Eunjin:hey, want to grab brunch before Alex’s thing? I was thinking Ferris?
Eunjin:just knocked on your door & no response so I’m just gonna head out
Eunjin:I really hope you’re up and just ignoring me bc I know you rly wanted to go support Alex.
Eunjin:Wait sry I totally forgot that you’re sick. Hope you’re feeling better & you got it all out of your system. Hope it was just food poisoning & you aren’t preggers. That would be bad. Lol. See you soon
Eunjin was right. Alex would be pissed if I missed their showcase. They had been talking about it for months. I pulled on the first clean sweater and pair of jeans I could find and ran to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I was about to text that I was on my way when I reread a line from her last text. “Hope it was just food poisoning & you aren’t preggers.” I scoffed. I couldn’t be pregnant; that would be ridiculous. I had gotten my period pretty recently. Actually, was it that recent? When was the last time I got my period? I pulled up my tracking app. It was six weeks ago. Fuck.
I stopped at Duane Reade on my way to Alex’s event. I didn’t skimp on the pregnancy tests. I’ve made that mistake before. A five-dollar stick from freshman year resulted in “Inconclusive,” causing me to waste two hours waiting for a walk-in appointment at the campus clinic the week before finals. The doctor’s test came back negative, and my period arrived a day later.
The event was held in a building on 120th and Amsterdam. I was on 114th and Broadway, six blocks and one avenue away. I rushed past the slow walkers, and even some brisk walkers who, under different circumstances, wouldn’t have annoyed me. Once I reached the building, I was out of breath, and felt my lungs burn even more as I sped up the stairs to the third floor, entering a classroom of about fifty students sitting on rows of metal folding chairs. The first presenter had just started. A couple of students from the audience glared as I walked in. My shoes were making too much noise, a characteristic that I inconveniently had not noticed until that point. I took a seat close to the doors and near the back of the room. Eunjin was sitting in the front row next to Leah.
I looked through old text messages with Alex to pull up theschedule of the event. Fifteen students, all members of the honors program for the art history department, would each be presenting a five-minute summary on their work. The first person just finished to a round of applause, and the second student was setting up her slides on the projector. Alex was third on the list. There was always the chance that the second one would end early, and Alex would be on in just a couple of minutes. I wanted to stay and pay attention to the presentation, but the pregnancy test sitting inside my backpack was burning a hole in my willpower. I squirmed in my seat and fidgeted with my hands until I finally couldn’t take it anymore.
The women’s room was located just next to the classroom, close enough that I could still hear the speaker. By the time the student presenter had introduced herself as Madeline, I was already sitting on the toilet seat in the handicap stall. As she began to thank her advisor, I was tearing open the cardboard box. As she started talking about Bruegel’s influence on late-sixteenth-century Flemish art, I was already pulling out the plastic stick. As she said to the audience, “I’m sure everyone here is familiar withThe Hunters in the Snow,” I was already reading through the instructions in the manual. Easy enough. I emptied a fraction of my bladder on each of the three sticks.
All three manuals said fifteen minutes, but I couldn’t stay in the bathroom for fifteen minutes. I exited the stall. There was a shelf underneath the row of sinks filled with stacks of unopened toilet paper. I moved a couple of rolls to the front and placed the sticks behind them, checking from all angles that they wouldn’t be visible to passersby. I set a silent timer on my phone for fifteen minutes.
By the time I returned to the classroom, the crowd wasapplauding for Madeline. Alex stood up from their seat in the front row and began to set up. I paid enough attention to their presentation that I knew it had something to do with queer identity in Renaissance art, but I couldn’t tell you the particular artists they mentioned or the pieces of art. The timer counted down in my pocket like a bomb.
—
The next day I purchasedthree more pregnancy tests. It was a waste of money. I had spent the morning sitting inches away from the toilet on the cool linoleum floor, clutching my stomach in anticipation of the next round of puking, praying no one would walk in. Thankfully, no one had. My breasts felt tender, swollen, almost numb. I spent thirty dollars to confirm a result that my body itself had already confirmed. Three sets of twin lines, six if you counted the ones I’d taken the day before: a mundane announcement to an extremely undesirable fate. The same unpleasant sight that had greeted me the day before. Positive. I was pregnant.
It was just another example that things weren’t working out the way they were supposed to. I didn’t get into Harvard, and now it turned out I was pregnant. If my life were a book, this chapter would be written in passive voice. I was rejected by Harvard. I was cursed with a pregnancy. I no longer did anything; things were done to me.
I tried to imagine my body as a vessel for human life. I pictured the seed, mucus, whatever you wanted to call it, growing inside my abdomen, nurtured by my own bodily functions. The food I ate, the water I drank, were no longer mine, but partly diverted to sustaining this new creature. It was a biologicalfunction that I understood from high school anatomy class, but not one I could wrap my head around in practice. I felt far more akin to a child than to a mother. When I imagined a doctor extracting these cells from my body, I felt no hint of pain or remorse. It didn’t appear to me that I would be losing something fundamental to who I was, or who evolution had dictated I would be, but that I would be receiving treatment for a condition to return my body to its default state. The object growing inside me didn’t feel natural, but the idea of its removal did.
It felt counterintuitive to everything I had learned about abortion growing up. Of course, the town I grew up in was predominantly conservative, and in eighth grade, when we were asked to present an opinion on a controversial topic, everyone who picked abortion was arguing on the side of why it should be banned. But even pro-choice media seemed to imply that though the choice belonged to women, it was not an easy choice—that it’d have lasting psychological and physiological impact, that it’d require navigating internal and external turmoil.
From a biological standpoint, the object inside me was far from a living being. It was barely an object, just a cluster of cells that would continue to multiply, which could just as well disappear without conscious interference on my end. There was no scientific justification for why someone would think of this as human life. As a result, I always treated this consideration as an emotional one. But my own emotions weren’t making this consideration. As I researched abortion centers in my area, I never once felt that I was making a decision about human life, or even the potential of one. Perhaps if my pregnancy were later-stage I would feel differently, but in the present moment, my decision was unambiguous. I would get an abortion.
TEN
I made an appointment withan abortion clinic IN Midtown East that had many negative reviews—but none of them were about complications with the procedure itself, and it was the only one with appointments for times that wouldn’t interfere with my class schedule.
There was no question about the father, although I hated using the word “father,” as this was not an actual baby. I’ve always thought people dole out the term “father” too generously. Men who have no involvement in their biological child’s life still manage to hold the title “father.” I prefer “sperm donor.” Anyway, the sperm donor was David, who I really would’ve preferred to leave out of this whole situation, but unfortunately, I did not have enough money in my bank account to pay for the abortion.
I considered going to the Columbia Medical Center, which offered abortions for free if you had the student health insurance, but I was on my mom’s employer-sponsored health insurance.Our plan probably did cover the procedure at the Columbia Medical Center, but then it would show up on her explanation of benefits and she’d find out about the abortion, and that was absolutely not a conversation that I wanted to have.
So after weighing all the options, I decided my best shot was to ask David for money. I told him to meet me at a coffee shop on a Saturday afternoon. Before our meeting I practiced what I was going to say. I would’ve preferred to open with “I’m going to get an abortion,” but that sentence wouldn’t make sense without “I’m pregnant” coming out of my mouth first. Still, I didn’t want David to be worried for even a second, so I practiced saying the two sentences as one. During that millisecond between him finding out I was pregnant and him finding out I wanted an abortion, would he think I was trying to baby-trap him? I admit, it probably was my fault that we were in this situation, but it wasn’t intentional. I had told him I was on birth control, and I actually was, but I sometimes forgot to take it. Besides, did people still get baby-trapped? Was baby-trapping ever a real phenomenon? It seemed awfully like something men would have invented to further demonize women for an action that takes two to complete.
I meant to make some small talk first. Maybe I’d first ask about his day. But I was too anxious to get the words out, so this is how it went: David arrived, sat down, and said, “Hey, how are you?” and I said, “I’m getting an abortion also I am pregnant.”
David’s eyes widened. I searched in his expression for fear, anxiety, or annoyance, but there was none—just a wandering look that seemed like a combination of concentration and curiosity, as though he were reading a plaque about dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History. Finally, his eyes met mine.
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.” I took out a ziplock bag with all of the pregnancy tests that I had taken. There were six in total.
“Okay. And you said you’re going to get an abortion?”
“Correct.”
“Cool. I mean, totally your choice, your decision.” He looked around as if someone would tell him what he was supposed to say. “As a feminist, I respect women’s right to choose.”
His awkwardness unnerved me. I had expected some drama, worry, maybe even anger, but certainly not awkwardness. It wasn’t like the movies, where the couple panics and discusses whether or not they should keep the baby, the woman saying, “It’s been my dream to be a mom,” and the man saying, “No, I’m not ready yet.” Or a TV show, where the producers can stretch a pregnancy scare into a narrative arc about the woman’s complicated relationship with motherhood and the father of her unborn child. Or a different kind of TV show, in which the woman miscarries and the pregnancy is never mentioned again, mostly because a baby in the show would kind of ruin the plot.
