Without sharing personal experience

"Without sharing personal experience, what are your views on abortion?"

I work at a family planning non-profit that also offers abortion services. You've heard of us. We ask this question of every person we interview for a job, since being pro-choice is a job requirement. Even with the caveat, "without sharing," people share.

Until I started working at my current job I only knew one person who had had an abortion. She was a high school classmate and we were seniors then. I don't know who else she told. I think she told me since I was vocally pro-choice. But knowing she was pregnant confused me. I knew that women should have the right to choose whether or not to have children. I just didn't understand how she got pregnant. She was smart, for one. And I thought just about the entire senior class was on the pill. I was. I realize now that a lot of the girls I grew up with didn't have the information my feminist mom gave me. And the only really difference between my friend and I was that she was unlucky enough to get pregnant. There but for the grace of god go I, and all that.

And that was it. Abortion was an abstract. A comforting option that no one I knew ever needed.

Except there were abortions going on all around me and I never knew it. One quarter of pregnancies ends in abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, if the current rate continues nearly 1/3 of women will have an abortion. Don't believe it? Come work where I work.

People tell me their abortion stories all the time now. I see patients walk in our doors on procedure days. I work with our donors, so it is not uncommon for me to hear stories of both illegal abortions before Roe and legal ones after. And these stories come from all kinds of people. And every story reaffirms for me why abortion is important.

Here's mine:

Bebe Lulu was the most planed baby ever. Charts. Temps. Calendars. Attempt at a December tax deduction. What I didn't plan, being a clueless first timer, was sleep deprivation and loss of judgement. Let's just say that when you are squeezing in some intimacy in ten minutes AFTER the baby should have been awake, and you slept very little, the distance from the drawer of the bedside table to the actual bed is far indeed. The poor condom never had a chance. I knew the next day that I was ovulating. Knowledge gained from charts. Temps. Calendars. I hoped. I prayed. It never dawned on me to walk my ass downstairs from my office to get EC. Not two weeks later one of my co-workers took one look at me coming out of the bathroom and said "your eyes." She knew was pregnant before I did. (she's right about the eyes...when I'm pregnant they go all soft and puffy.)

That night I took a test. And it was nothing like the test I had taken some 14 months before. I wanted to fail more than anything. I knew what I would do before the pee hit the end of the stick.

It wasn't a decision I struggled with at all. I had a five month old. I was exhausted. I didn't have the energy or money to have a second baby right away. Bill agreed. The hardest part of the process was making that trip downstairs to the medical office and asking a co-worker how I could start the process.

It took me thirteen years to figure out how my friend got pregnant. But now I understood.

I've never felt regret, or even sadness, about my decision. I just knew that I owed it to Bebe to not let my laziness get in the way of her full share of being the baby. I wanted to be able to enjoy her as much as I could. And just as having my daughter reaffirmed my belief in choice, so too did having an abortion.

What I do have a regret and sadness about is something that happened three months later. I felt distinctly pregnant. So I took a test at work and it came up positive. One of the nurses at work felt like it could be residual hormones from after my abortion, so she sent me to the hospital for a blood test. I started to feel a little bit of excitement. Bebe was sleeping and our budget wasn't totally destroyed. The blood draw was quick. The hcg level was neither high nor low. It made sense for where I was in my cycle, if I was pregnant. The nurse sent me back two days later to see if the number was going up or down. As I sat in the chair, getting my blood drawn, the nurse in the lab asked, 'Will this be your first?" "No," I answered. 'My second." "Oh, congratulations!" They were not in order. The second draw showed a much lower level. A week later I bled. My co-worker nurse and I agreed it was mostly likely an early pregnancy loss.

Its not this loss I regret (though I did feel sadness). What I regret is not having turned to that nurse in the lab and said: how can you presume I want to be congratulated? How can you know what I want here? How can you not understand the complexities of pregnancy and families and bodies? How can the one piece of paper in front of you, ordering a beta test, lead you to think anything about me and what I want or what might happen to this body of mine and all it holds inside?

That's want I wanted to say to her and what I want to say to the protesters outside of my office. Life is not black and white. There's no line in the sand between mothers and women who have abortions. There's no good girl and bad girls. There are just women who make choices.