Choice Words Page 5

  Seeing the doctor was not as simple an operation as one might have supposed. To begin with, I did not know which doctor to see. It was so many years since I had been unwell that I did not know how to set about it; in fact, I had not been unwell since I had become an adult. I had never had to do it on my own. The only doctor I knew was our old family doctor, who lives near our old but now abandoned family residence in Putney, and he was clearly unsuitable. I supposed that I ought to go to the nearest GP, but how was I to know who he was, or where he lived? Living within two minutes’ walk of Harley Street as I did, I was terrified that I might walk into some private waiting room by accident, and be charged fifty guineas for what I might and ought to get for nothing. Being my parents’ daughter, the thought outraged me morally as well as financially. On the other hand, it did not seem a good plan to pick a surgery so evidently seedy that it could not exist but on the National Health: though this was in fact what I did. I passed one day, in the small road off George Street, after visiting an exhibition by a very distant friend, the brass plaque on the front door that said Dr. H. E. Moffett. There was a globular light over the door, with surgery painted all in black letters. It was not the kind of door behind which anyone could be charged fifty guineas, and I made a note of the surgery hours and resolved to return the next day at five-thirty.

  I visited the doctor the next day. That visit was a revelation: it was an initiation into a new way of life, a way that was thenceforth to be mine forever. An initiation into reality, if you like. The surgery opened at five-thirty, and I made an appointment there. Promptly: I arrived at about twenty-eight minutes to six, thinking that I was in plenty of time, and would have to wait hardly at all. But when I opened that shabby varnished door, I found the waiting room overflowing with waiting patients, patiently waiting.

  THE ABORTION I DIDN’T WANT

  Caitlin McDonnell

  I’m lying on a table at a women’s health clinic being held down by three young clinicians while a doctor performs the procedure. There are tapestries and Georgia O’Keeffe prints on the walls. I can’t move or see what’s beneath my knees. My body resists; I do not want this. The hands restrain me until it’s done.

  “You’re not pregnant anymore,” the doctor says, and then leaves the room.

  A cold wind of grief blows through me. My body feels empty, like a dried rind. X drives me home in silence. I lie on the bed and pull thick blankets over me, trying to turn off the resounding emotional pain. He leaves the house and goes on a walk. I take a pill to help me numb. It will be years before I begin to process this day.

  Every abortion is a story. It might be mundane or dramatic, involve great sacrifice or great relief. Too often these stories live only in whispers between trusted comrades or tucked away in journals. Abortion is just one example of how women have grown accustomed to living with stories that never get told publicly. Mine is a story of an abortion I didn’t want but chose to go through with anyway. It’s a grief I live with. It’s my grief. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  * * *

  I’d sung along with Fiona Apple the whole way on my drive across country to move in with X. I’m going to make a mistake/I’m going to do it on purpose.

  We barely knew each other. He was a rising literary star. I was a poetry fellow at an art colony where he did a reading and we struck up an intense long-distance connection. He was starting a new teaching job in a new city and proposed I come with him when my fellowship ended.

  But I soon felt trapped at the walled-in college campus and struggled to find work. We argued about how to clean, whether to have a faux bearskin rug, how to play Scrabble, what to eat, whether marriage mattered, and how we might raise a child. When I told him my news, he said he needed to take a walk. When he returned, he looked at me with a defiant distance in his eyes.

  “This is the worst thing I’m going to do in my whole life, but no part of me wants to take this journey with you.” It felt like someone was reading a horrible line from a play. I wanted to hand him a different line, and tried to, for weeks, months. I was in the kind of love with him that shocks the system with its compelling wrongness. We were in a standoff.

  In the midst of it all, we named the fetus Malachai. I pictured a boy who was a combination of us both. X looked at me sideways and said we weren’t going to have a baby just because it would be “a cool color.” I was paralyzed by indecision, sleepy with denial and hormones. I made termination appointments and cancelled them for one reason after another. I had the flu. I had the wrong insurance.

  “How do you think you’re going to do it,” he kept asking. “How?”

  I kept finding ways to defer my decision. A Kaiser clinic didn’t understand what “strabismus” was in my medical history. It wasn’t until being told I’d passed the date when a chemical abortion could be induced that I felt real fear. It is the kind of choice nature makes for you if you don’t make it yourself.

  During my intake at the women’s clinic, I told them that I didn’t think I could say I wanted an abortion but that I thought they should do it anyway. Understandably, they didn’t know what to do with me. They took me into a room and counseled. “Are you sure? Have you explored all your options?” I told them I had.

  They left me alone and argued among themselves. I just kept repeating my outrageous statement. At one point they tried to send me home.

  * * *

  “We think you should think more about it,” a clinician said. I was firm. I wasn’t leaving. But I couldn’t say I wanted it. Every alternative they offered made me shake my head no. I couldn’t say anything more affirmative than “You should do it.”

  I needed to end my pregnancy—and not think about being an arbiter of life and death, at least not that day. I asked them to hold me down because I was afraid my body might resist. What they did for me that day was heroic and kind.

  I think I’m not alone in feeling that to truly wrap my head around the enormousness of the choice that day was too much. The inevitability of this abortion felt bigger than me, and I needed to experience it as a great wave coming over me rather than as something I was doing.

  The wave was a slow one. “When will I feel better?” I asked my friend from my bed cocoon after the procedure.

  “Not until you have a baby,” she answered, from her own experience.

  I believe life begins at conception, but that doesn’t change the fact that women have dominion over the life inside their own. I grieved because I wanted a child. Maybe if I’d been less in love with X, or had a better job, or had more money saved, then I would have done something different. I had more resources than some, less than others.

  The woman who had been my therapist through my adolescence and my parents’ troubled divorce said, “Sometimes it’s the ultimate act of generosity.”

  If I had remained pregnant, I’d have been bringing into the world a child with a dearth of stability and a father who’d stated clearly that he didn’t want him. I think I probably would have made it work somehow, but my wanting a child at that point was not compatible with the reality of my circumstances and it would have tied me irrevocably to a man I didn’t trust.

  The distinction between grief and regret is an important one. I wanted to be a mother and knew I was terminating a potential life. When I did get pregnant again, years later, grief gave the experience an added gravity. Each ultrasound reminded me of Malachai. Each concern sent me down a spiral of thinking that I might somehow be punished, or that I had lost my one chance.

  Did I make a choice? I now see that I did, despite my efforts to shroud it. Do I regret my actions? That’s a trickier question.

  I had beers with my friend Gabe in San Francisco a couple of months after the abortion, and he counseled me not to be afraid of the word “regret.” We all live with regrets, as death lives alongside life. Every meaningful relationship has regret in its DNA. It doesn’t mean we’re doing the wrong things.

  Merritt Tierce wrote last year in her incisive New York
Times opinion piece, “This Is What an Abortion Looks Like,” that we need to stop categorizing abortions as justified or unjustified according to the amount of suffering a woman contends with. She argued that the personal contexts, the stories surrounding the abortion, are not relevant until we grant “each woman the right to make and do with her body what she will.”

  Tierce is right in cautioning us against using the stories to justify the choice, but what if we all start telling them anyway, in all their great variance of comedy and pain, until they are a normalized part of the human experience?

  In 1984, my aunt, Kathleen McDonnell, a feminist who lives and writes in Canada, wrote a book called Not an Easy Choice in which she explores the silence women have to live with after an abortion if they feel grief. Any expression of sadness is pounced on as regret by abortion opponents. Women deserve both the complexity of the decisions that affect their bodies and the fundamental right to make them.

  I didn’t want my abortion, but if I could close my eyes and return to that table, I would do the same thing. However painful the decision-making process, however fraught it is with ambivalence and paradox, it is ours. We aren’t simple. Some choices take years to understand. My abortion opened up the scope of my life in a way I couldn’t see clearly that day, and for that I am grateful.

  I now have the most amazing daughter in the world. She knows she has always been wanted. I accept the sadness that accompanies the choices I’ve made, both by seizing my agency and by ducking it. I live with the grief of my abortion in the same way I live with the grief of many paths not taken. They are all part of the story that got me here.

  FREE AND SAFE ABORTION

  Ana Gabriela Rivera

  I’m curious to know the meaning

  Of the difference between legality and illegality

  For centuries past

  My sisters who give birth,

  My sisters who also decide not to give birth

  Have not been stopped by these laws,

  They’ve only put us in danger

  We join together so we can better understand ourselves

  Because out there

  Nobody wants to inform us.

  Not the lawyers, not the doctors, not the scientists

  All the experts

  Want to make decisions about my body,

  Outlawing ancestral practices

  Today, September 28th

  I lift up my voice

  I let out a shout to reach the ears of pastors and priests

  I put forward a demand for justice to the clowns who govern us

  I demand that my decision be respected

  That my right to make decisions about the right time be respected

  That the spaces in which i walk be respected

  Because letting us interrupt a pregnancy

  Does not obligate anyone to do it

  Because sex education is not blasphemy

  Because there’s no reason that my knowing about my body has to

  impede you.

  But if it is blasphemy and if it does impede you:

  Today I do not care!

  Because my sisters’ deaths have no justification!

  Today, September 28

  I shout for all of those who have died trying to carry out an abortion

  In secret

  For those who have been forced to be mothers against their will.

  For those victims of your judgement, victims of violence masked

  As tradition,

  For the women who do not know how to use contraceptives to

  Make decisions about their own time.

  Translated by Sarah Leister

  MERELY BY WILDERNESS

  Molly Peacock

  The breasts enlarge, and a sweet white discharge

  coats the vaginal lips. The nipples itch.

  A five-week fetus in the uterus,

  as the larger share of a large soft pear,

  soaks quietly there. Should I run directly

  and insist that he marry me? Resist

  is what we do. It is this: I’m in what

  I never thought I could be caught in,

  and it’s a strong net, a roomy deluxe net,

  the size of civilization. To shun

  this little baby—how can I? Maybe

  I could go it alone, fix up a home

  for us, never ask why inside the lie

  we’d not look beyond, so not ask beyond:

  a poor scratch—castle with a beat-in door.

  I can’t do this alone, yet I am so alone

  no one, not even this child inside me, even

  the me I was, can feel the wild cold buzz

  that presses me into this place, bleakness

  that will break me, except I cannot be

  broken merely by wilderness, I can only

  be lost.

  FROM MARIA: OR, THE WRONGS OF WOMAN

  Mary Wollstonecraft

  Maria, the novel’s narrator, is an educated upper-class woman whose husband has taken away her child and imprisoned her in an insane asylum in order to control her. There she makes friends with one of the asylum staff members, Jemima, who tells her the story below.

  “At sixteen, I suddenly grew tall, and something like comeliness appeared on a Sunday, when I had time to wash my face, and put on clean clothes. My master had once or twice caught hold of me in the passage; but I instinctively avoided his disgusting caresses. One day however, when the family were at a Methodist meeting, he contrived to be alone in the house with me, and by blows—yes; blows and menaces, compelled me to submit to his ferocious desire; and, to avoid my mistress’s fury, I was obliged in future to comply, and skulk to my loft at his command, in spite of increasing loathing.

  “The anguish which was now pent up in my bosom, seemed to open a new world to me: I began to extend my thoughts beyond myself, and grieve for human misery, till I discovered, with horror—ah! what horror!—that I was with child. I know not why I felt a mixed sensation of despair and tenderness, excepting that, ever called a bastard, a bastard appeared to me an object of the greatest compassion in creation.

  “I communicated this dreadful circumstance to my master, who was almost equally alarmed at the intelligence; for he feared his wife, and public censure at the meeting. After some weeks of deliberation had elapsed, I in continual fear that my altered shape would be noticed, my master gave me a medicine in a phial, which he desired me to take, telling me, without any circumlocution, for what purpose it was designed. I burst into tears, I thought it was killing myself—yet was such a self as I worth preserving? He cursed me for a fool, and left me to my own reflections. I could not resolve to take this infernal potion; but I wrapped it up in an old gown, and hid it in a corner of my box.

  “Nobody yet suspected me, because they had been accustomed to view me as a creature of another species. But the threatening storm at last broke over my devoted head—never shall I forget it! One Sunday evening when I was left, as usual, to take care of the house, my master came home intoxicated, and I became the prey of his brutal appetite. His extreme intoxication made him forget his customary caution, and my mistress entered and found us in a situation that could not have been more hateful to her than me. Her husband was ‘pot-valiant,’ he feared her not at the moment, nor had he then much reason, for she instantly turned the whole force of her anger another way. She tore off my cap, scratched, kicked, and buffeted me, till she had exhausted her strength, declaring, as she rested her arm, ‘that I had wheedled her husband from her.—But, could anything better be expected from a wretch, whom she had taken into her house out of pure charity?’ What a torrent of abuse rushed out till, almost breathless, she concluded with saying, that I was born a strumpet; it ran in my blood, and nothing good could come to those who harbored me.

  “My situation was, of course, discovered, and she declared that I should not stay another night under the same roof with an honest family. I was therefore pushed out of doors, and my trumpery th
rown after me, when it had been contemptuously examined in the passage, lest I should have stolen anything.

  “Behold me then in the street, utterly destitute! Whither could I creep for shelter? To my father’s roof I had no claim, when not pursued by shame—now I shrunk back as from death, from my mother’s cruel reproaches, my father’s execrations. I could not endure to hear him curse the day I was born, though life had been a curse to me. Of death I thought, but with a confused emotion of terror, as I stood leaning my head on a post, and starting at every footstep, lest it should be my mistress coming to tear my heart out. One of the boys of the shop passing by, heard my tale, and immediately repaired to his master, to give him a description of my situation; and he touched the right key—the scandal it would give rise to, if I were left to repeat my tale to every inquirer. This plea came home to his reason, who had been sobered by his wife’s rage, the fury of which fell on him when I was out of her reach, and he sent the boy to me with half-a-guinea, desiring him to conduct me to a house where beggars and other wretches, the refuse of society, nightly lodged.

  “This night was spent in a state of stupefaction, or desperation. I detested mankind, and abhorred myself.

  “In the morning I ventured out, to throw myself in my master’s way, at his usual hour of going abroad. I approached him, he damned me for a b——, declared I had disturbed the peace of the family, and that he had sworn to his wife, ‘never to take any more notice of me.’ He left me; but, instantly returning, he told me that he should speak to his friend, a parish-officer, to get a nurse for the brat I laid to him; and advised me, if I wished to keep out of the house of correction, not to make free with his name.