Merritt Tierce: The Abortion I Didn't Have

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/magazine/abortion-parent-mother-child.html?smid=tw-share

No paywall
https://archive.ph/SiCe6

He was born on New Year’s Day, the year 2000. I got pregnant with him when I was 19, a month before I graduated from college. I was a brain; that was my identity. I was headed to Yale Divinity School, where I would study for a master’s in religion and literature. Those were my interests: religion, literature, study. I had not thought about having children or being a wife. I hadn’t thought I wouldn’t do those things, but if I thought about them, they existed in the vague haze of my distant future.

I wasn’t really dating his father. His father was only the second person I’d had sex with, and I had a crush on his good friend. The friend wasn’t interested in me romantically, but the three of us hung out together. I would be winsome and flirt with the friend, and we all had a nice time. Sometimes I would read to them. Isak Dinesen: “Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard.” The friend would go back to his dorm on the campus of the small Christian university we attended, and my son’s father would linger at my apartment. I was a little younger than the two of them but two years ahead in school, so I lived off campus. My son’s father is kind, gentle, handsome, friendly, warm and funny. We kept having sex, and we kept praying for the strength to stop having sex. I kept saying I didn’t want to be with him. He kept trying to accept that.

When we had sex, we couldn’t use condoms, because having them around would have been admitting an intent to sin or an expectation of fallibility. For the same reasons, I couldn’t take birth-control pills or use any other form of contraception. To prepare to sin would be worse than to break in a moment of irresistible desire. To acknowledge a pattern of repeatedly breaking, of in fact never failing to break, would have meant acknowledging our powerlessness, admitting we could never act righteously. Our faith trapped us: We needed to believe we could be good more than we needed to protect ourselves. As long as I didn’t take the birth-control pill, I could believe I wouldn’t sin again. His father always pulled out, which works until it doesn’t.

I remember the moment I learned of the pregnancy so clearly — as if it has always been happening and will continue to be happening until the end of my life, as if it rang a heavy bell and the deafening note reverberates still. I took the pregnancy test in a restroom in the Biblical Studies Building. I had received my bachelor’s degree in English the week before but had stayed in town to guest-teach the literature unit of a monthlong course on women’s spirituality, led by one of my professors. At the break, after talking to the students about a poem by Marge Piercy —

In nightmares she suddenly recalls
a class she signed up for
but forgot to attend.
Now it is too late.

*snip*

[lapfog_1]

1. for many so called christian conservatives

the opposition to abortion isn't about the unborn child.

It' all about punishing the "sinner" that had sex. Oddly it is only the women they want to punish for this "sin".

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. They very effectively punish the child for the sins of the father too. . . nt

[Hekate]

11. This punishing attitude cost them a brilliant woman

While I was pregnant with my son, the elders at my son’s father’s church wanted us to come down to the front of the sanctuary one Sunday morning after the service and confess that we had sinned by having premarital sex. Because I was not a member of that congregation, my son’s father asked if he could do it by himself. The elders said I needed to be part of it, even though that denomination does not typically allow women to speak to an assembly of both men and women (unless they need to be shamed). They said that if we refused to do this, the ladies of the church might not be willing to throw us a baby shower. I felt so angry and humiliated and diminished.

When my daughter was about a year old, I realized I couldn’t bear for her to grow up there, in that community, believing she was inherently inferior to boys. As soon as I had that awakening, I was struck by the equally untenable possibility of allowing my son to grow up thinking girls were inherently inferior. I understood how damaging it would be for both of them, and I left religion immediately and without looking back, after trying my whole life to hold my faith at the center of my being in the world.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. This hit hard. Thanks for posting it. K&R.

[snowybirdie]

4. Your story hitt home

as well. Back in the day religion prevented many of us from rigorously using birth control. It was compounding a "sin"with a sin. So stupid!

[Freddie]

5. What a wonderful piece

She is a truly gifted writer. So much to think about. Thanks for sharing.

[blueinredohio]

6. 19 and graduated from college? Wow!

[Solly Mack]

7. ...

It’s all fine is a story other people need to be true...

[Nevilledog]

12. The "It's all fine" phrase really struck me too.

[Solly Mack]

13. One of the most profound, simple truths in the piece. A story unto itself, really.

Lot of people never get around to understanding it. To accepting it.

Because they don't want to see they subvert your needs, your rights, and your well-being to secure their own.

The people around her needed to feel better about it all - separate from her needs - even though she was the one in need.

It's also a way of shutting people down. Easier to say "it's all fine" than to actually deal with what is happening or what has happened.

[Hekate]

8. "At 19 I erased the future I had imagined for myself".

[slightlv]

9. Other than condoms,

birth control wasn't available when I was a teen having sex. We did use them, and thankfully, they worked; tho we did have our "scare" months. One of our "times and places" was the parking lot of the church during youth services! He had a camper on the back of his truck. Thinking back after reading this article, we ended up being just plain lucky.

[Hekate]

10. This is long, spectacular, searching, & utterly heartbreaking. It ends like this...

Of course I’ve agonized about publishing this essay, because I don’t want to hurt my son. But I wrote it because I want to get at the falsity of that very correlation: It was traumatic for me to become a mother when I did, and I want to be able to acknowledge that openly, without that acknowledgment’s operating as some kind of hex on my son’s life.

Our reductive and linear frameworks around abortion, and our very understanding of what it is, force a zero-sum choice between the idea that it’s hard to become a parent if you don’t want to and the idea that a child is an absolute good. We insist that if a child is an absolute good, then becoming a parent must also be, by retroactive inference, always and only an absolute good. I want to report from the other side of a decision many people make and say: Yes, it can be true that you will love the child if you don’t have the abortion. It’s also true that whatever you thought would be so hard about having that child, whatever made you consider not having a child at that point in your life, may be exactly as hard as you thought it would be. As undesirable, as challenging, as painful as you feared.

It has been so hard to decide to say these things, but I have to stand up for my 19-year-old self. I didn’t abort the pregnancy I didn’t plan, but I did have to abort the life I imagined for myself. It cost me a lot, to carry an unintended pregnancy to term, to have the baby, to live the different life. All I’ve been able to do is try to make sure I paid more of the cost than my son did, but he deserved better than that.

There’s a spectacular poem in “Cries of the Spirit” that I’m sure I was scared of when I was 19. If I read it in my preparation for that class, I would have turned the page quickly. It’s Gwendolyn Brooks’s most beautiful, most unflinching, most truth-telling “the mother”:

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

If I could go back to my young self, be with her in that bathroom stall in the Biblical Studies Building, it’s not as though I would tell her to have an abortion. I would never give my son back, for anything, but I would certainly give him a different mother. The young woman standing there was not ready to be a parent, and didn’t want to be a parent. There’s not much I could offer her. I wouldn’t give her the harsh version — I’m sorry, did you think you would get to live the life you wanted to, whatever life you imagined? That’s not what life is — but what could I say to her instead?

Yes, your son is coming, and having a baby now will break your life. The breaking of your life will also give your life back to you, in many ways, but you won’t really understand that for 20 years. You won’t get the guidance and support you need right now, but when your kids are this age that you are, facing the beginning of adulthood, they will trust you and listen to you, so maybe they will never have to feel this pain. This is your life, and these are the words of a woman.