This Telling: An Abortion Story
On Sunday I was telling Clare about my plan. There would be coat hanger party favors. There would be a baby-shaped piñata. Blue and pink cupcakes would reveal a bright red interior. I thought I was being very funny. We laughed and laughed while standing at the pass, a lull in brunch service.
The party was a celebration of my abortion, the anniversary of which was on Tuesday. The date had flashed in my head like the clean flat lights of a tarmac at night in the weeks between discovering that the man I had been seeing somewhat casually for the last few months was not, in fact, adept in the fine art of pulling out and my appointment at Planned Parenthood in the East Village. A year later I was a whole different person and also mostly the same: still bartending at a neighborhood restaurant down the block, new hair from an at-home bleach job in a friend’s bathtub, cycles of disappointment and excitement over my fumbling attempts at a writing career.
“I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled,” writes Annie Ernaux in Happening, a memoir about the author’s illegal abortion in 1963 France. “There is no such thing as a lesser truth.”
It’s not that I was explicitly quiet about my abortion in the weeks following the procedure—keeping much of anything to myself was not my strong suit—but it felt somehow wrong to toss around in casual conversation. My mother cried; one friend gasped and her mouth hung open for a few long seconds; another named a few mutual friends who’d also terminated; my sister told me I was allowed whatever feelings I held. Wrong? Insensitive, maybe, though the experience hadn’t seemed particularly delicate, and I’d never felt any sense of loyalty to the clump of cells I’d flushed down the toilet that evening in April. Insensitive, rather, to the private and deeply interior space those weeks of pregnancy and the impending termination had revealed, a space immovable and yet flickering, fractured—infinitely possible and infinitely contained within within within. So I refrained from talking about it with coworkers, my favorite bartender, my neighbor. Or I didn’t, and told them, and regretted it. A betrayal, I think, of the important and intricate and inarticulable feelings I held about the experience, this right to my own self. How mine it felt.
I’ve been wary of writing about it squarely, which was in part an intentional decision, a refusal to participate in the narrative that suggests one’s life is forever altered by pregnancy, an abortion. At this time last year, vaguely nauseous, the competing anxieties of invasion and anticipation, I remember feeling as though I should be writing more of this down but not really doing anything about it—out of fear? Overwhelm? Laziness? In some ways it felt too close then, but then soon after, it became too far away. Lately though, the absence of this event appears to me a hole in a story with a plot that is ongoing and vast and digressive, a story that is not about this one thing but contains it. This seems to me the closest explanation for my hesitation to write it down: it was both profound and monumental and also ordinary and then gone. A thing that people said would change my life had no real effect on it, except that it affected everything from then on, and still.
It didn’t feel like a choice to me, the matter of the thing itself. My resolve was absolute. It was claustrophobic and certain, it left no space for question. It wasn’t a choice. It just was. I was peeing on a stick, I was taking a shower, I was trying to find the NOT before PREGNANT on the tiny screen of the high-tech test, conditioner still in my hair, I was naked in my room trying to get the Planned Parenthood website to load on my miniature laptop, all my fingerprints smudged on the keyboard.
Then I had an alien living low in my abdomen and my body was not mine but also strangely more mine than ever. It was spring. I was certain this was the wrong feeling, whatever feeling it was. I had recently turned twenty-eight. I lived in New York City, and all the trees were lightly pink or green. I spent most nights serving tables at a neighborhood restaurant and learning to bartend. I overfilled the jiggers, spilled liquor all over my hands. When it was warm I went to the coffee shop around the corner and ate affogato on the wobbly chairs outside. Every morning I took the dog to the park and warily avoided the chatty early risers clumped together in the grass. My best friend lived in Manhattan, and occasionally I would ride the subway there—thirty minutes on the C, a short walk past packed restaurants, up the stairs to her apartment, the leather couch, the pipes that emitted a dull constant heat. We drank batched cocktails she stole from her restaurant job. Once, martinis and little metal containers of caviar no one ever noticed had disappeared. She doesn’t live here anymore.
This is not justification; this is a particular moment in time; this is who I was there in it. How to articulate this, how to tell this story that is not a story. What was it that seemed so striking to me about the experience, this decision that was so obvious it was not a decision, this right so intrinsically my own? Its profundity betrayed the definition of the word—it was essential, ingrained, glaring. My pregnancy excavated a warm incomprehensible dark inside of me—inherent, and so inherent to everyone else, too—which no one had ever touched, or seen, or understood, and no one could—that ungovernable, innate subjecthood wherein my right to myself resided, and so my right to reject the pregnancy that lit up this warm interior alcove.
Walking to the subway with the man I was seeing that morning, sunny and cool, I wore my denim jacket and loose-fitting clothes underneath, as recommended by the clinic, I said, “Today’s the day I become a woman.” We both laughed. My pregnancy had been excellent fodder for a new rolodex of jokes. It was just a few blocks further to the 3. Something about the phrase felt oddly true though—not in its shallow definition of womanhood, which was its own thorny construct, but perhaps in the implication of the self refined, definite and new—as though I was only now able to accept the grand incontrovertible truth of my life, which was that it was mine, that I was living it, here in this body.
Trying to defend the decision is the real betrayal, perhaps the entirety of my hesitation to discuss it. I did not want to list my reasons, nor did I want to over- or under-emphasize how the experience had affected me. I wanted to be understood, of course, as always, fully and honestly as perhaps it is impossible between two people, but especially between people with uteruses and people without, between those who’ve aborted and those who haven’t. And if it was always doomed, maybe this wasn’t the goal after all; maybe it really was the telling, the trying, as I am doing now. I want the act of saying it, not necessarily to be heard but to speak, to chronicle my life so I may navigate through it, exist within it, to be in the world because this is what I’ve decided being in the world means—this telling, this story, this choice.
I had the abortion. I took mifepristone at the Planned Parenthood office with a woman wearing gold earrings and a red dress, and I took misoprostol at home the next day, holding it in my cheeks like a woodland creature until it dissolved. I watched the new Batman with Robert Pattinson; every time I shifted positions on the hard couch in my living room, I felt hot blood seep out of me onto the diaper-sized pad I was wearing. I drank a few sips of water and vomited on the floor. During the high-speed car chase, I sat on the toilet with my head between my knees.
Then it was another day and another. I returned to work and made blueberry bread pudding with a caramel drizzle. I wrote this quote down in my notebook: “I love the diary because it knows itself to be a minor form; it isn’t trying to be anything but. It isn’t constructed … it is life as it happens.” I bought rollerblades and used them twice before stowing them away in the closet. I agreed to Italian food even though I wanted Thai. I took a selfie in the corner stool at a bar wearing a red shirt when my hair looked really good. My life remained my own, which is how I’d always wanted it, which had never faltered. Yesterday, waiting to cross Eastern Parkway, I saw a man carrying a cat-sized lizard, though when a stranger asked what it was I heard him say dragon as the light turned and he walked on.
