Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(14)

The head of the clinic picked up the phone. She talked to me in a calm, competent voice—like an important businesswoman who is also your mom, which is probably fairly accurate. She talked to me until I started breathing again. She didn’t have to. She must have been so busy, and I was wasting her time with my tantrum. Babies having babies.

“We never do this,” she sighed, “because typically, once the procedure is done, people don’t come back. But if you promise me you’ll pay your bill—if you really promise—you can come in next week and we can bill you after the procedure.”

I promised, I promised, I promised so hard. Yes, oh my god, yes. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you! (And I did pay—as soon as my next paycheck came in. They were so surprised, they sent me a thank-you card.)

I like to think the woman who ran the clinic would have done that for anyone—that there’s a quiet web of women like her (like us, I flatter myself), stretching from pole to pole, ready to give other women a hand. She helped me even though she didn’t have to, and I am forever grateful. But I also wonder what made me sound, to her ears, like someone worth trusting, someone it was safe to take a chance on. I certainly wasn’t the neediest person calling her clinic. The fact is, I was getting that abortion no matter what. All I had to do was wait two weeks, or have an awkward conversation I did not want to have with my supportive, liberal, well-to-do mother. Privilege means that it’s easy for white women to do each other favors. Privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.

I don’t remember much about the appointment itself. I went in, filled out some stuff on a clipboard, and waited to be called. I remember the waiting room was crowded. Everyone else had somebody with them; none of us made eye contact. I recognized the woman working the front desk—we went to high school together (which should be illegal)*—but she didn’t say anything. Maybe that’s protocol at the vagina clinic, I thought. Or maybe I just wasn’t that memorable as a teenager. Goddammit.

Before we got down to business, I had to talk to a counselor, I guess to make sure I wasn’t just looking for one of those cavalier partybortions that the religious right is always getting its sackcloth in a bunch over. (Even though, by the way, those are legal too.) She was younger than me, and sweet. She asked me why I hadn’t told my “partner,” and I cried because he wasn’t a partner at all and I still didn’t know why I hadn’t told him. Everything after that is vague. I think there was a blood test and maybe an ultrasound. The doctor, a brisk, reassuring woman with gray hair in an almost military buzz cut, told me my embryo was about three weeks old, like a tadpole. Then she gave me two pills in a little cardboard billfold and told me to come back in two weeks. The accompanying pamphlet warned that, after I took the second pill, chunks “the size of lemons” might come out. LEMONS. Imagine if we, as a culture, actually talked frankly and openly about abortion. Imagine if people seeking abortions didn’t have to be blindsided by the possibility of blood lemons falling out of their vaginas via a pink photocopied flyer. Imagine.

That night, after taking my first pill, as my tadpole detached from the uterine wall, I had to go give a filmmaking prize to my friend and colleague Charles Mudede—make a speech on a stage in front of everyone I knew, at the Genius Awards, the Stranger’s annual arts grant. It was surreal. Mike and I went together. We had fun—one of our best nights. There are pictures. I’m glassy-eyed, smiling too big, running on fumes and gallows humor. I remember pulling a friend into a dark corner and confessing that I had an abortion that day. “Did they tell you the thing about the lemons?” she asked. I nodded. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “There aren’t going to be lemons.”

She paused.

“Probably no lemons.”

Afterwards, Mike didn’t want to stay over at my place because he had to get up early to go to his high school reunion. That was fine. (It wasn’t.) I’ve got some uterine lining to shed, bozo. I tried to drop him off Fonz-style, but he could tell I was being weird. It’s hard to keep secrets from people you love, even when your love isn’t that great.

“What’s going on?” he said, as we sat in my quietly humming Volvo in the alley behind his house.

“I can’t tell you,” I said, starting to cry.

There was silence, for a minute.

“Did you have an abortion?” he said.

“Today,” I said.

He cried too—not out of regret or some moral crisis, but because I’d felt like I had to keep this a secret from him. We were just so bad at being together. He felt as guilty as I felt pathetic, and it made us closer, for a while.

He still went to his reunion the next day, and he didn’t text enough, and I cried a little. I lay in bed all day and ached. No lemons came out. It was like a bad period. The day after that, I felt a little better, and the day after that was almost normal. I wasn’t pregnant anymore. But instead of going back to our old routine—him running, me chasing—something had shifted inside me. Within six months, we were broken up for good. Within seven months, I wasn’t mad at him anymore. Within a year, he moved back east. He was a good guy.

I hesitate to tell this story, not because I regret my abortion or I buy into the right-wing narrative that pregnancy is god’s punishment for disobedient women, but because it’s so easy for an explanation to sound like a justification. The truth is that I don’t give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.