Over two years ago, way before I started writing for Girl w/Pen, Alison Piepmeier wowed me with an essay about getting an abortion and how her decision made with her husband was a love story:
...the story I most want to tell—and one I have never heard—is of abortion as an intimate part of a couple’s life together. Our abortion was a love story. I’d worried that Walter and I were rejecting a gift from the universe. What I discovered, though, was that when we stripped away the distractions of everyday life so that we could make this difficult decision together, it bound us together as surely as if our choice had been different—and as it turns out, that was the gift.Every once in awhile their story returns to me. I often don't know why it stumbles into my brain and says, "Hey! Ponder me!" but it does. This morning it returned to me yelling, "Why?!"
I was half-listening to WBEZ's 848 and some story about a man running away from his life. Original, I know. But what hooked my brain to jolt me from my grant writing was a line about how when he was 22 his girlfriend got pregnant. The story begins with him recalling how happy his girlfriend just was, despite her belief that she wouldn't had been happy. Then he runs off in the car and comments about how if he just admitted that he didn't want the baby there would be an abortion and "well, that would be the end."
I'm taking that line to mean that would be the end of their relationship. See, that's where Alison & her husband come in. Why? Why would having an abortion mean the end of a relationship? Are Alison & her husband the only couple to abort a pregnancy (not for medical reasons anyway) and remained in love? I just don't believe it.
Are we socialized to believe that despite study after study saying that women overwhelmingly feel relief after an abortion, that two adults in love must break up? That having an abortion dooms their romance? The story on 848 ends without conclusion about the pregnancy, so I have no idea what happened. What if he returned and confessed his true feelings and she admitted that she felt the same way? Alison seemed to have talked herself into wanting to carry the pregnancy to term, but realized it wasn't the right decision.
Doing a web search for abortion stories, I ran across this story of a married couple with children who chose to abort and she's at peace with her decision. At the Feminist Women's Health Center's website, there are story after story of women who had abortions. Some stories are of women who stayed with the man, as one woman put it, "who fathered the child who was not to be."
This leads me back to the question from two years ago: Can abortion be a part of a love story? I still think it can.
On Glee, what if Quinn had decided to have an abortion? Would that had given her some honest time to strengthen her relationship with Finn? Or would that have driven him into the arms of Rachel sooner? I'm sure there are other and perhaps better what-ifs in pop culture, but seriously, what if an abortion was what saved a relationship instead of dooming it to be feel like a forced marriage? Allowing the characters to reexamine their lives and move on together?
Now who's brave enough to let us see that relationship blossom after a sunny morning at the local abortion clinic?
Um, yeah...here's example #36,423 of "I think too hard."
Windy Citizen 
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6 comments:
I had an abortion about 6 months into my relationship with Scott. Neither of us was emotionally ready or healthy enough to want or raise a child, so the decision was made to terminate the pregnancy. 14 years later, we're still together and going strong.
As you can imagine, the infertility of the past 10 years has sometimes made me wonder if I made the wrong decision back then, but the answer that always comes back to me is a very firm "no, I did not make the wrong decision." I'd have a child now, yes, but I'd most likely be a single mother - not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's hard - and I would have made a terrible mother at that time in my life. Terminating that pregnancy was the best thing for me and for my relationship with Scott. It really did allow us to blossom as a couple in a way that we never would have if we'd had a baby so early in our relationship.
Great post, and thanks for the links!
Thanks for raising these questions again. I'm glad this essay remains provoking, and I know it certainly was to lots of folks who disagreed with me when I wrote it. But I still agree with myself: we had an abortion, and now we have a baby, and both were parts of our love story.
Maybe 2 years into my relationship with my at the time boyfriend, I got pregnant. He was ready to support me in whatever decision I made. I was not emotionally ready for a child. After being a second mom for my siblings for most of my childhood, I'm not sure I'll ever be ready. I kinda "did that time" and look back upon it with regret for various reasons. I saw my pregnancy as the same. No child deserves that.
6 years later, we're married and very much happy with our lives. I have never regretted my decision for a minute. My next door neighbors have a new baby and I occasionally hear it or see them with it. It also doesn't make me regret anything to see a living, healthy baby. My neighbors made the decision to have theirs, just as I made my decision.
More of a problem for me was the socialization against abortion. Other than my now husband, I have never told friends, family, or co-workers that I was ever pregnant or got an abortion. I was thrown into a really bad depression that did not end until after the abortion was over. It made me feel like I was a bad person for even considering even though I KNEW it would be better for my relationship, for me personally, for everything... if I did it. I felt very suicidal during this phrase. I think I would be dead today if I didn't have my now husband there supporting me and loving me.
Thank you for this post. Found you by way of Feministing.com
I am not able to fathom the "relationship ending" logic either. I've been married for seven years. I had an abortion 2 weeks before we were married. Neither of us were ready for what a child would entail at that stage in our lives and at that early stage of marriage. Additionally, I was not sure I wanted to have children at all. It was an experience that brought us closer together as a lot of challenging experiences do.
Alison -- Thanks for checking in!
And to everyone who shared their stories, thank you so much.
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