Ann Friedman - Unintended

I’m on leave until March and sending pre-written newsletters until then. This is Part 4 of a serialized essay. If you’re just jumping in now, I suggest you go back and catch up. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this essay here.

I am trying to hide my indecision from the algorithm.
 
My desire for privacy—the impulse to cocoon while enduring the specifics of an experience that is the subject of broad-brush public commentary—is so overwhelming it extends to the digital. I don’t want a single tracking pixel to know what’s happening in my lower abdomen. I open a private browser tab and search “emily oster first trimester caffeine,” “emily oster first trimester cannabis,” “bath temperature pregnancy,” “what happens at 8 week scan.”
 
The results tell me what I already know: There is no way to proceed in true indecision. If I want the option of parenthood, I have to act like I am going to carry this thing to term, lest my normal behavior trigger a miscarriage and make the decision for me. I develop a sick inside joke with myself about a kind of fetal Hunger Games. If it can survive my standard regimen of vaporized weed and gin martinis, perhaps the fetus deserves to be here. We can hang.
 
I mean, I don’t do that. I cut out marijuana and hot baths. I keep the Hunger Games joke, though, and look to it for occasional relief from my hot resentment. I clench and unclench my fist, my nails carving a row of little parentheses in my palm. It’s ok, I don’t feel like drinking anyway.
 
Let’s talk about how we’re going to help women in danger, says the president.
 
I hate him, but I feel this way, too. That we should always frame this conversation in terms of people whose lives and bodies would truly be destroyed by continuing a pregnancy. That we should think, first and foremost, of the people trying to figure out how they’ll afford to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion or afford to feed another child. That, by comparison, my pregnancy is so low-stakes it might as well be a spa treatment. That my indecision is boring and bourgeois.
 
The only things in danger are my lifestyle, my autonomy, my sense of self. Mere trifles.
 
These weeks feel lonely, but I have company: Nearly half of all pregnancies fall into the “oops” category. “An unintended pregnancy,” according to the reproductive statisticians at the Guttmacher Institute, “is one that occurred when a woman wanted to become pregnant in the future but not at the time she became pregnant (‘wanted later’) or one that occurred when she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future (‘unwanted’).”
 
I’m 40 years old; there is no “wanted later” because later is now. Is it “unwanted,” though? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. And if I—with my supportive partner and attentive therapist and financial security and devoted community—cannot linger in the indecision, then who can? Anti-abortion forces have so thoroughly compromised the process of choosing that this country does not meaningfully allow for indecision, for pause, for the gray area.
 
Pregnancy itself is a gray area. This is what the Supreme Court concluded in Roe (RIP), and what a majority of Americans declare when polled: Life does not begin at conception, life does not begin at birth. It happens somewhere in the messy in-between. For some people, I’m sure it feels like a lifeform from the minute they are aware of its presence. Wanted. For others, it never does. Unwanted.
 
I am not in either camp. I didn’t choose this. But could I come to want it?
 
The stats say I am likely to pick parenthood: “42% of unintended pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) ended in abortion, and 58% ended in birth.” I do feel a sense of inevitability about it. For most of my life, I didn’t want to get pregnant. Now that I am, I’m not sure I care enough to try to get unpregnant. How is it that I, a woman of firm opinions about almost everything, am now a leaf floating downstream? Fuck it, I think. I don’t care. Whatever. Just flow with the 58%.
 
Maybe I’d feel differently if I didn’t have to be a mother. I play a word-association game: Mother. Martyr. Nag. Conformist. Put-upon. Undervalued. Disrespected. Shackled. Resentful. Doing the most for the least in return. Needed. Constantly needed. Nurturer.

Even the positive spin is repulsive to me, a kind of hippie-feminine stereotype I gag on. I want to love and nurture by choice and circumstance, not by obligation. I don’t list these words to friends, especially not my many friends who are mothers. I just say, “I’m dealing with my internalized misogyny about motherhood.” In addition to being true, this framing comes with a convenient intellectual distance.
 
“Freedom,” says Toni Morrison, “is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilities; it's choosing the ones you want.” Freedom, I think, is choosing the people you will be responsible for and to. This potential kid is a wild card. I’m choosing a type of responsibility, but not the actual person. But the Morrison definition stands: Unlike so many women, I get to choose. No matter which outcome I pick, I am free.
 
This was Part 4 of a serialized essay. 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 5: Dream Baby Dream.

"Anyone who’s ever gotten what they wanted has understood that the desire was where the power was." -Daisy Alioto