Today marks the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark United States Supreme Court decision giving women the right to choose. Since Roe v. Wade, roughly 50 million women in the United States have exercised that right. I am one of them.
I had drunken, unprotected sex on a weekend upstate with a new boyfriend. I got back to the city, called my OBGYN and left a message telling her I needed the morning-after pill. She never called back and I got busy with school and forgot about it. Two stupid, careless moves on my part.
After about a month, signs of pregnancy began to appear, but I had explanations for them all. My missed period was due to the fact that I’d started a new birth control pill mid-cycle and my body was still adjusting. The nausea and fatigue had to do with the Vicodin I’d been taking for my broken toe. I had headaches because I was nauseated and not eating. And I’d lost ten pounds. Who loses ten pounds when she’s pregnant?
Two months after the first trip, on the way back upstate, I stopped into Price Chopper and picked up a pregnancy test. When we got to the house, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to pee on the thing for a full five seconds. I was too nervous. So I did it in a red plastic cup and submerged the “absorbent strip” in my urine for 20 seconds, the other option offered by the instructions.
I don’t know why I was so nervous. No matter the results, I wasn’t going to have a baby. I was 23, still in college, broke and had only been with my boyfriend for three months. I’d always been grateful that I had a choice—I'd even marched in defense of it—but never thought I’d have to exercise it. In the little world in my head, that kind of thing just didn’t happen to me. I was only taking the test “to put my mind at ease,” I told myself.
As I watched a dark blue vertical line and an incredibly pale horizontal line appear in the window of the test, I still thought there was no I way I could be pregnant. I went downstairs with the cryptic EPT and asked my boyfriend to help me decipher it.
“It’s not quite a plus sign,” I said trying to ignore the fact that it was the vertical line—the line that makes a plus sign a plus sign—that was dark blue. “You can barely make out that line.” He agreed though neither of us was certain that it wasn’t a line, either.
I wanted to be sure. I called the 1-800 number on the box. I explained to the man on the other end that one line was dark and the other was so faint, I wasn’t sure if it was really even a line.
“How dark is the vertical line?” he asked.
“Very dark.”
”Then you’re very pregnant.”
As I hung up the phone, I heard the man say, “Congratulations.”
I called my sister and burst into tears. Then I called Planned Parenthood.
Three days later I was in the waiting room of the Margaret Sanger Clinic, surrounded by young Black girls, Latina women in their 30's and 40's who already had children, and white 20-something's just like me. "White Chicks" was playing loudly in the background, maybe to distract us from thinking about why we were there.
It was the shittiest day of my life, but I was one of the lucky ones; my boyfriend waited eight hours for me in the lobby, took me home in a cab and nursed me for a few days after. A 16-year-old girl I'd met had taken the train in alone from Long Island and was going home the same way. She couldn't tell anyone. Because people don't talk about their abortions.
I'm not going to change anyone's mind about abortion writing this, nor am I going to waste words defending a decision I was 100% sure of and still am today. But I am one more person, and one less statistic, talking about my abortion.
Thanks to the brave ladies at Jezebel for inspiring me to post this.
[Jezebel: Unlike Alveda King, I Am Neither "Reformed" Nor A Murderer]
