What Nobody Told Me About Abortion

Notes from an animal mother

I’ve been letting pineapples rot lately. I buy them firm and green, dense with optimism that this week will be different. I imagine bright-eyed mornings and parfaits eaten at my desk while I tap out cheerful emails. Instead, I shuffle pajama-clad to the kitchen at odd hours to eat handfuls of cereal, or maybe a banana if I find one. There I see my pineapple, fruit flies darting around its spiky leaves, while mottled brown dots spread through its golden insides. I can’t quite remember when I bought it, but I can tell you that my abortion was seven weeks ago tomorrow.

On the sort of afternoon full of ripe summer fruit, my new boyfriend and I—still flush with sweat and limerence after some midday sex—stared at an ovulation test strip and realized we’d misread an earlier test. 

“Uh oh,” I said, lightly amused as a thousand rom com moments flashed through my mind. Cue the clueless horror movie protagonist who fails to notice the axe murderer behind the bedroom door, mistaken about the genre of the story unfolding.

We listened to music and I swiveled back and forth in an office chair while narrating ChatGPT’s damning answers to my questions about fertile windows and test strip line darkness. My boyfriend kissed me on the cheek each time he walked past. We riffed about games we could play at our abortion party.

Our decision calculus was numerical, emotions an afterthought. There is a 1 in 4 chance of conception each month, so deciding not to take Plan B would result in a 25% risk of needing an abortion. Plan B costs $50 and an abortion costs $500, but with only a 25% chance of conception the expected value of that option is $125. Plan B and early stage abortion seemed physically pretty similar—nothing to consider there.

“If you get pregnant, we’d both know we’re fertile,” my boyfriend pointed out. 

“True, why would anyone pay for fertility testing with such a thrilling alternative available?” I quipped back.

In the end, my sense that failing to take Plan B seemed plainly stupid led us to swing by CVS on our way to an under-the-sea-themed party in San Francisco. I was wearing a black and gold ballgown, he, a shimmery jacket that made him look like an undiscovered mer-creature dredged up into the fluorescently lit family planning aisle. Later at the party, I recounted our ill-fated afternoon with punchlines as I pried open the clamshell package and unceremoniously swallowed the Plan B in my friends’ cozy kitchen.

Nine days later, my breasts suspiciously sore, I took a pregnancy test and laid it on the kitchen counter as we opened and closed cabinet doors, making tea and chatting lightly. A faint line. Wide eyed silence. Reality disassembling itself and reassembling into a new shape too strange to make out just yet.

---

I’d known since before it was mine that I would not keep it. My life was still packed haphazardly into U-haul boxes, my relationship a mere handful of weeks older than the baby. I’d quit my job just a week prior. I have wanted to be a mother since I myself was a child, but yearning had no place in a decision like this. After all, what claim do we as humans have to superiority if not the ability to make decisions based on something more than impulse?

I knew what I had to do. Ignoring the mounting hum of my instinctual self, I walked across Berkeley on a chilly August evening to pick up abortion pills from the sort of friend who people think of when they say they know a guy. I’d originally planned to take the pills Sunday, but this was all proving to be more difficult than I’d expected, and so I moved my plan forward by three days to Thursday instead. Soon this would all be over. 

I’d spent the day in bed, watching parts of myself waging a silent war. My rational mind was a distant god who already knew the outcome her hand would choose, but let a brutal battle play out all the same. I curled into a tight, steel ball, images raging inside me. One part of myself appeared—pregnant, beatific—while another, wild and vicious, attacked her relentlessly, stabbing again and again with a small, merciless blade. Another image, a desperate version of me, overwhelmed and frantic, hurled herself against an invisible wall, pounding her fists, her screams muffled behind the glass. The ruthless god was unmoved.

After a bout of crying, my boyfriend and I fucked intensely, the act raw and newly sublime. Afterward, I lay beside him and basked in the sense that, for just this brief moment, we were a small family. The baby was acutely real to me, and the joy of its existence was like awakening with the epiphany of a long-sought solution to a complex equation.

The absolute order of the universe suddenly felt vividly clear. The trees outside the window appeared crisp and bright, the impeccable biological machinery humming within them unmistakable. The stars had made all of this, had spent an eternity burning bits into existence, which had then assembled themselves into the shapes of this bedroom, of our bodies. My breasts were swollen, my belly suddenly alive —a trillion generations removed from the primordial soup, the imperative of life was dividing and multiplying within me.

I had thought I’d known something small about what it meant to be a mother in my years working as a nanny. I’d patiently let toddlers wipe their snot on my shirtsleeves, felt a deep peace when they napped on my chest, sweaty curls sticking to their foreheads. These were experiences with connection and care and selflessness. But this—this was distinct. Motherhood was a new realm of love entirely. 

It was as though I had been playacting love up to this point, smashing my body against the edges of other people, using clumsy language to make small points of contact with inscrutable minds. This new connection was absolute, the possible points of contact limitless—my child lived inside of me, every facet of its being as known to me as the contours of my own hand, but infinitely more lovely. To caress its small shape was ecstasy. 

For years I had seen hints of this great sea of connection, and finally I was standing at its edge letting its balmy waters lap at my feet. The very core of my being vibrated with the desire to submerge myself.

I can imagine a parent reading this, scoffing at the suggestion that my weeks spent gestating a little lizard-like embryo could amount to even a shadow of what they’ve experienced, wishing to tell me that parenthood is so much more than I could possibly imagine. My answer: I believe you. 

My question: can you imagine standing on the bank of this sacred sea and then walking away?

---

Nobody talks about the hell that is misoprostol, the abortion pill. I suspect that, in its politicization, no one wants to mention that the drug in question is a sledgehammer—on its quest to destroy the fetus, it also obliterates the mother. On Thursday afternoon I unceremoniously took the first of three doses: four little white pills shoved into my vagina as far up as I could wedge them. Tiny bombs placed quietly beside the cradle where my unsuspecting baby slept.

I waited, fever rising, for the bleeding that should have started after an hour or two. The second dose came and went. By dose three I could barely move. I took the stairs one at a time, weakly gripping the railing, my joints aching with each step, the inside of my mouth painfully raw. Curled in bed, I whispered for more and more blankets, shivering and only dimly aware of my boyfriend there beside me searching the internet for answers about my racing heart and shallow, rapid breathing.

In the morning I felt drained, but the fever and pain were gone. The large maxi pad, which the internet warned I may soak through as often as once per hour, was entirely dry.

The thing about probability distributions is that, like my indomitable fetus at this developmental stage, they have tails. Misoprostol as an abortion protocol is 85% effective. As the 24 hour time point neared and I felt not even the slightest cramping, it became clear that I was among the unlucky 15% of women for whom a second attempt would be necessary. In taking the first dose of pills, I’d started down an inescapable path and had no choice but to march to its end. As a friend would later say, the correct number of abortions is either zero or as many as it takes.

In the end, it would take four.

I repeated the three-dose protocol on Friday afternoon and once again descended into a quivering feverish state, my frustration and desperation mounting as again, I did not bleed. I jokingly polled my friends about abortion options—should I try a coat hanger next, or perhaps a tumble down the stairs? Even my most unorthodox friends urged me to go to a doctor, and so I begrudgingly called Planned Parenthood.

The next day, a sunny Saturday, I walked past a lone protester on a steep San Francisco sidewalk into Planned Parenthood. 

“Please don’t kill your baby,” she called after me halfheartedly. 

Desperation welled inside of me. I wanted to grip her bony shoulders, to look her in the eye and ask her what she would have me do with this broken beautiful thing inside of me that had survived six doses of poison and was now fated to die. 

More abortion pills, more waiting, more shivering in a ball of feverish torment. Still no blood.

---

My memories of the surgical D&C procedure four days later come to me in fragments that feel sharp in my chest. I remember a cold wand pushed into me searching for a smudge of evidence of my baby. And then a room with a chair and an iPad video that soothingly warned of hysterectomy risk. Finally, a room that smelled of chemicals where I sat on crisp paper and stared at a tray strewn with ominous medical instruments. Panic.

Here, my memory becomes strange, like trying to remember the faulty logic of a dream. I was frozen on the table, paralyzed despite my desperate urge to get up and run out of the clinic. Suddenly, it felt like the nurses and my doting boyfriend were closing in on me, and like a trapped animal I became angry, ready to snarl at anyone who might block my escape.

Through this, I did not move. Tears gathered in my eyes at the inevitability of the situation, at my overwhelming helplessness. I presented my arm to the pretty young nurse who would administer the fentanyl and sedatives. I lay down and spread my legs for the kind practitioner there to vacuum out my stubborn baby. What’s a mother to do in a moment like this, but carry her child gently to the executioner’s arms?

Lights dimmed, drugs tugged at my limbs, and time became slippery as the doctor pried at me with a long metal rod. To widen my cervix, she explained as I flinched. The trapped animal howled soundlessly in defeat.

At some point the nurses left and reported upon their return with some excitement that they thought they’d spotted my speck of a baby under the microscope. “Did you see its tail?” I asked groggily. My sweet lizard baby with its little tail. I hoped someone had gotten a glimpse.

“No,” the doctor replied with a startled, amused tone. Disappointing.

“Can I keep it?” I asked. They exchanged sideways looks, and after a moment one of them said, “the state of California mandates that we send it to a funeral home.”

“But it’s mine,” I said, in disbelief. I’d come there and traded hundreds of dollars for the service of baby removal, and I wanted now to take that baby and be on my way.

“We agree with you,” she replied gently, “but unfortunately we have to follow the law.” Another wave of helplessness, resignation. 

I’d been joking for days about where I would be at the moment the baby actually died, teasing friends that it might forever haunt their houses. This final location turned out to be a small brick clinic in a strip mall in Fairfield, California. I walked slowly out into the white afternoon sunlight, leaving my baby behind—Pyrrhic victory achieved.

---

I recently had coffee with a friend who became very still when I mentioned my abortion. Tears sprang to her eyes as she told me that she’d once had an abortion too, and although it was seven years ago and although she never wanted the baby, never even wanted to be a mother, it still makes her cry every time she remembers it. She’d taken the abortion pills and two days later, in a grungy dive bar bathroom with music thrumming through the door, she’d found her clot of a baby in her bloody pad.

“I knew I had to eat it,” she told me. And then, as though suddenly realizing that this might sound absurd, she tried to explain. “I mean, I couldn’t just leave it in that dirty bathroom, it was my baby. What was I going to do, throw it in the trash?”

I stopped her, shaking my head “no, no, it makes perfect sense to me. It really does, of course you had to eat it, it was your baby.” The maternal logic of this was unassailable. Anyone who has been a mother for any stretch of time would not question such a primordial urge. The animal mother knows what to do, and your judgements are not what carried evolution billions of years to this moment.

“So what did you do?” I asked her.

“I ate it.” She said it wide eyed.

---

I was not permitted to eat my baby, nor bring it home in a little vial to bury it, or put it on the mantel, or inspect it under a microscope for a tail. Perhaps if I had been, the cataclysmic crash of hormones that awaited me would have taken a gentler shape.

Instead, in the days that followed, I began to experience borderline psychotic episodes.

These hours-long periods would begin with a vague sense of unease and build until the world around me became twisted and surreal, like a haunted house. Sometimes, anger at my boyfriend would inexplicably swell inside of me, sharp and alienating, distancing me from the one person who might understand my pain. Often, I was consumed with an urgent need to go find my missing baby.

My thoughts would enter obsessive, frenzied spirals about this desire, running through the sequence of events that had led to my baby’s departure from my womb where it clearly belonged. My memories of the D&C churned with an ominous bent. The kindness of the nurses suddenly felt coercive, like they had conspired to place me under a spell so that they could use strange and powerful devices to remove a precious, integral part of me.

I was frantic at the realization I’d made some mistake that had led to my baby going missing, and would pore over my memories trying to understand how this could have happened. Invariably, I would find the image of sliding $500 to the receptionist, of signing the execution papers. At this, a void in my stomach, a howl: my baby was dead, and I had been the one to do it.

With the encouragement of friends, I planned a ritual at Burning Man to assuage my grief. I gathered the only evidence I could find that my baby had ever existed—a pregnancy test dug out of the trash and a blood test result indicating a successful abortion. Crying, I stapled these to the wooden latticework of the temple, where six days later they would burn alongside thousands of other mementos of grief. 

As the week progressed, I alternated between days of normalcy, during which I biked across the playa in colorful costumes to climb art structures and dance until sunrise turned the desert golden white, and terrible days when incessant thumping bass closed tightly in on me, dissonant and suffocating, as I sobbed in my dusty canvas tent. 

On these days, the temple took on an unsettling magnetism. I felt strangely fearful to return, yet consumed with an obsessive sense that I needed to race back to the monolithic structure to find my missing baby and carry it away to some secret place. I understood that this made no sense, but there was something intensely alluring about letting my thoughts slide further down these threads of psychosis, like scratching at a spreading rash. Resistance was painful, and just on the other side of reason was a land of delusion in which anything I desired could be mine.

In this other world, my baby was not dead, but rather caught in a complicated ritual, a puzzle that I could solve if only I could focus hard enough to make a plan. The pieces were murky, but involved the Planned Parenthood nurses, and now the Burning Man temple. I could feel that I was getting closer than ever to solving it—at least now my baby was here in a known location. I just needed to figure out how to find it in the temple before it was incinerated in mere days.

On the penultimate night of Burning Man, I gave into the mounting pull of the temple and left the cacophony of art cars and my concerned boyfriend behind at the Man Burn to bike through a dust storm alone to the temple. I wove through the crowd, searching for my tiny effigy, eventually collapsing in devastation upon finding it. It was paper. Delusions be damned, there was no baby waiting here for me. 

The following morning, I awoke with a renewed drive to return to the temple to try one more time to find my baby before it burned. I arrived as the heat of the day was rising only to find the structure cordoned off with cones and caution tape, helmeted construction workers moving dutifully inside. 

I was too late. Just as with the D&C, the momentum toward an inevitable end was too great. In mere hours they would burn the temple, and with it my last thread of deluded hope that I could ever solve this nightmare puzzle I’d created. I sank to the ground beside my bike, head in my hands. I was a failed mother. There would be no redemption here.

That night, I watched the temple burn, clouds of glowing dust intermittently obscuring the skeletal blaze. I let my mind flip through scenes of grief. The temple became my womb, destruction tearing through it; then, it morphed into my baby’s tiny body, disintegrating before me. As the temple finally collapsed, a great wave of fatigue overcame me and I lay down, closing my eyes. I felt still, unattached. I had not understood that I’d felt an ever-present tether to my baby until that tie was severed. Before I was a mother, I was a woman who belonged entirely to herself. I finally understood then that my baby was gone, and that I was once again alone.

---

Last year, a woman named Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children and then jumped out a window in an attempted suicide. She had been in treatment for postpartum depression for months, and had sent her husband out on an errand before carrying out the plan. She awaits trial for three counts of murder. Community members recall her as a devoted mother and a gifted, caring nurse.

It turns out that while full-blown postpartum psychosis is rare, subclinical psychotic thoughts are common, affecting 15-30% of women who give birth, and, less commonly, following abortion and miscarriage. Critically, people experiencing these thoughts retain insight into the fact that their thoughts are distorted, though such knowledge does not immunize them to suffering. 

A friend recently messaged me, “you were either lucky or wise in somehow securing your delusions about your baby to the temple, which was planned to be burned. Like what if you had decided your baby was in the Empire State Building or something?”

In many ways, luck is all that separates me from Lindsay Clancy. My delusional thoughts centered on rescuing my baby, but just as easily could have coalesced around harming nurses or loved ones. For reasons unknown to me, I kept one foot firmly in reality, but I can imagine what it might feel like to follow a thread of psychosis so far that I could no longer find anything else to grab onto. Perhaps in that case I’d be writing this from a jail cell. 

It’s strange to me that, given the prevalence of postpartum depression and abortion, I haven’t heard anyone talk openly about either. My concept of abortion was shaped instead through divisive political narratives, which leave me feeling trapped between absolutes in how I am allowed to talk about it, forced to hedge every statement. 

Of course abortion should remain legal, but it turns out there’s something pretty compelling happening at the moment of conception. No, not so compelling of course that we should force women to become walking incubators. No, never mind, I know it was an embryo not a baby. Yes, of course rape and the mother’s life, and what about teen pregnancy and coat hangers and never going back and feminism… Nuance is a casualty of politicization. 

Anti-abortion activists are correct that abortion is terrible, but they are wrong about the frame. Abortion does not exist in the domain of pointed fingers and defendants, but rather that of cancer and wildfires. In a better world abortion would not happen not because it would be criminalized, but because it would be unnecessary. No person should find themselves performing the grim arithmetic of an axe hanging between two lives.

---

My grief has settled into a shape small enough to carry around the world. It goes out with me to dinner, and seems to like it when we take evening walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes, when I know it won’t cause too much trouble, I take it out and marvel at it. It’s heavier than it looks, the weight of it on my chest enough to knock the breath out of me if I’m not prepared. Many nights, my grief unfurls and wraps its long tendrils around me. I wake sweating and tangled in my blankets, planets still bright in the sky. Soon enough, it will learn to sleep through the night.

I often have the thought that this is plainly the saddest thing that has ever happened. I was a mother, and now I am not. I loved my baby, and now it is gone. I gazed upon a landscape so lush that my world now appears utterly colorless. I took one bite of a sacred fruit and then turned around and cut the whole tree down. 

Had I kept my baby, I’d be nearly through the first trimester. Inside of me, its delicate hummingbird heart would be fluttering incessantly while I brushed my teeth and placed just-ripe avocados in my shopping cart and stood at the window watching cool fog roll across the San Francisco Bay. It would grow fingers and toes and a brain that would one day become a mind. I’d be scrambling to build a life that could hold a whole other person, watching entire realms of possibility fall off the map. In this timeline, I would not have escaped grief, only replaced the object of it. 

I’ve never quite understood regret. Should the butterfly regret a flap of its wings upon learning of the resulting tornado? Still, as the shadow of loss looms over my days, I have started to think I probably would have been happier in this alternate timeline in which my grief would be balanced by purpose. Whether this will feel true five years from now is harder to say—perhaps one should wait to see what is built from the tornado’s wreckage before declaring regret. I find myself trying to calculate this likelihood, but quickly stop. I know now that some arithmetic belongs to older gods than reason.

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