Vol. 30 - I Have My Daughter Thanks to an Abortion

On Women's Rights

Over the last few weeks, I, like so many, have been devastated by the Supreme Court’s decision to potentially overturn Roe v. Wade; horrified that women are at the risk of losing their autonomy at the hands of religious zealots, who have never been pro-life but anti-choice (but that’s another post for another newsletter); furious that our nation, one of whose most important tenets is the separation of church and state, is creeping ever closer to becoming theocracy; disappointed by the utter failure of one of America’s cornerstones and one of the most vital institutions in a functioning democracy; and just about every other bad feeling you might have when you find out that a bunch of ideologues are trying to determine what your daughter may or may not be able to do as it pertains to her own body, health, and well being.

But you don’t need to have a daughter to recognize that a woman’s body and the decisions she makes about it are hers and hers alone.

Through all of those emotions, I wrestled with what, if anything, I should or could say.

And so I wrote this essay about the experience Emily and I had with an abortion, about just one of the many instances why a woman—in this case, my wife—might choose to have an abortion, and about what, or more importantly, who, it resulted in.

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I love my daughter so much.

I’m obsessed with her, as most parents are with their squishy ten-month-olds.

She’s easy, almost always smiling, crawling everywhere, exploring the world around her, making her mom, me, and her big brother laugh what seems like a hundred times a day. She’s a great eater and amazing sleeper and an ideal cuddler.

To me, she’s perfect.

But if it weren’t for an abortion, our daughter, this daughter, would not be here.

Sure, we’d likely have another child in her place, maybe a little girl a lot like her or a second boy, as rowdy, rambunctious, and stubborn as our four-year-old son. And we would love that child just as much as we love our daughter. And, to us, she or he would be just as perfect.

But my wife’s second pregnancy stopped progressing somewhere around its sixth week, even though her body continued to play a cruel trick on her, doing everything it was supposed to do to convince us that her pregnancy was well on its course.

I’m hesitant to refer to Emily’s second pregnancy—the one that was miscarried then aborted—as a “baby” for a few reasons. 

First, it wasn’t a baby yet. At six weeks, it was just an amalgam of cells, a zygote closer to something you’d find in a pond than a little girl or boy.

Second, it’s far easier to deal with the loss if you don’t call it a baby.

The problem was, it wasn’t six weeks into my wife’s pregnancy, a pregnancy we thought was moving along just fine given her violent morning sickness, exhaustion, and lack of any miscarriage symptoms, when we found out her pregnancy was nonviable.

Rather, it was near the end of the first trimester, just as Emily and I began to volley potential names back and forth; to discuss how we might divide the labor between a newborn and our son, a very active toddler; to decide how we might reveal the news to extended family and friends that we were expecting. 

We’d yet to hear a heartbeat or see an ultrasound and, other than the internal manifestations of growing a baby and the near-constant stream of vomit coursing out of her, Emily’s body had not started to change much. 

It was only the thick blue line on a series of twelve-dollar drugstore pregnancy tests and a urine-test visit with our doctor that confirmed the pregnancy’s very existence. 

Thus, beyond the very idea that Emily was pregnant, we had developed little relationship to the embryo we thought was going on its twelfth week of gestation.     

Even the nickname we gave it, “The Zygote” or “The ‘Gote” gave us little reason for emotional connection.      

Still, when you think your child is beginning to grow inside your wife and someone tells you that’s no longer the case, it’s a gutpunch.  

I was home, as COVID precautions prevented me from joining Emily for the first ultrasound, while our son played at my feet with his beloved Hot Wheels. Emily called me from the hospital parking lot, sobbing, coughing out the words that it wasn’t good news. 

She had what’s called a “silent” or “missed miscarriage,” one in which the pregnancy ceases without any physical markers of a nonviable pregnancy. The ultrasound at twelve weeks showed nothing but an empty pregnancy sack. The doctor laid out a trio of options. First, Emily could return as soon as possible for an abortive procedure called a D&E, or “Dilation and Evacuation.” Second, she could take a prescribed pill that would speed the process of Emily’s body rejecting the pregnancy. Finally, she could allow nature to take its course, however long that might take.

Knowing there was no way this pregnancy could result in our second child, Emily chose the D&E, laying our her reasoning in this note she wrote me as I composed this essay:

When you hear that something you've been working on for months does not exist, you want out. You want out so fast you can't even describe how quickly you want the whole shitshow to be over. But from the date of the empty ultrasound, I had to wait an entire week to get another ultrasound, just to confirm, and then wait to be scheduled for the abortion. THOSE SEVEN DAYS SUCKED. They went by so painfully slow. Time already moves slow when you are pregnant and you're counting every day and week, hoping for progress. Then we had to wait to be scheduled for the procedure. When a nurse called me to schedule last minute on a Friday afternoon to come in that Monday, I jumped at the chance. We had no childcare or anything set up but we'd do whatever we had to, to end the pointlessly vomitous nightmare. I can't imagine just sitting at home waiting for my body to get the memo.

After the ultrasound, Emily came home and went straight to the bathroom to vomit, a twisted joke The Zygote continued to play on her body, which thought she was still very much creating a baby. 

By the time the appointment came to vacuum the remnants of The Zygote from my wife’s uterus, I was allowed in the exam room, where I resorted to my method of stress management and made a few too many jokes. 

Emily, knowing my process, laughed. Her nurse did not.

On the drive home, I lamented the fact that we already told a dozen or so of our closest friends and family that we were expecting, that we’d have to call them back, to relive this miscarriage again and again and again.

“I guess that’s why people don’t announce early,” I said. 

“We knew telling people early was a risk,” Emily said, comforting me, the one who didn’t just have a nonviable pregnancy vacuumed from his body.

“We’ll be okay,” she reassured.

As Emily was nearing forty at the time, we knew we didn’t want to wait much longer to start trying to have our second child. But as she had just had miscarriage sucked out of her by a cold, grey machine in a cold, grey room in the midst of a cold, grey winter, neither of us was in the mood for trying.

We decided to give her body a few cycles to recover and, after three vomit-filled months of thinking she was pregnant followed by the trauma that comes with losing a pregnancy, Emily was looking forward to enjoying one of her favorite delights; a dirty vodka martini, one olive, chilled.

And as we were nearing the eve of the most contentious general election in our lives, and likely in the life of our nation, Emily thought she might need a drink here and there. 

Early 2021, we decided.

We’d endure the election, enjoy the holidays, and then start trying again. Maybe late January or early February, that our second child might come sometime in October, the month we were married.

But as Thanksgiving arrived, Emily missed a period and was constantly running to the toilet, racing the bile that rose in her throat. 

Just as we did with our son and just as we did with The Zygote, Emily and I stood above a pregnancy test, whose affirmative blue indicator line was made all the more jarring juxtaposed against our white-tile bathroom counter.

Soon, we were in our doctor’s office as he mushed his microphone through the clear gel smeared across Emily’s lower belly, the thump of a rapid heartbeat cutting through the static that was, apparently, the sound of my wife’s placenta.

It hadn’t even been two months since Emily’s abortion.

Within a few weeks, early genetics testing indicated no presence of a Y chromosome and a few months after that, we welcomed our second child, a baby girl, my daughter, into our family.

If Emily were prohibited from having that abortion, if she was forced to wait it out as her body grew and her stomach forced out almost everything she ate (even though her pregnancy sack was completely empty), my daughter would not be here today.

Abortions aren’t just about terminating unwanted pregnancies. They happen for a wide variety of reasons (and let me say this in bold: not a single one of which is anybody’s fucking business but the mother involved and, maybe, her partner).

In the case of my wife and me and our untenable Zygote, the abortion existed to give Emily physical comfort and emotional solace in the face of a pregnancy that could never have resulted in a child.

In the case of our daughter, it gave her a chance to become our daughter.