The Injustice

Having enough kids to form a soccer team is one of my main aspirations in life so I felt conflicted not embracing the opportunity, however surprising and untimely it was. But after pragmatism set in, I was 100% behind my decision – for the most part. My reason was and remains simple: I am not ready. I am not mature or selfless enough to be the mother I want to be. And I have neither the mental nor emotional nor economic resources to raise a child on my own.

Even though I believe that it is our responsibility to protect those who cannot protect themselves, I have always found it odd that we assume a fetus would invariably choose its own life over the life and welfare of its mother and family. Why do we make that assumption? Is such a choice moral? Is it not incumbent on the parent to make the decision for the fetus?

On the other hand, when a soul decides to incarnate, doesn’t it select its parents – or parent – and life circumstances? And when I cross that line and say that I have the right to choose if the human being living in my womb should die, at which point does the value of life begin? When the fetus has fingernails? Right after a child is born? When they are three years old? When they bring home their first A for calculus? I don’t know. And I’ll never know. Life is often about choosing the least of all evils, is it not?

The moment I amped my rationalizations up to a self-serving degree, the paralyzing emotions I’d felt during the initial aftermath began to dissipate. One by one, they left – fear, guilt, denial, anguish – as if to go out for some beer and chicken wings and then never come back. Yet, abortion continues to be a confusing and hellish experience, just not for the reasons I’d foreseen.

What I’m realizing is that society now judges me as a woman who has fallen from grace. It’s as if there’s an unspoken law that women could have the freedom and right to choose their own future, but only on the condition that they are duly ashamed. And what strikes me as particularly unjust is that while I’m obliged to shroud my abortion in private remorse, the man involved has not been made – and will never be made – to feel marked for shame. It irks me that only one party is saddled with the weight of this perverse social contract, wherein abortion is considered a women’s problem, for which women must pay the price.

… Yes. And on Thursdays I sit in the backyard and burn my bras.

Anyway, I’ve always prided myself as someone fairly open about my own person, quirks, defects, blunders and all, of which my abortion is – as I’ve come to understand in the last couple of months – not included. Suddenly I found myself with a new identity, that of a person with something to hide. And I hate it.

The first rule of abortion (for women) is that you don’t talk about your abortion outside of your therapist’s office. And as far as I can tell, this rule applies even to women who are otherwise proud, confident, and pro-choice. They are happy and eager to shout about women’s right to have an abortion — just not their own. And I empathize with them completely.

But storytelling is vital, distinctly so and especially so, when we are told to keep quiet. There aren’t enough honest conversations about the painful and complex curveballs life sometimes throws at us, and it’s essential that we try to change this. Today I write anonymously because my story involves others who don’t necessarily want to be identified, but it's a step nonetheless in the right direction. One day we will all speak freely and put a face to each and every one of these precious stories.

The Pill Plan

My mum has always had a sort of hippie, au naturale approach to health and medicine so I never really had a particular doctor or even clicnic that I would visit regularly growing up. She’d stress the importance of listening to your own body and understanding what it was trying to say by way of green mucus, ulcers, and loose stool. She’d prescribe a warm cup of honey and lemon for a sore throat, a plate of chicken liver after a visit from Aunt Flo, a pot of ginger tea for a tummy upset, and always sleep, sleep, sleep, no matter your ailment.

So, being someone who doesn’t take Panadol or even vitamin capsules, contraceptive pills just wasn’t something I’d ever considered. Hell, there was even once I tried to twerk and then downward dog my way out of taking the morning-after pill until my cousin screamed at me, “are you fucking insane – how does dancing and yoga help in any way? ”

I’d been bleeding for longer than what was healthy, so my gynae prescribed me some contraceptive pills in a bid to curb my bleeding and chill my hormones out. Even though she definitely used more professional medical terms when explaining this to me, I still had some qualms about her decision. And also a lot of faith that my uterus would calm down and cooperate soon.

My options were to either bleed to death or risk nausea, weight gain, and some wicked hot pulsing acne on my chin. So I bled for another week and then had to be given a talking-to by my mum (oh, the irony!) before I eventually took my first pill.

Today I am happy to report that I’m 5 pills away from the end of my first course of Meliane. Apart from the migraines, which feel very much like someone driving an electric drill right through my skull, and my erratic mood swinging like a pendulum defying all laws of Physics, the last couple of weeks have gone by much better than I had anticipated.

I never really took the responsibility of birth control into my own hands because I’m too afraid to stick an IUD up there, the sympto-thermal method seems hella confusing, and as mentioned my impression of the pill up until recently had been ugh. It’s such a silly decision to let the onus fall on the dude, while I just lingered in this kind of in-between place that put me – a perfectly educated kale-eating urban dweller – in a very vulnerable position. As it turns out, pulling out happens to be not that much riskier than using a condom in terms of pregnancy. And is often the preferred method of many other perfectly educated kale-eating urban dwellers. But as it also turns out, guys can be total asshats.

So, really, have your own game plan, girls.

There are plenty of options out there and not every one of them will be equally well-suited to you and your body, so put in the time and effort to figure out what is best. Whichever you choose, it is going to come with some side effects, but the point is to choose something. Have a plan that is NOT Plan B. Prevention is better than cure! Or rather, prevention is better than abortion! Please take my word for it.

Birth control is essential to the liberation and empowerment of women because it allows sex to be almost entirely isolated from child-bearing and reproduction. But only almost. And any woman who is making sex with a man needs to be aware that she is implicitly embracing this risk. It’s really not rocket science and I’m not sure why I never thought of it this way before – probably because it lowers my libido – but even if you take the necessary precautions, there will always be a tiny, tiny, chance that partaking in this act now may mean making a choice between terminating and not terminating a pregnancy further down the road.

Scary, isn’t it?

The Irony of Life

You guys are fucking awful, really. Just fucking awful. Google Analytics tells me you’ve been lurking on here, just waiting to read about which one of my fingers I’ve cut off in an attempt to assauge my guilt. I knew I was going to be underestimated by everyone, so – surprise! I still have all my fingers. And toes. In fact, I even went on a date last weekend, which I’d like to think of as an act of stoicism, not wanting an abortion to interrupt my life, to show off that my existence though irrevocably changed by it, was not arrested by it.

LOOK. AT. ME. NOTHING. WRONG. AT. ALL. HAHAHA. HA. HA. HA.

I don’t know if I’d take a bulimic to a buffet on the way home from rehab but I figured it’s probably different with abortion, right? The idea was to normalize my days, so I tried. But my dad was flummoxed and seemed certain that I would return home preggos again. Lol. A girl can’t get pregnant from sharing a pizza with a boy. Wait – can she??

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m still basking in the afterglow of flushing my embryonic baby down the toilet last December. And in this time, my mind has become a sort of battleground. Most days I feel like everything and nothing at once, and I’m certain that there’s a hole in the middle of me that every happy thing falls into. It seems crazy and dangerous that nobody has put me in a straitjacket (read: chastity belt) or confiscated my computer yet.

I usually have to put a little distance between myself and the past before I can really understand it – and I use the term “understand” loosely, the way you’d call the 10 steps between your couch and fridge “exercise.” So I rang in the New Year thinking “not this year,” because time heals all wounds, and 2020 seems perfect for processing that sort of thing, and ignorance is bliss – and admittedly, so is denial. But then I had this other thought one day – not an original thought, but it’s better than no thought at all: If there’s just one thing I know to be beautiful and true about life, it’s that it is nothing more than a colourful parade to the grave. JK. It’s that if you aren’t honest with yourself – cuttingly, painfully honest – life can’t be honest with you. And so of my infantile experience thus far of life after an abortion, I have this to say:

Every morning, my mum asks me how I feel and I say, “I won’t be home for dinner this evening,” which is an answer to a question I wasn’t asked. So she asks again. “Stop it,” I snap back with a mouthful of warm porridge.

Emotionally, my anxiety made me brittle and easy to anger. Physically, seven continuous weeks of bleeding had taken its toll on me and if I appeared to be very selective about how I expended my energy, it’s because I was and I still am.

I felt myself retreating from the world like a slow-motion magic trick. Even though everyone reassured me that the passing of time would eventually carry me out of this nightmare towards feelings of joy, I waited many days and had no such feelings.

I used to be horrified by the idea of people telling me what to do or think, but this gesture was something I’d come to greatly appreciate in the last few weeks. And although falling on my own face is nothing new to me, this latest burn ripped my ego apart and shook my sense of self in such a merciless way, I really did not know what to do but to do absolutely nothing. It made the most sense to stop being an active participant in my own life, to become a passive observer instead, after the colossal mess I’d created for myself with my own hands. I had almost no desire or confidence to be present or engaged, only to be presentational, or to pretend.

As you can imagine, I’m beyond French’d out at this moment. Frenchmen, french toast, french kissing… Say it with me: ugh. But much has to be said about the way the French respond to pain and embrace their pain day after day with uncompromising zest for life and admirable poise. FYI, pain means bread in French in case you had the nerve or cluelessness to miss my clever pun.

Despite how tempting it is to surrender to emptiness, to withdraw into the safety of our shells, and to drift away from anything we’d once called familiar whenever tragedy strikes, it’s so important to remain determined to pull something meaningful out of the abyss of dissonance. “Paris is our capital. We love music, drunkenness, joy. For centuries lovers of death have tried to make us lose life’s flavour. They never succeed,” was what French writer and cartoonist Joann Sfar had to say in wake of the massacre last November.

There’s a good chance going back out into the world to reclaim my identity, to reassert who I am and what I stand for, to take back ownership of my life will at some point – or rather, several points – challenge everything I believe to be true about myself and break my heart into more pieces than it was made of. But that’s not anywhere close to the worst thing that can happen to me. Far worse is living a life motivated by fear and ruled by pride.

So, how do I move forward from here? How will I use myself, everything I’ve been given, to serve that which is greater than myself? The only way I know how to, I guess. I’ll find a man I like a lot and have as much amazing sex as humanly possible – obviously with a condom this time. (I think there’s a saying that goes ‘once bitten… please bite me on my arse again, please’ ????) Then I’ll do it again the next day until my legs are so weak and wobbly I can hardly stand up. I’ll tell him what turns me on and ask him what turns him on. I’ll teach him how to touch me so that I have really good orgasms. We’ll stay up ridiculously late telling each other the long stories of our lives. And then meet for ice cream and walks in the park at spontaneous hours of the afternoon. I’ll buy him my favourite Douglas Coupland book and write him SparkNotes inside in a coded, erotically tender language that only the two of us can decipher. When he says, “You’re so beautiful.” (Oh, and he will.) I won’t blush and say, “Thank you.” I’ll ask, “What makes you think that?” And then watch his face very carefully while he answers. It will be fun and interesting and hot and sweet and bloody terrifying all at the same time.

But this is what we’re here for. It’s what we're meant to do in this colourful parade to the grave we call life. Joie de vivre, it’s such a simple – and, it must be said, fundamentally French – idea. How wonderful it is to be alive and how ironic the medium in which this lesson revealed itself.

The Pregnant Pause

I’ve admitted to being a walking bag of contradictions in the past, but never before have I felt so confused and exhausted by my conflicting emotions of deep regret one morning and warm relief the next. After vast amounts of thought, my brain still remains a giant plate of scrambled eggs. I should apologise in advance because I'm about to write my feelings all over your Internet and it's likely to upset a lot of people.

By age 45, half of all women will have had an unintended pregnancy and one in three will have had ended theirs, yet there remains so much shame and stigma surrounding the issue. I haven’t yet been able to say a lot about this openly in real life and most accounts I’ve found on the Internet were either very pro-life or very pro-choice. What happened to all the voices that were slightly muddled or unsure?

I’m aware of the floodgate writing about this opens, and it honestly is such a terrifying process to actually sit down, dig deep, and churn out all these words about something so sad and so personal, and then lay it out here for third party consumption. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that it is important for me to try to be as transparent and honest as I can, especially with other women, because a woman's ability to choose whether or not she wants to terminate a pregnancy – for whatever reason – is often under attack.

I have found the experience of abortion to be greatly uneven throughout the world. It varies not just by law but also by upbringing, culture, race, income, age, religion, education, family; by whether a boyfriend offered a hand to hold at the clinic or told her matter-of-factly that there are already enough human beings in the world as it is; by the kindness and warmth or callousness and flippancy of the attending nurses; by whether she had to order the pill online because it is illegal in her town or battled protesters outside a clinic. Some feel so ashamed that their family and friends will never hear of their pain; others feel stronger for having lived through the experience and regret nothing about their decision.

It isn’t every day that a story comes back full circle to bite its author directly in the arse, but such is the case for me, who has wittingly joked about pregnancy scares for a decade. I kid you not, bitch is knocked up! (Ba dum tss.)

I'm probably the least reliable narrator right now but I want to attempt to talk about this without it sounding like a fancy fur coat that everyone is keen to try on, only to have it thrown back at me in revulsion because we all know nobody would ever deliberately wear something so vile.

In my gut, I knew what I wanted to do. But the moment logic and reason caught up with my instincts, I did the thing I thought I'd never do. Suddenly it became apparent that my life right now was not conducive to raising a happy, healthy child. Even though I was in a much better position compared to the many young victims of rape who kept their babies in spite of it all, I couldn't bring myself to put a child or myself through a lifetime of chaos. Even though I'd always trusted my intuition, I turned my back on it when it really mattered.

Adoption. Murderer. Reckless. Selfish. Irresponsible. Let the judgements roll...

I will not delve into all the intimate details, such as how did it happen and wasn’t he wearing a condom and how far along are you and what did he say and is he going to take responsibility for it and whose is it, actually and are you sad and does your family know and who have you told and who can I tell and when will you make an announcement and does Nadia know and is it okay for me to tell her when I see her tonight and who is going to pay and how much is it going to cost, exactly and does Nadia know because I feel like she needs to hear it from me and are you seeing someone else and what's going on between you guys anyway and does he have a new girlfriend and what are their names and how much do they weigh and are weekends lonely and are you happier and do you think you will ever regret this and could you just tell me exactly every detail from the very beginning especially the bad stuff?

“It will hurt,” my doctor warned. No shit. I wasn’t expecting an abortion to feel like a milk bath and massage. I had 3 doses of medication inserted into my baby box before I felt any contractions. I cramped and bled the entire weekend before returning on Monday for an ultrasound. Somehow the amoeba was surviving. Just 6 weeks and already it was a little bit resistant, a little bit stubborn. =)

Because it was still early in the pregnancy, we could afford to wait until Friday before we made our next move. My sesame seed had evolved into a peanut by then and I think I saw a heartbeat on the screen but I didn’t dare ask. It's weird the attachment you can have to something you can't even physically hold. I spent another Friday afternoon at the clinic for a second round of medication. I heard a small splash when I sat on the toilet to pee that evening. Using a pair of chopsticks, I fished out a lump of curdled blood attached to a grey thing the size of a ping pong ball. It was surreal. I thought, do I just flush the toilet? And then I did.

Since then, I’ve had six bowls of really awful herbal soup cooked by my mum, two hours of sleep per night, ten plates of steamed Pomfret, forty cups of bitter tea, approximately 3,000 iron pills, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Even though I have amazing friends who guide me and take care of me and save me from my darkest days, everyone has his or her own life to return to and wants me to do the same. Everyone else has moved on and is a little tired of my situation, even though I am still in transition as I try to make sense of everything that has happened. Unless my baby daddy texted me something appalling recently, or there are some new boyfriends and girlfriends in the mix, most people don’t want or know how to talk anymore about the physical reality of going through an abortion and the psychological burdens that accompany it.

Except your mother.

It’s one thing to be tough and stalwart. It’s another to bear such extraordinary pain alone. Don’t do it. Even though it feels like nobody else understands the specific ways you are in pain, you have to be brave enough to show some weakness. You have to trust people, especially the people you love and who you know love you back. You have to give them the chance to come through in the clutch. What’s the point otherwise?

A mother is like your conscience only much louder. And nosier. In fact, your conscience probably stays out of your own affairs far more often than your mum does, which is not so much because while your conscience is negligent or busy, your mum is always watching and you are nothing without her, really.

Ultimately, any gut-wrenching experience makes you see things differently. It tears apart your ego and breaks your heart so new light can come in. It also reminds you of the simple truths that we purposely forget every day or else would never get out of bed. Things like, condoms break and pills get skipped and pulling out seems good in theory. And shit happens. And it can happen to anyone. The best outcome is that you learn a little more about what you can handle and you stay soft through the pain. Perhaps you feel a little bit wiser now. Maybe your story can be of help to others if they should ever need a hand navigating such supremely shitty times.

The fact that anyone has to feel ashamed of his or her personal decision is extremely unfortunate. The countless women who feel scared and alone when they end up needing to have an abortion are the reason I speak freely on the matter. My hope is that one day, all women will be able to feel the same way. That being said, even though I am not ashamed of my abortion, and I will never be ashamed of being a woman who exercised her rights, getting an abortion really does suck a lot. Really. Just to reiterate: getting an abortion sucks.

As I’m learning, saying I'm pro-choice and living that decision are not entirely the same things. When you decline the gift you're given, will the universe offer you that gift again? In truth, most days I feel like I need to be punished for getting pregnant in the first place, so I alienate myself and am hesitant about asking for help or support that I'm not sure I deserve. I weep at anything, even detergent commercials. Some days I wake up and it's almost too much to open the door of guilt and regret because it is daunting and overwhelming. But it’s precisely the stuff we ignore that haunts us further down the road.

So, I dunno, you guys. I'm waiting for the day I wake up feeling like my whole self again. But until then, I think we just try to do whatever we can and forgive ourself the rest.