5w6d

D. hung up on me yesterday and, other than a couple of nasty e-mails, nothing for 24 hours. He’s been telling people about our situation, and I pointed out that I felt my privacy was being violated. I received I didn’t do anything wrong and how dare you tell me whom I can tell… then silence. I typed up an e-mail I didn’t send:

I don’t know what to say anymore. I’m tired of working hard to stay in love with you. I’m tired of fighting for our relationship. I’m not saying it’s over, because I don’t think that’s inevitably the case, but you’re on the verge of losing me. I have made mistakes, but I don’t deserve malevolence.

I’m at the point where I no longer know what the best thing to do is, both with the pregnancy and this relationship. I talked with my friend N. last night, whom I’d called to set up a lunch date. He called back almost immediately and said, without provocation, You sound really depressed…more than I’ve ever heard you. Are you okay? What can I do? The answer is that I don’t know what anyone can do, short of taking a two-by-four and whacking D. across the head to get him to wake up to the fact that he is completely fucking things up. From abandoning me when I’ve needed him most to a complete lack of empathy about his violation of my privacy, I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.

As I stave off both tears and episodes of vomiting, I both want D. to go far, far away and come rushing back to take me in his arms and apologize. But apologies only work for so long, and there have been too many of them for too long. Perhaps what I need is to learn how to do this alone.

5w5d

I suppose I thought I’d waltz in to D.’s place last night and everything would be okay, and we’d decide that we could see this pregnancy through to term. Instead, I’m left with all the reasons I don’t have to, feeling brow-beaten into something I already know is the best thing. What I’m left with is a sinking feeling that, come June 5, there won’t be any reason to stay with D. All the items on my reasons to have an abortion list seem to work equally well on a reasons to leave D. list.

5w1d

Last week, I joined a (pro-choice) online support group for women dealing with unplanned pregnancies. I’ve been a member of this group in the past, both when making the decision to have an abortion and making the decision to carry my pregnancy to term. It’s a helpful place to be, a space in which other women are struggling with the same issues and going through the same process to come to terms with their own decisions. That is, until you get attacked by a troll.

Trolls aren’t present on the list; the moderator does an excellent job making sure the listserv itself is free of judgment and coercion. However, some people join the list under false pretenses (you’re supposed to tell your own story to the moderator before being approved for membership, and some people simply lie) and use the list as a means of mining e-mail addresses for the purposes of sending confused pregnant women nasty e-mails. And lo and behold, after I signed one of my posts to the list Namaste (I’m not Hindu, but I appreciate the concept of “I honor the divine in you”), look what arrived in my in box:

Hi Vegan. I couldn’t help but notice the irony of your signing off with “Namaste”, and so casually discussing the termination of your own child. I assume you are a vegetarian and possibly Hindu. You put so much importance on the lives of animals, yet you are going to kill your own baby? Do you not see the hypocrisy here? And I know that the Hindu faith teaches the sacredness of all life. That includes your unborn son or daughter, who is alive and kicking, heart beating and brain waves. What are you doing with your life that you keep putting yourself in the position of having to tear your own children apart limb from limb?

I know what I say will make you very angry. Do you really know why? Are these words touching a sore spot, a wound on your conscience? I am truly so sorry – I don’t want to cause anyone undue pain. But you need to see the reality of your actions, or you will continue to cause harm to your children and your own soul. Please reconsider. I would do anything in the world to help you give life to this baby. You say the birthfather has come around and is now supportive. I think he will also come around to loving this child as he does his older son. Please give him this chance. You can also consider adoption – as hard as it is, it is a choice that you can feel good about, not guilty.

Please prayerfully consider these words, not as a personal attack, but as the God’s honest truth. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you let your baby live. There is support out there. You don’t have to do it alone.

My response is simply, Ugh. Two things strike me as dishonest: “having to tear your own children apart limb from limb” and “your unborn son or daughter, who is alive and kicking, heart beating and brain waves.”

I’m not an expert on anatomy and physiology, but I have miscarried a child when I was 6w4d pregnant and, when I passed the embryo, it wasn’t anything with the capacity to kick. I’ve read — and looked the pictures in — Lennart Nilsson’s A Child is Born. I’ve seen the ultrasounds when my sister began spontaneously bleeding at at 7w6d and no one could figure out why. To put it bluntly: characterizing what is growing inside of me in the above manner is not only dishonest, it’s morally reprehensible (and cruel).

I am not saying abortion is an amoral issue. Indeed, it is something that deserves careful consideration, and as a vegan I see the moral connections probably a bit more distinct than most (see Gary Francione’s essay in Animals and Women). But the guilt I feel or the anger at the e-mail I received isn’t a “wound on my conscience” — it’s part of a struggle to do the right thing, which isn’t always the easy or most comfortable thing.

Many years ago, when I thought I might be pregnant (I wasn’t), I visited a crisis pregnancy center. I didn’t realize they were a front for pro-life groups. While they were performing the pregnancy test (a urine-based test that takes no more than two to four minutes to get an accurate result) whose results “wouldn’t be definitive for 20 minutes” I was locked in a small room with a television no more than a foot from my face. There was no space for me to turn away, and the volume was turned up so loud it gave me a headache. The graphic video showed dead fetuses from second- and third-trimester abortions in explicit detail. The whole thing horrified me. Their scare tactics worked; had I been pregnant, I wouldn’t have had an abortion. I suppose they “won” that day.

Now, older and a bit wiser, I see abortion as a moral issue, but not the same way that pro-life activists do (and I definitely don’t equivocate the images from that video I saw with early first-trimester embryos). I see unplanned pregnancies not as inconveniences but as sad events that bring us to the point of being unsure what the next step is. I don’t believe pregnancy in general should be treated flippantly — but how is it that a 16-year-old girl who has a baby because she wants a living doll can be judged “good” and a 33-year-old woman honestly assessing her capacities and abilities is branded “evil”?

There are good and bad reasons for doing everything, and the best I can do right now is not engage with people who aren’t trying to be helpful. Want to say I’m discussing these things “casually”? You don’t know what I’m feeling or not. Want to say I’m a bad person? Go ahead. The truth of the matter is that if I were a “bad person” I wouldn’t be having this struggle. It’s the good people in the world who aim to make thoughtful decisions based on valid reasons, who seek to cause the least harm, who strive to be responsible — who want desperately to do all of these things without falling back on knee-jerk reactions predicated on half-truths and mean-spirited accusations.

4w4d

I’m tired of feeling sorry for myself, tired of worrying how I’ll cope if D. can’t give me all the support I need.While my perspective on the world remains colored by sadness and loneliness, I’ve begun to take steps to make sure I’m okay. Working on my relationship with D. is obviously necessary, and there are lots of things that need to be addressed if we are to “make it” as a couple, but I’m tired of putting so much energy into the process. Let me get through to June 5, and then I’ll worry about us. Right now, it’s too much to cope with.

And so I told a couple more friends, hoping for support, which is coming in spades. Today, C. listened to me talk for forty-five minutes or more, offered lots of empathy, and allowed me the time to work through some things out loud, figure out for myself that it isn’t that I don’t want to have another baby necessarily; it’s that I can’t have one with D., or at least not right now. If I could move to Montana or otherwise steal away from D., hide this child from him, trick him into not knowing, I’d do it in an instant. But beyond not being able to live with myself if I did any of those things, I don’t think I’m ready to wed myself (literally or figuratively) to this man for 18 years or more, when there is already so much uncertainty about our relationship.

I’ve also contacted the Chicago Women’s Health Center, which offers both crisis counseling (pre-abortion) and a post-abortion support group. I’d called to sign up for this summer’s post-abortion group, knowing in advance that I’d need it, and I suspect the counselor on the phone could tell I needed a bit something before that point. I’ll be seeing her this week, and I’m glad services like that exist. Before my last abortion — which was just after 9/11, a point in time where everything was turned upside down — I went to four “options counseling” sessions at Planned Parenthood, which was extremely helpful. I’m hoping these sessions will offer the same sort of clarity.

The main thing is that I no longer feel I can’t make it through this without D. by my side. And not only can I survive on my own, but I will if I have to. I’m not scared of that anymore. I’m also planning on going away for a couple of days over the holiday weekend with my younger son, just to get away from the city and reconnect with nature and my inner goddess, so to speak. Just me and the boy, finding our way in the world.

4w3d

It’s been more than a day since I’ve seen or talked with D., who told me Friday evening that he needs “a break” until Monday. I don’t understand the idea of stealing away to lick your wounds when it means leaving a fellow wounded person behind alone. He always comes back after a hiatus, but the fact that he takes them when I need him the most is beginning to make me numb.

A few days ago, I e-mailed my friend M., who has some experience with herbal abortions, to get advice on what I should do. Her advice was fairly simple, including not only “natural” abortion methods, but also suggestions on how to cleanse my body and mind:

First I’d suggest taking a long hot bath by candlelight. Shower first to get all clean; exfoliate, scrub, cut your nails, get off any old junk. Then fill a tub with hot water and a generous handful of sea salt. The salt will extract toxins from your skin, rebalance the salinity of your cells, and neutralize the out of whack vibrations you’ve picked up or created in the past few days/weeks. Basically it sets you back to zero – clears your system and spirit. Don’t think about anything during the bath, but before hand, as you slip under the water (til just your face is out), drop the question into your head of what you really want to do. Don’t try to answer it – just soak with it and let something rise to the surface. Usually by the time you get out the answer is peacefully clear to you. Sometimes you go to sleep and either dream the answer, or wake up knowing it. That’s the first thing I recommend, to get right with yourself, balanced and be sure.

If you decide that this is not the time for you to have a child, what you do will depend on how far along you are. If it’s only a few weeks, one of these two should be very effective:

1) 6000 mg of vitamin C a day for several days. Get the tablets and just mega dose for several days, until you’re sure everything has passed.

or

2) Very strong ginger tea 8-10 times a day for several days. Slice up some fresh ginger, put it in a mug with boiled water, let it steep at least 15 minutes. Drink it when it cools a little; add honey and or lemon if you want. It should be strong enough to be good and spicy. Keep at it until you’re sure all is done.

Perhaps I’m too brainwashed by Western medicine, but the herbal methods scare me a little bit, and so I’ve avoided trying them. For same reason I want to avoid a medical abortion, I can’t see myself dosing and then sitting around and waiting for my body to respond. It isn’t that a surgical abortion is much more appealing, especially given that my doctor’s family planning clinic doesn’t offer any anesthesia, but when I’m already struggling with feeling alone and abandoned, I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I will randomly and spontaneously abort. No, I need predictability and order and a plan.

Nonetheless, I did take the first part of M.’s advice last night. I took a nice long shower, scrubbing everything until I couldn’t scrub any more. Afterward, I relaxed and watched some television, ordered a soy cheese pizza, and forced myself to eat, since I’ve had no appetite since Wednesday. And right before bed, I drew a bath with a generous helping of lavender sea salt, where I soaked for quite some time. For an unknown reason, I took the last pregnancy test I had in the house before I climbed into the tub. Of course, I’m still pregnant.

The answer didn’t float to the surface. I went to bed, hoping I’d dream something significant. Instead, I woke to the sound of the “L” at 7am, the alarm clock at 9am, my cell phone at 9:15am. I am now awake, lucid but lacking clarity, alert without any more answers than when I climbed into the tub last night.

4w1d

There is too much arguing and too much negative energy. I am tired, and not just because hormones and a growing blob of cells are sucking all of the life out of me. I have had a headache since Tuesday, since before three tests confirmed I am pregnant. I have had cramps since the tests came positive. I have been crying too much at too many things. Most of all, though, I am scared.

Tonight was the first time we’d touched each other since. We were both apprehensive, each thinking the other never wanted to touch us again. When D. kissed me, he said it felt like the first time, and I believe he might have been right. We had changed since the last time. We’d become the sort of people who had to make tough decisions amid anger and tears and across great distances, in spirit if not in fact. We’d been the exception to the statistical probability, the one- to two-percent failure rate “with perfect use” that doctors warned about. And also: we’d become the couple who, three months into dating and falling in love and dreaming of years in the future, made an appointment to have an abortion.

4w0d

I almost didn’t make it onto the bus today. And I had to make it onto the bus, the #11 Lincoln Avenue that would take me to the #8 Halsted, which would take me to my doctor’s office. After a morning of fitful chatting online with D., I almost couldn’t take the loneliness anymore. I huddled on my couch and cried until I had the sense to contact V., who I knew would talk me down from my hysterical ledge. I cleaned myself up, engaged in a sufficient amount of numbing repression, and began my journey. Along the way, I decided that if D. didn’t hug me within two minutes of seeing me, I would either spontaneously combust from inner sadness or break up with him.

I’m glad I was numb, walking to the bus stop through Lincoln Square, the proving grounds of our relationship: The theatre in which we saw our first movie together, the coffee house where we’d eaten waffles a half-dozen times, the indie record store where the clerk knows both our names. This is MY ‘hood, though, one he could just easily abandon as an old pair of socks or jeans that no longer fit. I couldn’t escape, and any way I turned, I saw his face, felt his arm around me, could even smell the scent of his neck as I leaned in for a deep embrace.

The bus ride was interminable. He’d be waiting for me at the end, standing outside of Jamba Juice, probably texting me because I was running a few minutes late, because of all the crying. Men on the bus ranted about governments and revolutions and the injustice of CTA bus drivers over- or undershooting bus stops all across the city, and the only thing I could think was “Baby. Pregnant. Fuck.” On the Halsted bus, out the window: fancy shops, upscale chain stores, gaunt women wearing $500 shoes carrying shopping bags, Latina nannies pushing Anglo babies in $1,000 strollers while talking on cell phones. It was all in stark contrast with my thoughts: I was a bruised and damaged woman, pregnant and alone, facing the prospect of an abortion, years after I swore I’d never go through that again. And the man who was at the end of that bus line, the man with whom I’d fallen in love despite myself, the man from whom I needed the most support… well, he was the last person on Earth able to do much of anything other than wait just under two minutes to give me a hug when I finally arrived.