On April 20th, twenty-five years ago, I underwent a midterm abortion in New York. The choice was not mine. I had just returned from serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Niger, West Africa.
Those three sentences have taken several decades to write. Trauma is like that. It never actually leaves the body. Even when the abortion took place long ago, it’s still in the bloodstream. The pain of unresolved emotion remains. Even after I’ve spent the last ten years writing a book of poems focused on it, I still have difficulty finding the right words in the bare lightbulb of prose.
Here are a few facts: I fell in love at first sight with Benoit, a French volunteer who was in Niger completing his alternative military service. We lived in the same city and later, traveled overland across West Africa. When his two-year contract finished, we stayed together. I visited Paris at New Year’s to be with him.
And then, within two weeks of returning to Niger, I missed my period. We were pregnant. Since Benoit and I had already declared our love for each other and started planning our future; I just thought we would have our first born a little earlier than anticipated. I thought wrong. Instead, he repeatedly told me, nous somme pas sur la meme piste; we are not on the same path. But what path was that?
After a month’s stay in his spare room—a 5th-floor walk-up, using a dollhouse-sized heater and a bathroom down a shared hallway, he let me know he had talked to his parents, and they fully supported his leaving me. That was when I knew it was over. Forty-eight hours later, he drove me to the airport and waited at the gate to make sure I boarded the plane.
Would I make the same choice again? Impossible to know. What I’ve realized, with the help of a good therapist, is that I was robbed, robbed of the right to process what happened to my body. My family never allowed me to come to my own decision. Just off the plane from France and jetlagged, my sister declared that she had made an appointment with an abortion doctor for the following morning–something I’d expressly asked her not to do.
To understand my experience better, I took a deep dive into the history of abortion. Abortion has always been with us, often as a legitimate part of the medical profession. I learned that ancient Arab, Greek, and Hebrew texts dealt directly with “expelling the fetus.” Plants such as aloe and the ripe seeds from Queen Anne’s Lace were prescribed to end pregnancies.
Much of what I discovered blew my mind. For example, in 1748, founding father Benjamin Franklin published a popular “recipe for the troubles” to spice up The Instructor, a Mathematics textbook he edited. Several indigenous tribes used a variety of herbs and roots to induce abortions.
While I dealt with my pregnancy in Niger, West Africa, on strict bed rest for several weeks, the father was in Paris studying banking for his MBA degree. While my sister scheduled me for a midterm abortion, without my consent, without the doctor offering any counseling, my ex-fiancé was studying for his final exams. His life stayed calm. His career options as wide as the sky.
Recently, at a local beach café, a childhood friend asked, “If you could go back in time to that choiceless choice, what might you do differently? Knowing what you know now of your life, would you make the same decision again?”
My friend’s question is the one I’ve been expecting. I look out at Puget Sound, the sunlight appearing and then disappearing off the water. I explain to her that if such an easy assessment were possible, I wouldn’t have spent the last ten years of my life writing the poems which chronicle the before, during, and after of my abortion. At 26 and the youngest child, I’d always looked to my older sisters as role models. It would have been easier for me to lift a Volkswagen in the air than go against my sisters’ advice.
This is a barebone narrative, but what I wanted to consider here is not only the particulars of my experience but rather the complexities that occur when a woman, any woman, must make this decision; that the decision is as old as human history. And her choice is never easy, never free. But it must be hers.
An unwanted pregnancy doesn’t need to equal a life of shame. But shame still often hangs in the air for women, and that question still follows me like a low fog around the coastal city where I live—What would I do if I could return to that time? All I really know is that I would have wanted in that moment was to make my own decision. To have had the unconditional love and support of my family no matter what I decided. To make my own choice.
