The first guy I dated seriously post-abortion found out inadvertently: blame exhaustion and too much booze and it being very, very early on New Year's Day 2008. He made a crack about a fetus, and I was too out-of-control wasted to get that he was joking. "Who told you about that?" I blurted. The conversation from there went smoothly enough, despite all the speech-slurring, until I said I'd felt no attachment or angst going into the clinic. He pounced: "How could you not have felt anything? I don't believe you! It's only natural to feel something."
We fought for an hour in bed before drifting to sleep during an impasse. It's upsetting when someone tells you that you couldn't possibly feel the way you feel. Or that what you felt — relief — is not a "natural" emotion. In the morning he apologized and said he hadn't articulated himself well. We went to brunch and took a walk. But some part of me still suspected that enough alcohol had brought out the sort of prejudices smart liberals know to be embarrassed by when sober.
Before my abortion I never would have imagined that seemingly antiquated ideas about gender — that women need to be taken care of, that women always have binding ties to motherhood, that female body processes are somehow alien or scary — would ever surface in the New Yorker-toting media men I was dating, even if just for a moment, even if just when drunk.
None of these men had faced abortion in any but the most abstract terms.
Then they did, more than once, and it was more than a bit depressing to realize that a fair number of liberal men still possess confining notions about women, and while they would argue wholeheartedly for reproductive rights in the political abstract, they might personally judge me in bed at night.
I still can't figure out why. Hell, the dreary poet graduated from Sarah Lawrence; I would bet money that he marched in at least one women's-rights protest. But then, none of these men had faced abortion in any but the most abstract terms; the hyperbolic political and cultural conceptions of the act were all they had. Or maybe my abortion just brought out some standard-issue male anxieties about pregnancy, fertility, the vagina in general. What I do know is that now, a year and a half later, I'm more terrified of abortion coming up on dates than I was a week after my operation. That's not to say I would lie. But I'll do whatever I can to avoid the question in the first place.
For what it's worth, one man took the news well right from the get-go: the fetus-daddy. By "well," I mean he based his reaction on the words coming out of my mouth and neither victimized me nor questioned my essential womanity. Of course, he also had the benefit of learning he wasn't going to be a twenty-four-year-old father in the same conversation. And over time, the boyfriend I told on New Year's eventually stopped looking constipated when I wisecracked about pregnancy, fetuses and abortions, though he never wanted to stop using condoms. Even though we were "in love." Even though it had been eight months. Even though I was taking my birth control with the timeliness of a church bell.
And weeks after my friend Mike held me on the park bench, he emailed an apology, explaining that he hadn't meant to treat me like a member of the wounded. But he went on to write that it must have been an "emotionally wrenching experience and full of heretofore unknown feelings that only a strong, self-possessed person could endure."
Months later, though, Mike and I were at a bar talking about stupid Facebook applications. I mentioned that on the Compare People question "Who would make a better mother?" I'd been voted against twenty-seven times. There was a pause and then I riffed, "Maybe I told too many people about my abortion?" He laughed, genuinely. Which was exactly what I was looking for. n°
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