My Decision
by Barbara ashwood
The line was faint pink but visible on that sticky July morning. Slowly, it became more pronounced, deepening to coral. I was stunned. Just a few days ago, a single solid line reassured me. Now there were two.
My husband was still lounging in bed upstairs. I had to tell him. I walked up the creaking wooden steps of the old farmhouse and over to the bed. My eyes ran over his week-old stubble as his gaze met mine.
“I’m pregnant.”
There was a pause, and then his eyes flashed as he sprung up from the white cotton cocoon, his tall, solid frame pushing past me as he charged downstairs. “No, no, no!” he yelled as he rushed to the patio door. I followed and watched him sit outside on the faded deck surrounded by cornfields, a cigarette in hand, as he wailed and wondered to the gods why, why, why this was happening to him.
We were only half a year into our marriage, and the fighting was volatile and near-constant. A tortured, unemployed poet ten years my senior, he moved from Columbus, Ohio, where we met in graduate school, to rural Illinois, where we lived near the university where I taught.
I watched him through the glass door’s smudges, then walked a few steps into the kitchen and leaned against the stainless-steel refrigerator door that was embossed with the imprints of his fist. I cried, then gathered myself, then called the doctor’s office. I asked about the likelihood of a false positive.
“It’s very unlikely,” said the nurse. “You need to come in for another test.”
My husband drove me to the office. I peed into a cup, and as we sat in the waiting room among other patients flipping through travel magazines, the door opened and the nurse walked over to us.
“Congratulations!” the grinning nurse beamed as everyone looked up, “You are definitely pregnant!”
I felt the air sucked out of me. My husband sat motionless. I was sick inside. We both were.
The nurse continued to beam at us and nodded. I plastered on a plastic smile as she chirpily provided referrals to various obstetricians. I then scuttled out of that office, ashamed of who might have heard the news. Small town ears are keen.
I knew I couldn’t have a child with him.
It didn’t take long to decide to seek an abortion, but the clinic required patients to wait until the sixth week of pregnancy to be seen—the embryo wouldn’t show up on an ultrasound before then.
My husband had previously planned for us to visit his parents in Columbus and insisted that those plans not change. There was an Illinois clinic on the route back, so a week and a half before my appointment, we piled into his Honda Civic and made the eight-hour journey to see my in-laws.
“I knew I couldn’t have a child with him.”
We fought during the trip, like countless other trips. This time it was because I wasn’t interested in lingerie shopping shortly before I was scheduled to cramp out an embryo. A few days after that fight, we made up and went for a drive in the city. The afternoon sun warmed our spirits, but suddenly his body stiffened. Down the street, in front of a Planned Parenthood, there was a protest. Hateful, mostly male faces and angry signs and “Jesus Saves” bumper stickers on SUVs filled the street. He quickly did a U-turn and drove away.
A few more days passed. His mother, hungry for a grandchild, continually questioned him in Greek, and he wouldn’t tell me what she asked. One morning he fought with her and then called me a bitch and left to spend the day smoking up with his friends as I tried to ward off her suffocating questions that were, this time, delivered in English.
I was scared about the procedure: I had a chemical abortion scheduled and needed to make sure that I vaginally inserted the misoprostol pill to induce contractions only during the hours that a doctor was on call because hemorrhaging was a risk. I felt trapped in that immaculately organized house and completely alienated. I locked the bathroom door, stripped down, and sobbed in the freshly scrubbed shower as the water pushed against my back. It was the only place that provided privacy.
Eventually, my husband returned. “This is just harder for me than it is for you,” he told me.
When we got to the clinic, my husband was instructed to stay in the waiting room. My vitals were taken by one nurse, and then I was whisked to the sonogram room to see another.
Lying on the cold metal table, with the sonogram wand inside me, I stared at the screen and focused on the black blob that had invaded my body.
“I can’t find a pole,” the nurse murmured as her tan brow furrowed.
“What?” I asked, still staring at the blob.
“I can’t find a fetal pole.”
“What’s that mean?”
Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the screen. “It means it’s not viable.”
Relief rushed through me. Not viable. Not alive.
I momentarily considered leaving the clinic right then. I’d probably have a miscarriage, right? I’d be absolved of responsibility. Nature made the choice, not me. I wouldn’t be one of those women, the “selfish murderers” the protestors yelled at, the ones my father contemptuously sneered about during our heated fights about reproductive rights. I wouldn’t have to carry the weight of the choice with me.
But I knew I couldn’t risk it.
I took a mifepristone pill at the clinic that would end any potential of the embryo growing if the ultrasound was taken too early to show a pole and the pregnancy was, indeed, viable. I needed to wait a day and then take the misoprostol. I didn’t want to do it at home or anywhere local, so my husband booked a hotel room in a more populated area that was near a hospital in case something went wrong. I asked my mom to feed our dogs and told her we were going on a late honeymoon mini-trip
My husband drove us to the hotel, and as we entered the elevator to go to our room, we were greeted with happy members of a wedding party getting ready to celebrate. The women’s dresses were colorful, and their eyes danced. I shifted myself into a corner, and my husband followed. Once we got to our floor and settled into the room, I took the prescribed painkillers, inserted the misoprostol, and stayed flat on the bed, waiting for it to take effect.
I felt the warm, almost euphoric sensations of the painkillers first. “This really isn’t bad at all,” I told him.
“It’s early,” he replied.
We continued to wait. His eyes moved around the room, briefly met mine, and then met the door. “I’m going to get some supplies. Some food and stuff.”
I was confused. “Huh? We don’t need anything.”
“You might. I won’t be long.”
He kissed me goodbye and left while I continued to wait.
And then it began, a slow climbing pain. My organs churned against each other, like rusty off-track gears, grinding and grating and grinding some more. Pangs that paralyzed. I vomited, brushed my teeth, then walked around the hotel room to distract myself. When that didn’t work, I disrobed, got into the shower, and arched my back into the stream of hot water, desperate to dull that pain.
Red droplets rained from me, swirling with the water to turn the tub’s white porcelain floor pink. I wondered where my husband was. This is what it feels like to be alone, I told myself. I wondered if I was going to be one of the women who had complications. And I briefly wondered if I might die. But I also knew it had to hurt. There had to be some price paid for extinguishing life. Or at least the potential of life.
“I remember lying in the hotel bed…obsessing about who might know my secret.”
Eventually, the pain lessened, and I got dressed and back into the bed. I could smell faint remnants of bleach on the sheets. My husband returned with soups and juices and sandwiches and all sorts of accoutrements from a variety of restaurants and stores. His demeanor was loving, but I knew he had deliberately distracted himself so he didn’t have to witness the process. I remember asking him if I was going to be OK. He said I would be. And I was.
About nine months later, I went on a trip with my mother and sister. When I mentioned to a coworker that I was going away to Boston for the weekend, she made a joke that I was going there to have a baby. I would have been due around that time—I didn’t look even remotely pregnant, and I convinced myself that she somehow knew I had been. I remember lying in the hotel bed as my mother and sister slept, obsessing about who might know my secret. I never told my sister about the abortion until six years later, after I had finally mustered up enough courage to leave the increasingly violent marriage and file for divorce. Eventually, I then told my mother. I kept the secret buried that long.
It took over a year after my positive pregnancy test for me to go back to my doctor’s office where the news was announced. Not because I was traumatized about having an abortion—that decision, like the one to get a divorce, was one of the few decisions that, when made, I never regretted or questioned. Never. I stayed away because I was traumatized about the possibility of my pregnancy being on record. I wanted the whole experience erased. I confronted the doctor about the way the news was delivered. Like many doctors, she was initially defensive, unwilling to admit wrong. But eventually she conceded that I should have been told in private—not in a waiting room packed with other people.
“…that decision, like the one to get a divorce, was one of the few decisions that, when made, I never regretted or questioned.”
That was a freeing moment, but I still carried the secret. And my estranged husband knew how I struggled with it.
He contested every step of the divorce, dragging out the process however he could. His parents footed his legal bill, but he knew I was paying my own.
One day, my lawyer dug out her notes from her most recent meeting with his attorney and read them aloud to me. She read the note about the discovery process’ exchange of documents (records that he insisted on receiving from me while never supplying his own), the note about the final trial date, the note about who got what art. And then her steely eyes met mine. “So his attorney said to me, ‘Well, did you know she had an abortion?’”
I was dumbstruck. I think I may have even laughed, not because I thought it was funny, but because it was a betrayal that cut so deep. He had not only absolved himself of any responsibility for the pregnancy and abortion: he reduced the experience to a bargaining chip and a barb to needle me.
But eventually, I was free.
Years pass, and I remarry and have a child. It’s late spring and I’m in bed, having finally coaxed my young daughter to fall asleep in her own room. Feathers enveloped in silky cotton surround me, and I reach for my phone for one final scroll before succumbing to sleep. I see the headline on my feed: “Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.” An electric shock morphs to a leaden heaviness in my chest. Here we are, I tell myself.
I think about my own abortion nearly 15 years ago and the escape it enabled. I think about all of the pain it prevented. I think about my daughter’s future and how a mostly male group of politicians and lawyers and judges is dismantling safe and legal access to abortion across the United States, an unraveling nurtured by women’s shame, secrecy and silence. My shame, secrecy and silence.
In some states, women will still have agency over their bodies. In other states, they will be criminals if they choose the path I did. But in all cases, the burden and the full weight of the decision will continue to fall upon female shoulders.
I’m not going to be silent anymore.
Barbara Ashwood grew up surrounded by cornfields and cows on her family’s farm in rural Illinois, and, after graduate school, returned to the area to teach creative writing and composition classes. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Rural Social Sciences, the Chicago Tribune, Adanna, the River Rock Times, and local nonfiction periodicals.
