It was February 1998. Winter was bitter and life was tough. Sitting on the icy tiled floor of the narrow bathroom in the student residence, I couldn’t take my eyes off the two pink bars. Maybe if I stared at them long enough and hard enough, they would eventually fade away. But nothing happened. Nothing magical, anyway.
I was 19 and my life was total chaos. The brothel pursued me, unless it was I who sowed it. No matter, there, I was in the ditch. At the time, I was working part-time at a luggage store and making $6.90 an hour. A real misery. My immaturity was equal to my excesses: excessive.
I was panicked. Completely overwhelmed.
This child, finally this thing in my belly which would have become one after nine months, I wanted it. I would have loved it, God I would have loved it. Because love, that yes, I had to give. But for the rest, what could I have offered him? Nothing, that’s what I told myself at the time. And after all these years, I still think the same thing. Beyond financial considerations, I had empty pockets of experiences, resilience, courage and judgment. In fact, of everything that shapes a parent, since I myself was, in many ways, a little girl.
I was seven weeks pregnant. It is powerful, denial! I had to get busy, find the $300 to pay for the procedure (a FORTUNE), find a clinic, do the ultrasounds and undergo. To suffer the judgment of the staff, the careless remarks of the social worker, the lectures of the doctor, the horde of anti-abortion activists decked out in signs exposing fetuses and my own look in the mirror. You must not believe, brought up in the Catholic religion, I felt disgusted. Abortion was legal, but it was still and for many amoral. What a slut I was!
But the worst is not the memory of the noises. Of the act. Of the end.
The most horrible thing is to know that we still and too often believe that women who have abortions are flippant. As cold as a February day.
In the winter of 1998, I did not choose not to give life, I chose not to interrupt mine, so that I could continue to grow so that one day, at the desired time, I would make as many children as I would like.
One could say to oneself, today, that things are simpler, that the procedure is free, that women can decide more easily, but it is an illusion. The cost of abortion is mental and physical. Its price is also social, determined according to the judgment of everyone’s convictions, taxed with an oppressive threat: the dismantling of our freedom to choose.
Let’s keep an eye open to what’s happening in the United States, to prevent the coldness of February from becoming a veritable polar vortex.