Ann Friedman - No Country for Undecided Women

In case you missed last Friday's announcement... I’m on leave until March and sending pre-written newsletters until then. This is Part 2 of a serialized essay. If you’re just jumping in now, I suggest you go back and catch up. Read Part 1 here.

In this crumbling theocracy in 2022, there are few questions more fraught than the one posed by an unplanned pregnancy. It is serious, life-threatening business—not just a collision of two cells, but a collision of the personal and political that is likely to smash whoever is standing in the middle.
 
Do you want to spend the next 9 months growing a baby and the next 18 years (really, forever) parenting it? It is almost funny to find myself at age 40 and unsure of an answer to this fundamental question of adult life. Even the pregnancy test brands imply that I know what I want to see in the result window. ClearBlue Easy. First Response. They suggest that I, the test-taker, am hoping for a YES or NO—and quickly. There is no pregnancy test called Unclear Uneasy. Or No Strong Response. Maybe I should start this business: An at-home test for the person whose period is late and doesn’t know how to feel about that yet.
 
After I see that “Yes +”, my first response is to make a to-do list: Therapy appointment for me. Couples therapy appointment for me and Will. Appointment with an obstetrician, just in case. Appointment with an abortion provider, just in case. (Another appointment with my therapist to rage about how these are two different appointments, but more about that in a minute.) Will offers to help with all of this, but I decline. “The to-do list is part of my process,” I say.
 
I call my friend Alex, a former Planned Parenthood nurse, to ask for her advice. She tells me that an obstetrician won’t see me for another month, at an 8-week scan. And I can’t get a surgical abortion for another three weeks at the earliest. (She tells me to book it at an abortion provider because some obstetricians will do it, but many won’t offer the full range of anesthetic options.) This means there is time for every task on the confusion checklist, so much busywork while I wait for clarity to arrive. Alex leaves me with a warning: if you feel pain on just one side, radiating outward and upward sharply, get to a hospital. That’s an ectopic pregnancy. This would be a physically terrifying but narratively satisfying outcome, I think: Even this fertilized egg can’t decide where to implant.
 
There is no real space for confusion in the world of early pregnancy. The United States loves to both laud pregnant people while treating them like shit on every systemic level, and also mercilessly judge childfree adults. Decades of active campaigning to marginalize abortion as separate from other healthcare has only deepened the dissonance and divide. Maybe this isn’t true for folks with a feminist ob/gyn they love, but for me, there are two different paths, two different checklists.

Our household just switched insurance plans (which is true of 20% of Americans in any given year), so I don’t have a trusted ob/gyn to call. There is a phone number for abortion and a phone number for pregnancy. I must call different doctors, make different appointments, figure out different timelines. I find new depths to my hatred for crisis pregnancy centers, which offer “advice on all options” when in fact they do not. Even here in the largest city of the largest liberal state in the nation, few of the major ob/gyn practices or hospitals list abortion among the services they provide. Most of them list labiaplasty for chrissakes!! More waves of anger as I realize this.
 
My rage is close to the surface, breaking through in the form of stinging tears (though, somehow, never full sobs) and grip-the-steering-wheel screams when I least expect it. You better not write this off as hormones: This is happening to me in summer 2022, just one week after the Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade has leaked. I fume to a friend, “All laws about abortion should be made by people who have taken a pregnancy test in the past two weeks.” I demand a policy that says If you don’t have the capacity to worry about this scenario on a visceral level, then you don’t get a say in how we collectively handle it.
 
Unfortunately, I am not in charge here. I am just a bone-tired woman with tender tits who is clinging to her to-do list for dear life, wondering what will happen when she crosses off the last fact-finding item and still hasn’t decided what she wants to do.
 
I call obstetrical practices one by one. “I have a positive pregnancy test. Are you taking new patients?”
 
One receptionist chirps, “Congratulations!”
 
“We’ll see,” I reply darkly.
 
Two other receptionists tell me that their office cannot see me because their doctors’ schedules are full for the month in which I'd be delivering this hypothetical child. (Like, they can’t just do a SCAN now?!?? No, I have to commit to complete gestation to get any immediate care.)
 
Just scan me, I want to scream. I just want to know if I really have to choose, if this thing has potential. After all, I’m 40. I have been subject to years of statistics about the trials and tribulations of geriatric gestation. This embryo could be dead in the water already. I just want to go to one doctor, now, discuss my options, then have that same doctor either terminate or deliver. Is that too much to ask? In the largest city in the people’s republic of California?!
 
A special vein of my rage is reserved for people who have supported abortion restrictions and funded anti-choice politicians for years. My revenge fantasies burble. Part of me wants to terminate the pregnancy just so I can scream, “It was an abortion, Michael! An abortion!!” like Diane Keaton in The Godfather. Wouldn’t it feel so good to point out that the reproductive restrictions had the opposite effect they intended? That maybe if they’d spent years campaigning for federally subsidized daycare or universal healthcare, I’d be leaning more toward “yes”? How short-sighted of them.
 
On Alex’s rec (how does anyone survive without a feminist-nurse friend?), I find an ob who can see me—as a bonus, there are no syrupy congratulations from her receptionist. At least there’s a date on the calendar.
 
The weeks slide by. Even though I am not visibly pregnant, I am on edge and cannot stand being perceived by strangers right now. I want to fully disappear from the world until I know how I want it to see me. There is no good time to be ambivalently pregnant, but this moment is particularly fraught. I can’t look at the cascade of headlines, the protest photos of two entrenched sides screaming at each other. I am even annoyed by the people I agree with. It’s all “shout your abortion!” But never “shout your bone-deep indecision!”
 
I schedule a surgical abortion for one week after the scan with the ob. I know we’re all hyping up mail-order abortion pills as the hail mary of reproductive autonomy in our medieval age of restricted healthcare, and rightfully so, but I can’t imagine bleeding out at home, alone, while wondering if it’s supposed to feel this way, if it’s supposed to look like that. Far better to have a doctor remove it all at once, clean scrape. I can’t stop thinking about the people who don’t have this option, who are twisted into knots while they wait for pills to arrive in the mail. Another tsunami of anger crests and breaks.
 
As I cross “schedule D&C” off of the to-do list—the last item—I burst into tears. I wonder: Is this because I actually want to have the kid? Are these tears of relief because I now have every kind of appointment I might need? Is it hormones? I suspect it’s something else: I am finally crying because there are no longer any actions to take. Nothing to distract me from my lack of clarity. Only a decision to be made.
 
This was Part 2 of a 10-part series. I’m on leave until early March, which means I will not be reading replies to this newsletter. However, it will continue to arrive every Friday. Next week, Part 3: Going Nuclear.

"In here, we’re all pretending that we still live in the fuck-around century." -Helena Fitzgerald