Sob Story

Once a month I wake up early to volunteer as an escort at my local abortion clinic. The layout of our clinic is such that most patients can bypass direct contact with the protestors on the sidewalk; it’s rare that I actually walk anyone to the entrance. Mostly I’m a friendly face, a rainbow vest, a brick in the human wall between the door and Them. I come home feeling useless, freezing, jittery with anger, feeling like that’s how I should feel, like I’m doing penance for something, I don’t know what, assuming Hillary would win maybe. I didn’t sign up for any shifts in 2020 but I started up again after the last New Jersey gubernatorial election was a bit too close for comfort, after I remembered that all that stood between me and the legal subjugation of my body was actually, effectively, nothing. I figured some of our regular (elderly) protestors would have died in the interim, but alas, they’re still around, pickled in their hate, and lately joined by more young people, which is hard to bear. What passed as unhinged behavior pre-pandemic is beginning to seem quaint. I don’t fear for my life when I’m out there, but also I don’t think about it too hard. When I don’t consider the fact that all it would take would be one of these clearly unwell people bringing a weapon with them next time, the protestors can be grimly funny. Their warbly renditions of “Silent Night,” the Christian hip hop they play on their phones, the sight of them trying in vain to get cheap headset mics to work, flinching at the shriek of feedback. The air of great solemnity with which they make the stupidest conceivable pronouncements. “Why are you wearing masks,” a woman in long skirts once implored of the volunteers, “to protect yourselves from a virus that can be CURED BY IVERMECTIN?” Another time, she bristled at the sight of us chatting and laughing: “I know you girls think witchcraft is cool, but let me assure you—IT. IS. NOT. COOL.”

Because I’m usually volunteering with young women and because sometimes in dim light from a moderate distance I can still pass for a young woman myself, I’ve been subject to lectures from the protestors about motherhood, a concept which they assume we—in our godlessness—have no familiarity. (It’s hard to take seriously someone’s professed belief in the sanctity of babies when said someone has dragged her hatless own to the side of a highway on a bitter February morning to wave it in front of moving vehicles, but perhaps I digress!) I’m sure I see what I want to see when I look at the protestors, and I know they see what they want to see. Not pictured: the two messy-haired kids at home in PJs, eating the waffles their dad has made. The way my devotion to them has upended my ambitions, altered my brain chemistry. I volunteer at the clinic because the world in which I want the two kids to live bears only a passing resemblance to the one they in which they do, and I volunteer at the clinic because in 2015, I had an abortion.

It’s May. For the rest of my life, May will be Mother’s Day and May will be the month I lost my first pregnancy, the month I terminated my first pregnancy. Stupidly, it took me about six months after our baby died to understand the medical process I’d undergone as an abortion. I knew my pregnancy had ended prematurely under the care of doctors, but no one exactly said the word “terminate,” no one said the word “abort.” The options my husband and I had been given were so few and so abysmal that I hardly considered what we’d made a choice. Would you rather take a hammer to the head or to the kidneys? You choose whichever one will hurt less. I was twenty-seven weeks pregnant. There was a slim chance that carrying to term would put my health at risk, and a better one that another thirteen weeks would trigger in me a full mental breakdown. We met with the doctor and I wanted her to tell us what to do. I asked her to tell us. She placed her palms flat on her desk, said, “I can’t make this decision for you.” It didn’t matter. We left her office, took the elevator to the hospital’s ground floor, and on the sidewalk outside confirmed at once that we both wanted to end it as soon as possible. The path of least suffering, as far as we could tell, though all paths contained much suffering. A few minutes later we got into an Uber driven by a very upbeat man who kept cheerfully inquiring after our Memorial Day plans.

What it took for me to finally get that I’d had an abortion was sometime that fall scrolling on Facebook (my first mistake), coming across a link to an essay by someone who’d had a later abortion, and reading the comments (my second). A woman had written, “Sorry for what happened to her but I could never do that to my baby.” The essay had been excruciatingly sad. It had something to do with me, but what the fuck, I wondered, a white howl sounding in my head like a boiling kettle, could it possibly have to do with this fucking lady? “Sorry for what happened to her but I could never do that to my baby.” Well, fine, except—how the fuck would you know? It took seeing it as subject to the judgment of internet strangers for me to understand: the way my pregnancy ended did not belong to us; it belonged to evangelical Christians, Republican legislators, busybodies across the nation who form strong opinions for sport. For six months I’d felt marked by catastrophe, deformed by it. I felt like a fairy tale crone whose sorrow had driven her mad. The village around me giving me wide if well-intentioned berth. Poor, wretched Katie and her broken heart. Don’t make eye contact; it’s bad luck! But now I saw there were people who would not, could not, extend to me a base level of sympathy, people who’d think I participated in an act of violence. People I didn’t know and maybe some I did. I had friends and family whose houses I’d slept in and whose children I’d babysat, who never acknowledged the end of my pregnancy, or else acknowledged it so weirdly as to be lightly insulting. Until that moment I’d taken it for simple discomfort in the face of demented grief, but now I was forced to wonder. Sorry for what happened to you but…

Lately, these last few weeks, these last few years, writing about my abortion in my novel, for this newsletter, I wonder if there’s any point in writing about my abortion. Sharing the story, re-sharing it. Every time a law is passed in a state I don’t live in—should I talk about it now? Would it do anything? Does it mean anything? Over time it’s become so clear to me how every moment of my experience was shaped by all the specific demographic boxes I checked. I was a young, straight, married, cis, white woman with health insurance in San Francisco. Much later, I was told that the night before the doctor refused to tell us what to do, she lobbied the necessary powers that be at the hospital to grant us the option to terminate, though I was three weeks past the point where California legally prohibits abortion. (I hated her so much at the time, she was the messenger I most badly wanted to kill, and now I send her a Christmas card every year: a woman who saved my life). A few years ago, someone on Twitter chided me for sharing the story during one of those bleak news cycles when we were all sharing, saying that my (admittedly extreme!) case undercut the (obvious!) fact that people should be able to get abortions for any reason at all, or none in particular. Her point was that we don’t all need sob stories, and I agree, but also, somebody, please advise: what do I do with this sob story? Sometimes I convince myself it could change someone’s mind, maybe the mind of someone who loves me. Most of the time, I don’t want the minds that need changing to expend a moment’s thought on me. What do I do with it then? I’m all too aware that in the coming months, the story becomes a relic: there was a pregnancy that was a calamity, if not at the start then certainly at the end, and it was allowed to simply and safely stop.

I have a hawk tattooed on my forearm for the baby we lost. I think about her all the time, but especially in May. For my children, who don’t know yet about the baby I didn’t have before them, the tattoo is a fact about my body like any other; their mother has freckles and a gap between her front teeth and a hawk on her arm. But I assume one day they’re going to want me to tell them about it, they’re going to ask me why, the way a stranger did at a wedding a few weeks ago, necessitating me to drop the whole story in her lap at cocktail hour to her thinly veiled horror, but lady, you don’t understand: when it happened I thought, I will never make it out of this alive; I thought, until I die there will be a hole at the center of the universe where the baby we were supposed to have should be. There is, and there isn’t. On Mother’s Day this year, the two messy-haired kids in PJs crawled into the bed and lay in my arms. They’re both big enough to tell me they love me and understand what it means. Funny, clever, kind, affectionate, my children. I don’t grieve the baby in quite the way I thought I would always grieve her. How can I, when her absence makes possible our entire life? Her absence, which belongs to us alone.

(As ever, this newsletter costs nothing—honestly, I should probably pay you—but if you’re so inclined please feel free to send the $5 you’re not spending on it to either the Abortion Liberation Fund of PA or the New Jersey Abortion Access Fund to potentially help a patient at my local clinic.)