What Happened Last Year: An Abortion Story

“Do you think they have sticky rice?” Melissa and I are settling into a booth in the back of an empty Thai restaurant outside of Atlanta. She stares suspiciously at the menu, “Wait, why are these drinks so cheap?” “Because we’re in the suburbs of Georgia, not Manhattan,” I laugh. “And they absolutely have sticky rice.” Melissa and I have known each other since she was in the 8th grade. She’s my little sister’s best friend, a part of my family, the Treasurer of our otherwise siblings-only Harry Potter Book Club (the Blast Ended Skrewts) and tonight she’s in town from New York training for a new job in Corporate Social Responsibility. She’s explaining to me exactly what that means when the waiter comes by and we order waters, white wine (such a deal!), and mango sticky rice to share. Eventually the drinks arrive, the waiter drifts away, and Melissa begins to tell me about last year.

 “Of course I never wanted to have an abortion,” she says. “That was never my birth control plan.”  

Melissa was careful. She knew that condoms break, but she also knew that Plan B (the Morning After Pill) was available to her if that should happen. “I never thought I would end up here,” she says. “It’s useful to enter that space of: truly anything can happen, no matter what you do.” It is useful. We don’t understand the dimensions of a choice until we arrive there ourselves.

It was Spring of last year when Melissa found herself in that space. At first it was just a Saturday night with a cute guy and the sudden horror of a broken condom. “I was like, ‘Ughh, God!!’” Melissa tells me, running her hands through her hair. The barrier, the level of protection, suddenly gone. She was alarmed, annoyed, but not panicked. She woke up the next morning, drove herself to the pharmacy by her house, and purchased Plan B. Melissa carefully followed the instructions on the packaging, and she moved on, confident in the medication. She lost touch with the guy, and as the weeks went on the complications of life - quitting her job, someone breaking into her car twice - put the whole incident out of her head.

But three weeks later Melissa sat alone in her room staring at a positive pregnancy test. By that point, she says, “I kind of already knew.” Her period was late, she was nauseated, her boobs were sensitive. “Obviously the condom broke. Obviously the Plan B didn’t work.”

It was immediately clear to Melissa that she would have an abortion.  She was living in LA, in a house she shared with a roommate in Echo Park. She didn’t have a job, she didn’t have health insurance. “If the circumstances were different, this would have been a much harder decision,” she tells me, as our sticky rice arrives at the table. “I barely knew the guy. He was like 24.”

“Of course,” I respond, lifting my spoon to dig in, “an easy decision.” 

She pauses, her hands resting on the table. It was a clear decision, she clarifies. But nothing about it was easy. 

Melissa was alone and pregnant and all at once becoming aware of something she had never considered before, “I have a reproductive body within me.” It was impossible for her to ignore, revealing itself in rolling nausea and heightened emotion. Her body different and overwhelmingly new. More. And there was something else.

Melissa puts some rice on her spoon, a little bit of mango. She takes a bite, swallows, and looks me bravely in the face. 

“I felt an instant connection to it,” she says. 

“I didn’t ever expect that. Because I had these physical changes, I think, it was just very real.  I’m pregnant and I could actually do this and have a baby. I have that potential in me right now. I think that just activated something in me. I did feel guilty extinguishing that. Logically, it wasn’t where I was. My belief system wasn’t there. But then my emotions were there. And I was very taken aback by that.”

Taken aback is the perfect turn of phrase. I sit across from Melissa in our quiet corner and feel blown back in my seat by her honesty and vulnerability, overwhelmed by the sticky truth of this. What was it that she felt a connection to? A spark? A life? A possibility of one? It’s the debate that rages at the heart of those who seek to protect or throttle the heavy responsibility of this personal choice. The one that fell on Melissa alone. What was the right decision for her and the possibility within her? Experiencing a connection to her body and her pregnancy added a new dimension of reality to Melissa’s decision. “I thought that it would just be cut and dry,” she says. But her decision remained clear: “I’m not going to have this baby.”

Tired, nauseated and full of emotion, Melissa called all eight clinics in her LA area. She discovered that she was early enough in her pregnancy to have a medication abortion, which involves taking a series of pills that result in a process similar to an early miscarriage. The cheapest clinic she could find charged $500. She was shocked by the price. 

Melissa reached out to the guy. “My roommate told me not to,” she tells me. But two people made a mutual choice, she says. He should know the outcome of that choice. “It was fair for him to pay for half of it,” she explains.  “Fair, but not equal, of course.” Melissa would still have to take time off of work, schedule and attend multiple long appointments, and navigate the physical and emotional experiences of both the pregnancy and the abortion.  “But he was really nice and understanding,” she says. “He said he would cover half.” She scheduled an appointment for the following week. 

The clinic was a women’s health center in a subdued building, nothing that screamed “Abortion.” As a result there were no protestors lined up outside, nobody to shame Melissa as she walked alone from her car into the clinic. “If there had been, it would have been so much harder,” she tells me. “I can’t believe people do that. Put another layer of shame and guilt on women besides what they might already be dealing with.” 

As soon as she stepped inside, however, an uneasy feeling came over her. “It felt very questionable,” she says. The price changed to $600, unless she could pay cash. The waiting room was overcrowded and noisy. The place was short-staffed and overworked, and it became clear to Melissa that she was going to be there a while. But this was the cheapest clinic in LA. And her decision had been made. She found a spot and waited for what would become three hours. Eventually, she found herself in an exam room lying on a table as a nurse performed an ultrasound. “Do you want to see it?” the nurse asked.

“That’s the only time I was really sad,” Melissa tells me. No, she didn’t want to see it.

There are some states where you don’t have a choice. California allowed the nurse to respect Melissa’s privacy. They didn’t force her to peer at the black and white screen, find meaning in the shapes. They finished the exam, gave her time to sit up and get dressed, and gave her the pills she needed to initiate the medication abortion. Melissa gathered her things, and walked towards the exit.

As she opened the door to leave, she found a crowd of clinic staff feverishly arguing in Spanish with a woman with two small children.  It was raining outside, which is unusual for LA, and the woman didn’t have a ride home. The staff were trying to figure out who might be able to drive her home after their shifts ended, which was hours away. Melissa shrugged, “I’ll take you.” 

Melissa’s car, freshly repaired from the recent break-ins, was safe and warm as she drove with the woman and her children - one crying, one fast asleep - through the LA traffic. In broken English the woman explained that she too, had just had an abortion. “I can’t support one more baby,” she said. She never thought she would have an abortion, but she just couldn’t do it. Me either, Melissa told her. And they drove together in the pouring rain, two women from two different walks of life, alone in their choices, and yet for one moment, connected. Just like Ram Dass tells us, “We’re all just walking each other home.”

Melissa pulled up in front of the woman’s house and helped her peel the kids from the backseat, “Call me if you ever need a ride or are in a jam,” she told her. And then she went back to her own house, to bleed and cramp and finish her pregnancy.

The guy stopped responding to Melissa. He never paid. Never called. “He ghosted me on my abortion,” Melissa tells me, as we spoon the last of the rice from our plate. She shakes her head, “It’s so unfair that guys can just have sex and not deal with the consequences. And to think that some people won’t have the option to abort and then they have to deal with nine months of pregnancy. And giving birth against their will. And raising a human. And still, it’s the same guy who’s not having to deal with it: this 24-year-old guy who wouldn’t pay 250 bucks.” Later Melissa was out with a girlfriend and shared the story. Afterwards, a Venmo notification popped up on Melissa’s phone. It was from her friend. She had taken the time, moved money around and sent Melissa $250 of her own savings. The message read – “Because of all these fucking men.” 

“It’s a great, wonderful capacity that our bodies have to create life, it gives us a magical quality,” Melissa says. But at the end of the day, she explains, dealing with the consequences rest squarely on the woman’s shoulders. It rests on her head, as it aches with exhaustion and decision. On her throat as she pushes back the nausea of morning sickness. On her sore breasts that throb at the slightest touch.

Melissa and I finish our drinks and walk out into the stifling heat of the Georgia summer, where politicians are working to make the overwhelming process of an unwanted pregnancy an increasingly punishing experience. Fewer clinics, heartbeat-based bans: “I would have been devastated,” Melssa says, if she didn’t have the choice. Or if she had to handle the logistics of traveling or draining a bank account. “It was so hard to go through.  I can’t imagine being in that place.” If she had these additional burdens, or lack of support or if she was younger, she says, “I think it’s something that would drive someone to be suicidal.”

A few months after the abortion, Melissa left California on a solo trip around the world. I saw her after she returned. She sat next to me on my sister’s couch and showed me a book she printed of pictures from her trip. Every page had a story. I thumbed through slowly, listening to Melissa describe her adventures. There were beautiful shots of her on cliffs in New Zealand. Teaching a classroom of young girls in India. She points out a seemingly inconsequential picture of a beach in Sri Lanka. “Right here is where I started to get really sick, out of nowhere.” Melissa came down with Typhoid Fever, by herself in Sri Lanka, with no one to help her. And then she shows me another picture. “This is the man who helped me find a doctor, food, medicine. He kept me company when I was sick and alone” After Melissa recovered, she started a fundraising campaign and raised enough money to buy her rescuer a motorbike so that he could safely drive to work every morning. And drive back home again at the end of the day. And then eventually, Melissa came home too.

Melissa lives in New York now, in an apartment in Brooklyn. She’s enjoying her new job, and, “Generally,” she explains, “This isn’t something I want people to know about me.” And of course it isn’t. As much as we try to bravely stand in the gap and tell our stories, it’s much easier to not have people know the intimate details of our lives. It’s easier, Melissa tells me, to not take on the social and political connotations that have come to surround this very personal and biological circumstance. It’s easier to keep our stories to ourselves. But why, she asks me, should she be ashamed? Melissa had an abortion last year. And it was hard and painful and lonely and expensive and a pain in the ass. It was overwhelming and sad and a huge relief. Why, she asks, should she, as a woman, “Bear all the consequences, the expenses, the physical toll and also the shame that society pins on us for the sex that two people had? Why is that falling on us?” Melissa shakes her head, “Now I have no shame. It’s something that happened.”