will later have. There’s the story of Walter’s lonely couple of hours in the clinic lobby, scanning the faces of the other men waiting for their partners, some crying, some relieved, all totally left out.
But the story I most want to tell—and one I have never heard—is of abortion as an intimate part of a couple’s life together. Our abortion was a love story. I’d worried that Walter and I were rejecting a gift from the universe. What I discovered, though, was that when we stripped away the distractions of everyday life so that we could make this difficult decision together, it bound us together as surely as if our choice had been different—and as it turns out, that was the gift.
Alison Piepmeier lives in Charleston, SC. Her essays have appeared in skirt!, the Scholar and Feminist online, and Bitch magazine. alisonpiepmeier.com