The Abortion at Eighteen

I chose it. Under pressure, under duress, under a man who treated it like a scheduling conflict. But I chose it. And I grieved it like it chose me.

Eighteen. Pregnant. Terrified in the particular way that only teenage pregnancy can terrify you because the world has opinions and every single one of them arrives before yours does.

He made it clear. Not in words. Men like him don’t use words when climate will do. He made the air around the conversation so cold that only one answer could survive in it. And I gave that answer because I was eighteen and I loved him and I thought love meant adjusting yourself to fit the space someone else leaves for you.

The clinic was quiet. That’s the thing I remember. How quiet it was. Like the building itself was holding its breath. Forms and waiting rooms and a woman in scrubs who asked me if I was sure and I said yes because what else do you say when you’re sitting there and the appointment is made and the person who should be sitting next to you is at rehearsal.

He was at rehearsal.

I want you to read that sentence again. I was in a clinic. He was at rehearsal. Playing songs. Being applauded. While I was in a gown on a table making a decision that would live inside me for the next twenty years.

Afterwards I bled. Quietly. In his bathroom. On his floor. And when he came home he looked relieved. Genuinely, physically relieved. Like someone who’d avoided a parking fine.

Nobody tells you about the grief. The pamphlets don’t cover it. The pro-choice narrative, which I believe in with every fibre of me, doesn’t leave much room for the woman who chose and still mourns. Who knows it was the right decision and still feels the wrong of it in her body every single year around the date it would have been due.

I wanted that baby. Not logically. Not practically. In the place below logic where wanting lives and doesn’t answer to reason.

Five years later I held my firstborn and I cried for two. The one in my arms and the one I’d let go.

I don’t regret the decision. I regret the conditions that made it the only one available. I regret the man who created those conditions and then went to rehearsal. I regret the eighteen-year-old who didn’t know she was allowed to want something that inconvenienced someone else.

She knows now.