Looking back over the words I originally put on the page about my abortion, I realize that I feel hobbled by a desire to portray myself as a “good person.” In my head are all the pro-life activists shouting “abortion kills!” “murderer!” “baby killer!” and I want to defend myself from them by painting my own experience sympathetically, so readers will walk in my shoes and empathize with my choice. But this is patently impossible, for what I see as a complex but understandable decision, one sometimes regretted over the years, but one I still affirm — they see as evil. In our culture, there is so little common ground. You stand with the – what? Baby – but it is not a baby yet, so potential baby, embryo, fetus? Even the language takes sides and raises someone’s hackles. Or you stand with the woman and her right to choose – a victim of rape or incest or domestic violence, a tired mother of seven who does not want another child, a single woman who makes a mistake, or an unfortunate addict who uses abortions as her go-to method of birth control. In this morass of placards and protests, all I can do is tell my story as frankly as I can and let the moral chips fall where they may.
So. Before I knew I was pregnant, I was a first-year graduate student, back at university after five years working in New York. I was finding my feet in Cambridge, and in my PhD program. The transition into academic life from the publishing industry had challenged my sense of self so much that I once dreamed I had just created a beautiful ad for a bestselling book – one of those complex ads with excerpts and pictures, quotes from literati and newspaper reviewers. Its message to myself was: “You have done good work; you know some things; you are not starting from scratch; you can do this.” And I was beginning to feel connected to my new friends and my fellow grad students, to my academic field, and to the rather quirky program that I was enrolled in.
That fall, I had broken out of a relationship of several months standing – with a University of Wisconsin man who thought highly of himself as an intellectual and was then driving a cab in New York. The relationship had begun to wither because of deep differences, both of temperament and of political correctness. I recall him lecturing me about why I should not pay a vet to help my kitten, and why Rilke was just a worthless bourgeois poet. In response to that, I threw the Rilke book at his head. I had recently met and taken up with a young faculty member from Trinidad who got stoned a lot and taught me about jazz. We were in the early stages of hanging out together and etcetera. Into this interesting, transitional and somewhat confused mix came the sinking suspicion and then the tested reality that I was pregnant.
It took my breath away. Worse, it seemed to break my life into shards of possibility that all seemed dire and dark, visions of a future that led me only to panic and despair.
I could not imagine making a life of parenthood with my former boyfriend and could not imagine even telling my new lover about the pregnancy, let alone trying to negotiate a continuing relationship with him that included a baby. (To my shame, I was not even sure who was the father. This bald fact made me feel shamefully irresponsible and maybe deserving of my desperate plight.)
So. I would be a single mother. How could I continue my studies? How could I support a baby? My new commitment to academic life still felt fragile, but I wanted this future passionately, and could not imagine raising a child on my own as a scholarship-holding graduate student. Would I even be able to stay in the program? This was in the dawn of the cooperative daycare movement and church- sponsored Mother’s Day Out programs – the latter an option I wasn’t even sure I qualified for. So if I kept the baby, how could I support myself in or out of school? And what about friends? Could they – all of them single or recently married with no children — imagine a relationship with me and my infant?
I had visions of myself and a baby alone in a squalid room with peeling walls and a flashing neon sign outside. In every life direction I looked, in every imagined future, I could not see room for a baby at that point in my life. I could not see my way to keeping this pregnancy. Even bringing the pregnancy to term and then giving up the baby seemed unimaginable, for I didn’t know where I would go or how I would live.
Oddly, though I can feel again that breathless panic, I cannot remember exactly how I reached my decision about terminating the pregnancy: did I speak to friends? Are these above sentences anything but a far-off reconstruction of what I went through in my head?
I do remember going to the Brandeis health service to talk to a doctor about my options. This was before Roe v. Wade, and abortion was still illegal in Catholic Massachusetts, though not in New York, where I’d spent the last five years. The Brandeis doctor said that they could recommend nothing, tell me nothing, that what I should do next was entirely my decision and, essentially, they wanted to know nothing about it. I was angry, but not surprised.
I must have spoken to some friends about this, because one of my friends recommended that I speak to her Ob-Gyn, who had since become the head of the Harvard health service. Although I’ve forgotten this, I apparently used her name to book an appointment with him, so at least some medical professional would know about my case.
So, I took the train to Manhattan, where I checked into a communally run women’s health clinic I found out about through friends in the city who were involved with women’s medicine. I remember very little about the procedure, except white coverings and friendly reassurances, a sharp, griping pain –and the information I was farther along than I thought. I stayed the night in New York and took the train back the following day. At the time, I mostly felt tremendously relieved.
The next morning, I woke up with a fever and in pain. My roommates, both good new friends, were not sure what to do with me. They looked up abortions in Our Bodies, Our Selves, the bible of the women’s health movement, and the only information they could find were reassuring words about not feeling guilty. Nothing about possible medical problems. Eventually they left me on the couch with water and aspirin and went off to work. I subsided into a pain-filled daze.
Later that morning, my friend Lucy, who had recommended her doctor and picked me up at the station in Boston, called to inquire about my health, then came immediately to the apartment and took me in hand, which may have saved my life. First, she called the director of the Harvard health service, her former doctor. She described my condition and urgently requested an immediate appointment. We arrived in his office soon after, and I listened foggily on a leather chair while he called both the Brandeis health service, to give them a thorough lambasting and ensure their financial support, and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to get me emergency service. Lucy drove me to the hospital through streets that seemed painfully bright, and after that my memories become fuzzy. I had a terrible infection, I was told, and realized how precarious my condition was only because my gynecologist sat up with me most of the night, and nurses came every quarter hour or so to check my vitals. My gynecologist told me about his experiences having his consciousness raised by his nurses, who made him lie with his feet in his own examining table stirrups and inserted a very cold speculum into his anus to make him more sensitive to his patients. He seemed like a lovely man. He also told me that the probable reason my abortion had been botched, was that I had a deformed uterus, and would likely have been unable to bring the pregnancy to term even had I wanted to. At the time, this was reassuring, though later it was a cause of sorrow. Ironically, the doctor had chosen not to give me a hysterectomy, despite my long odds of carrying a child to term, so the drama of the infection came partially from a decision to help me keep all options open for motherhood.
That long, quiet night will always remain in my memory. It was slow and intimate, interrupted only by the nurses, a gentle time shrouded in darkness, with my body gradually gaining ground against the infection. My doctor eventually went home, and the nurses came round only on the half hour, then finally left me long enough so I could sleep.
Afterwards, I went back to my life as a graduate student. I can remember very little of my mood, but I think it was the abortion that led to an end of my new love affair. Conversely, Lucy became a lifelong friend.
I was grateful to be alive, I know, and grateful not to be a mother. And after a week or two, the Director of the Brandeis health service called me in for an appointment. He informed me that my experience had led them to change their policy about abortions. I remember leaving the appointment with a mixture of emotions, thinking wryly that the call from Harvard might have had something to do with it, but also recognizing that my body had, in a small way, contributed to social change.
Houston Writers' Group 