Looking for Jane (35)
Tina nods in her usual sanguine way. “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”
The rest of the car ride passes in a prickly silence that Angela acknowledges she may have imagined, but any lingering tension is instantly overshadowed once they enter the treatment room. They’re in today for another expensive intrauterine insemination procedure—their ninth. Five of them didn’t take at all. Two did, but both ended in miscarriages.
Almost a year ago, Angela had to go to an abortion clinic to treat one of the miscarriages that hadn’t naturally completed. At the time, she had no idea that the abortion procedure was also used after some miscarriages. While she didn’t have any real preconceptions of the women who access abortion services, she was reminded that these clinics aren’t just filled with irresponsible teenagers. Even the most anti-abortion, right-wing woman might at some point need to have the procedure after a miscarriage to avoid a potential infection. After all is said and done, it’s just like any other surgery or treatment. But the protesters outside the clinic didn’t seem to have gotten that memo.
When she and Tina arrived at the clinic, they immediately noticed a crowd of people gathered on the south side of the street across from the entrance. They all wore the same black toque, and about half of them were carrying neon poster boards boasting a variety of ominous phrases in thick marker. Angela could see other signs with pink and red images on them, and more giant headlines propped up along the sidewalk. From a distance she couldn’t tell what they were, but she could guess: gruesome photos of alleged fetuses juxtaposed with happy grannies holding fat white babies behind a soft blurry camera filter.
On the north side of the street, a few counterprotesters held up purple signs. Three police cars were parked in front of the clinic and the police were chatting with the counterprotesters. One officer was standing sentry near the front door of the building.
Tina took hold of Angela’s gloved hand. The pro-choice counterprotesters waved them through, smiling at them both as they passed.
“Ignore them,” one said to Angela, indicating the shouting mass across the street. “They know they’ve lost, and they’re pissed off about it.”
But they were, by design, difficult to ignore. Glancing sideways, Angela caught sight of some of their signs:
LIFE IS SACRED
ABORTION IS MURDER
YOUR ALL BABY KILERS
At least spell your fucking sign correctly, Angela thought wryly. There was even a small boy, just four or five years old, holding a placard that read MY MOTHER CHOSE LIFE. Her pulse had started to race then, and Angela couldn’t stop herself.
“Do you think I actually want to be here?” she’d screamed at them. “Do you think I don’t wish I were still pregnant? You ignorant fucks!”
“Ange!” Tina had grabbed her shoulders. “Ange, come on. Come on. It’s not worth it. Leave it.”
Their experiences at the fertility clinic are so bright and positive, despite the physical discomfort. The nurses and technicians offer well-wishes and support for their choice to become mothers. No one protests outside its doors, screaming at passing women and judging them for wanting to be pregnant. Yet aren’t fertility clinics and abortion clinics just two sides of the same coin?
Angela was grateful that she hadn’t needed to go back to that horrible place after the most recent miscarriage, which completed on its own.
But that was then, she reminds herself as they wait in the treatment room. Today is a day of positivity. Today they’re at the point in the fertility roller coaster where their hopes are high for a successful insemination and implantation, and they try not to remember how crushingly disappointing it is if it doesn’t take. Angela knows Tina is tired of the process, but she isn’t ready to give up.
The next one will be it, she tells Tina every time, repeating the mantra to herself whenever she starts to doubt it. The next one. The next one. We’ll get a baby on the next one.
Back before Christmas, when Angela got her period after the last failed treatment, she walked out of the bathroom sobbing, shaking with rage and resentment and a dozen other emotions. But mostly, she was full of hate. So full of it that she couldn’t breathe.
She hated her friends who already had children.
She hated those stupid teenagers who got pregnant by accident, without even trying.
She hated how fucking hard this was on her body and her heart and her marriage. Her bank account.
She hated trying to get pregnant but hated the thought of not getting pregnant even more.
Tina came home from work to find Angela in her spot on the couch, a glass of real wine in her hand and Grizzly curled up in her lap as tears poured down her swollen face, and she knew immediately what had happened. They were both so intently tuned in to Angela’s cycle, they knew that in the coming days they were approaching either the beginning or the end of something.
“Oh, Ange,” Tina said, flopping down on the couch beside her wife and pulling her into a hug. Grizzly meowed between them, and to Angela it somehow sounded like an apology for everything they wanted and couldn’t have. Angela sobbed even harder in Tina’s arms, devastated by the loss of the possibility.
A couple of days later after Angela had calmed down enough, Tina broached the idea of adoption with her. They talked all evening, but Angela wouldn’t budge. Having been adopted herself, there was a drive deep down in her being to have a biological baby of her own, a direct line where her child could connect the dots, without having to search for them like Angela had. Tina never wanted to be the one to carry, and Angela was determined.