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How many pregnancies?
When I used to go the gynecologist, I was always asked how many pregnancies I had had. “I have had six pregnancies: three abortions, two miscarriages, and one live birth.” That last one resulted in a delightful 30-year-old man who is now one of the great joys of my life. But I’d like to give just a little attention to those other five, and perhaps a glimpse into what made me an abortion rights activist.
The miscarriages were both early, like first few weeks early, but they were still awful, heart-breaking, and haunting. The first was when I was eighteen; I was changing my tampon, and I suddenly found myself standing in a pool of blood, with spatters on the cabinet next to me. That shock was hard. The second one was many years later, at a time when my partner and I were thinking about stopping contraception and getting pregnant, and when my period was late, we were excited, until I bled, and we knew. We cried and caught our breath. He gave me an electronic piano as a consolation prize, as a way to ease the grief. A few months later we conceived our son.
The abortions are a whole different story. Each of them was with men I loved, and they were babies I would have loved to raise, children I still imagine lives with. The first was when I was nineteen, and it was from the only other Armenian I’ve ever had sex with. I made a conscious decision not to date Armenian men, because their mothers told them too convincingly that they were little pashas and deserved to be served. But this one person slipped under the radar, and he caught my eye and my heart. When I learned I was pregnant, I had to face the fact that I was going to abort the only Armenian baby I would ever conceive.
The second was when I was organising farmworkers on the East End of Long Island, and I fell in love with a spectacularly beautiful, brilliant black man who completely swept me away. Everything about him was right, and everything he said made me feel wonderful. He was a gift with a hidden tragedy: we could never live together. He had an extremely complicated past that made that unimaginable. But having to give up the possibility of having his child was brutal. And I couldn’t even tell him.
The third was with my partner. I knew we were going to spend our lives together, and we would have loved that baby and raised it happily. But we were on the verge of our lives: I was going to graduate school, he was looking for work in the US, where I lived, and we simply weren’t prepared to give a child anything. Not a home, not time, not two parents in the same place. So, we decided for an abortion.
But here’s the thing that people who oppose abortions never understand. If we had decided to have that baby, there would have been many joys, but also many losses. I wouldn’t have gone to graduate school, wouldn’t have written books, wouldn’t have become a professor. I’m not at all sure our relationship would have survived it, either. But the single most important loss of all would have been the son I did have. If I had kept that baby we aborted, we would never have had the one I know and love. That is no small thing.
It is painful, and creepy, to think of trading one child for another, but in some abstract and slightly perverse way, that is exactly what happened. I gave up babies I have cried for countless times so that I could have the one I was meant to have. To have the one I adore, the one I am so proud of, the one who has taught me so, so much.
There is no right and wrong here. There is nothing simple, nothing cavalier, nothing heartless, as so many anti-abortion advocates suggest. I have wept over each unborn child, both miscarried and aborted, and I think of them not infrequently. But the gift they gave me was the life I have and the son I have, and there cannot be anything wrong with that.
So, I did a lot of clinic defense in the 1980s and 90s, and I got beat up by Operation Rescue, and all of that. I even had my own special nightmare terrorist, who stood on a street corner in downtown San Mateo and waited for me to show up after dropping my son off to day care, to go to my dissertation collective’s office, so that he could shout “Murderer” at me for five minutes until I got into the building. I tolerated all of that because I felt—and feel—so very strongly that women should have the chance I had to choose the paths of their lives and their childbearing without harassment and humiliation.
My babies, my lost babies and my living son, demand nothing less from me.