I am the monster they fear

The abortion didn’t hurt but the three weeks after it did.

It was a low ache down deep in my belly, pressurized. I wore dresses to work so I wouldn’t have to button any pants. I was tired.

Two weeks after, I was on a plane to Syracuse to judge an international news-design competition. No one knew. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell my friends. It was between my boyfriend and me.

It had been an accident. We weren’t ready. There was no hesitation once we realized.

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I should have written about this sooner, shared it widely and without shame. It’s easier said than done, I’ve learned.

Most of the details have already faded in my memory, so I’m glad I wrote down something at the time. The anti-abortion fanatics want you to believe it’s this searing trauma that you’ll pore over every day for the rest of your life. Maybe for some people it is. But for me, it was just something that had to be done.

Jan. 14, 2016

It’s 3:30 p.m. It’s Tuesday. It’s January. And I’m pregnant.

I won’t be, soon enough.

Writing that feels weird. I zoomed my computer screen way out so the type wouldn’t feel so large. Or in case someone a mile away were to be looking. This is my secret. Our secret.

I don’t know how I feel/I feel weird.

Jan. 16, 2016

It’s 1:23 p.m. It’s Thursday. And I’m still pregnant.

I have made the appointment. Here in this state, governed by wizened old pasty folk who know best, there is a mandatory 48-hour waiting period. So I will have to make another The Appointment after the first one. That first one is in 11 days.

Now I know why my period is late and why my stomach feels weirdly crampy and why I’ve been peeing more and why I am so quick to anger lately (four symptoms I had last time, too, but that are easy to rationalize and deny away).

Now I am in on my own secret. And 11 days feels like an eternity to carry this secret around.

I know I’m lucky to even have the option to have a secret like this and not fear for my life. I am grateful that I have options. I feel stupid and irresponsible and like a stereotype. But I don’t feel guilty. I just want it done.

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Here are some specifics I do remember. I don’t remember if things are out of order or what happened on which visit, honestly.

The second, secure waiting room was full. It contained a diverse crowd of women spanning ages and skin colors, with a smattering of male companions. The carpet sported a pattern that looked like an abstract drawing of a petri dish growing penicillin. This amused me so I took a photo and texted it to my boyfriend. He responded, kindly concerned about my well-being. I had not asked him to come with me. It didn’t seem necessary.

There was a radio to the left of me blaring music. In all fairness, it was likely not blaring, but it seemed very loud from my seat right next to it. It was probably soothing to others seated a reasonable distance. Everyone’s mileage varies.

I was the same sort of nervous I get in any doctor’s waiting room, with a small side of paranoia. There had been no crazy protesters outside as there often were when I had passed by the Planned Parenthood in the past, but I thought about the building security and how possible it could be that some deranged lunatic might storm the doors and try to make a political point with violence while I was there.

I met with a woman behind a desk who read from a script prepared for her by the Tennessee state legislature. It was sprinkled with aggressive propaganda — including the assertion that this procedure could kill me and if it didn’t, it would likely give me cancer — that she and I both wordlessly, with skeptical eye contact, acknowledged was untrue and unscientific. She reiterated that she was required by law to read the script to me.

I received an exam that included a transvaginal ultrasound, presumably to date the pregnancy, since the age of the pregnancy factors into whether you qualify to get the pill or will need to have the procedure done surgically. A transvaginal ultrasound is performed with a wand-shaped probe that the ultrasound tech must thrust inside vagina and press against the cervix to get a glimpse of the fetus. The procedure was painful. The ultrasound allowed the tech to estimate that my pregnancy was 10 weeks old. I was asked if I wanted to see the image. I did not.

The doctor — an ancient, age-spotted man behind a desk — had to run through another script for me, very similar to the one I’d already heard. He seemed annoyed and apologetic and I remembered thinking I bet he has to give this same bullshit scripted speech dozens of times every day.

They sent me home with pills to take at precise intervals between two days. The first pill sets up the pins, the second set of pills knocks them down. I knew I would need to clear my schedule so I took the second dose on a Friday. I was back to work on Monday.

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I laid on the couch and expected pain, but instead got pretty standard cramping. The worst part was the anticipation of the unknown. I had read many first-person accounts on blogs and message boards and, just like accounts of labor and delivery, everyone’s experience was wildly different. So I had to wait and see what mine would be.

I went to sleep that night, same as every other night, and remember waking and rushing to the bathroom, where I experienced a disorienting middle-of-the-night gush of fluid. It didn’t hurt, but the volume was surprising and new. I emptied out and it was done.

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It’s not so much the shame that keeps you quiet, turns out. It’s the uncertainty of how others will react. (Maybe that’s a flavor of shame.) If I blog about what happened, am I putting a target on my back for someone out there who’s got a vendetta? If I tell people openly and casually what happened, will our relationship dynamics change? Will my employer decide I’m not a good representative of the company’s values? If I post about my abortion on Instagram, will someone in my family curse me angrily for what I had done?

I kept quiet, in part, out of fear of all of the above.

Turns out at least one of those fears was legitimate.

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Planned Parenthood requires a follow-up exam to ensure that the pregnancy was fully terminated. That meant another transvaginal ultrasound a couple of weeks after the pills. It was uncomfortable. I was still healing, my cervix still returning to its normal state.

The ultrasound tech confirmed that the gestational sac was no longer present. She also found something large and abnormal, a mass that she could not identify. “I’m just a tech, not a doctor, so I would encourage you to follow up with your gynecologist.”

I did so, and matter-of-factly told my gynecologist that I had recently medically terminated a pregnancy and that the tech had found something strange during the ultrasound. Fast forward several weeks of exams and CT scans and MRIs and I was being handed pamphlets about severe endometriosis, fibroids and potential hysterectomy. The tech had gotten a glimpse of what was at the time a 7-centimeter endometrioma — an endometrial-blood-filled sac that had overtaken and destroyed my left ovary.

I was asymptomatic so I am not sure that I would have ever known about the thing growing inside me, threatening to burst. By the time I had completed my final diagnostic scan over the course of several months, it had grown to 10 inches and the need for surgery was considered fairly urgent. So I had surgery and it went well. I now have one ovary that will hopefully not be overtaken by endometriosis too.

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Legislation that criminalizes abortion is sweeping the country. To have participated in the ongoing “abortion” “debate” the past couple of decades has felt a bit like having a perfectly serviceable flowerbed with aggressive weeds that had to be managed, maintained, beaten back. Some years they weren’t so bad but, fuck, some years your knuckles were bloody and sore from weeding.

Somehow this time the weeds have come clear up the front steps and they are in the house. It happened so fast, I guess, if you weren’t paying attention.

I don’t know. I don’t have any good analogies. I’m so tired of the “debate.”

The first step of beating back the weeds (they will never die permanently) is, I guess, telling the weeds your story. Sit down beside the weeds and tell the weeds about basic bodily autonomy. Try to reason with the weeds. If that doesn’t work, crack open your most personal secrets and pour them into a megaphone that will translate them into a Bat Signal that will shine to motherfucking Timbuktu. Might not be traumatic for you but it certainly will be for others. Still, you must stand over the weeds, dripping your secrets and tears onto them to beg for their understanding and their compassion.

Are the weeds listening?

Man, weeds don’t even have ears.