I don’t remember much about the appointment itself. I went in, filled out some stuff on a clipboard, and waited to be called. I remember the waiting room was crowded. Everyone else had somebody with them; none of us made eye contact. I recognized the woman working the front desk—we went to high school together (which should be illegal)*—but she didn’t say anything. Maybe that’s protocol at the vagina clinic, I thought. Or maybe I just wasn’t that memorable as a teenager. Goddammit.
Before we got down to business, I had to talk to a counselor, I guess to make sure I wasn’t just looking for one of those cavalier partybortions that the religious right is always getting its sackcloth in a bunch over. (Even though, by the way, those are legal too.) She was younger than me, and sweet. She asked me why I hadn’t told my “partner,” and I cried because he wasn’t a partner at all and I still didn’t know why I hadn’t told him. Everything after that is vague. I think there was a blood test and maybe an ultrasound. The doctor, a brisk, reassuring woman with gray hair in an almost military buzz cut, told me my embryo was about three weeks old, like a tadpole. Then she gave me two pills in a little cardboard billfold and told me to come back in two weeks. The accompanying pamphlet warned that, after I took the second pill, chunks “the size of lemons” might come out. LEMONS. Imagine if we, as a culture, actually talked frankly and openly about abortion. Imagine if people seeking abortions didn’t have to be blindsided by the possibility of blood lemons falling out of their vaginas via a pink photocopied flyer. Imagine.
That night, after taking my first pill, as my tadpole detached from the uterine wall, I had to go give a filmmaking prize to my friend and colleague Charles Mudede—make a speech on a stage in front of everyone I knew, at the Genius Awards, the Stranger’s annual arts grant. It was surreal. Mike and I went together. We had fun—one of our best nights. There are pictures. I’m glassy-eyed, smiling too big, running on fumes and gallows humor. I remember pulling a friend into a dark corner and confessing that I had an abortion that day. “Did they tell you the thing about the lemons?” she asked. I nodded. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “There aren’t going to be lemons.”
She paused.
“Probably no lemons.”
Afterwards, Mike didn’t want to stay over at my place because he had to get up early to go to his high school reunion. That was fine. (It wasn’t.) I’ve got some uterine lining to shed, bozo. I tried to drop him off Fonz-style, but he could tell I was being weird. It’s hard to keep secrets from people you love, even when your love isn’t that great.
“What’s going on?” he said, as we sat in my quietly humming Volvo in the alley behind his house.
“I can’t tell you,” I said, starting to cry.
There was silence, for a minute.
“Did you have an abortion?” he said.
“Today,” I said.
He cried too—not out of regret or some moral crisis, but because I’d felt like I had to keep this a secret from him. We were just so bad at being together. He felt as guilty as I felt pathetic, and it made us closer, for a while.
He still went to his reunion the next day, and he didn’t text enough, and I cried a little. I lay in bed all day and ached. No lemons came out. It was like a bad period. The day after that, I felt a little better, and the day after that was almost normal. I wasn’t pregnant anymore. But instead of going back to our old routine—him running, me chasing—something had shifted inside me. Within six months, we were broken up for good. Within seven months, I wasn’t mad at him anymore. Within a year, he moved back east. He was a good guy.
I hesitate to tell this story, not because I regret my abortion or I buy into the right-wing narrative that pregnancy is god’s punishment for disobedient women, but because it’s so easy for an explanation to sound like a justification. The truth is that I don’t give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.
For that reason, we simply must talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities, and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, always an impossible decision. Well, we’re not, and it’s not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex, and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine.
Paradoxically, one of the primary reasons I am so determined to tell my abortion story is that my abortion simply wasn’t that interesting. If it weren’t for the zealous high school youth-groupers and repulsive, birth-obsessed pastors flooding the public discourse with mangled fetus photos and crocodile tears—and, more significantly, trying to strip reproductive rights away from our country’s most vulnerable communities—I would never think about my abortion at all. It was, more than anything else, mundane: a medical procedure that made my life better, like the time I had oral surgery because my wisdom tooth went evil-dead and murdered the tooth next to it. Or when a sinus infection left me with a buildup of earwax so I had to pour stool softener into my ear and have an otolaryngologist suck it out with a tiny vacuum, during which he told me that I had “slender ear canals,” which I found flattering. (Call me, Dr. Yang!)
It was like those, but also not like those. It was a big deal, and it wasn’t. My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.
You’re So Brave for Wearing Clothes and Not Hating Yourself!
Probably the question I get most often (aside from “Why won’t you go on Joe Rogan’s podcast to debate why rape is bad with five amateur MMA fighters in a small closet?”) is “Where do you get your confidence?”
“Where do you get your confidence?” is a complex, dangerous question. First of all, if you are a thin person, please do not go around asking fat people where they got their confidence in the same tone you’d ask a shark how it learned to breathe air and manage an Orange Julius.
As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, “Where do you get your confidence?” is, “You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.” I’m not saying there’s no graceful way to commiserate about self-image and body hate across size-privilege lines—solidarity with other women is one of my drugs of choice—but please tread lightly.