Emily Parzybok
AN EASIER STORY

Around the time I had an abortion, the bathroom drain gave up entirely. For months, the drain had been slow-moving. I’d find myself in an inch of water at the end of a shower, shaking my feet as I placed them one at a time on the bathmat. Finally, it stopped draining altogether. A ninety-second rinse left a pool in the tub that took hours to clear. In the TV show Russian Doll, a character says, “Nothing in this life is easy. Except peeing in the shower.” And I kept remembering that line as I held my insistent bladder under the hot water and thought about whether or not to stay pregnant.

I found out I was pregnant on a Thursday morning. The faint double lines confirmed what my body already knew. It was my first pregnancy. It had been the first time I’d ever had questionably safe sex and thought, “I don’t need to take the morning-after pill. It will be fine.” In the weeks that followed, I began to feel alienated in my own body, as if it didn’t belong to me. My breasts swelled and disgusted me. I felt the way I once had during puberty when my breasts became embarrassing. The whole thing felt like a betrayal. My body began to unfold a story I hadn’t co-written. My digestive system ground to a halt and my breasts ached enough to keep me up nights. I desperately wanted to exit my body.

Less than ten minutes after the positive pregnancy test, I called Planned Parenthood to make an appointment for an abortion. They told me their next opening was in three weeks. The thought of letting errant hormones in my body grow exponentially made me physically sick. I called another clinic to schedule a medical abortion the following day. I’m fortunate; I live in a city with multiple places to receive care. I wasn’t sure if abortion was the right choice when I tried to logic it out, but my body screamed to be free of the pregnancy.

At the abortion clinic, I sat in the initial waiting room. I’ve sometimes wondered, in less loaded trips to the clinic waiting for a pap smear or treatment for a yeast infection, which women were waiting for an abortion.

I don’t wonder as I sit this time. It’s me.

In the waiting room, there’s a man working on his laptop. There are several Latina women and another woman translating forms for them. We are not allowed to eat or drink water in deference to those whose procedures prohibit them from drinking and eating. I am thirsty. Two hours after my scheduled appointment time, I am called back by a nurse. She guides me to another, inner waiting room. Inside, I find a Black woman on her cell phone, a woman in a hijab staring straight ahead, and a white woman dressed up in an Anne Taylor blouse and black slacks fiddling in her purse. The room has a television playing a reality TV program about people who win the lottery and use the money to buy their dream house. Simultaneously, a radio plays over the speakers in the ceiling. Both are turned to low volume resulting in a buzz of mostly indistinguishable noise.

Being in that inner room, I feel calm for the first time in days, in company that can’t judge me. There’s no guesswork. We’re all here for an abortion. We’ve all been here for hours. Between forays into our phones, we collectively gasp at the price of a six-bedroom home in Tennessee. Slowly, tepidly, we begin conversation. The 300,000 dollars wouldn’t buy a lot, let alone the house on it, here in Seattle. One woman has recently moved back in with her parents. A stylish Black woman enters the room and we marvel aloud at the way she’s managed to put an outfit together for the occasion. Most of us are in sweatpants but she has on designer shoes and a neon jacket. I’m wearing an oversize sweater with rabbits on it. The stylish woman is visiting from Chicago, taking her art show on tour. I immediately like her because she makes a face when another woman in the room talks about driving forty minutes every evening to make her boyfriend lunch for his job the next day. The artist doesn’t have time for that bullshit or the way my city is built around the desires of white men in outdoor gear. She hates the boutique breweries for people who own dogs and the lack of public transit. Says she could never move here. She’s funny. If she wrote critiques of the cities she visits, I’d read her blog.

It feels good to think about white dudes drinking heavily-hopped beers with their dogs because all I’ve thought about for days is the space between my navel and pubic bone and the way it would feel to press the tip of a knife into that soft skin. I’m afraid of blood, so I don’t picture piercing, just a pressure from without to ease the pressure within. It’s not unlike the relief of throwing up food you wish you hadn’t eaten.

When I’m finally on an exam table, four hours into my appointment, the technician tells me she can’t find a pregnancy in my uterus on her screen. She tries an intravaginal ultrasound instead. I go numb while she penetrates me. Still nothing. It’s early pregnancy. Maybe it’s just not showing up yet. The doctor I consult with tells me it could be that I’m simply not far along enough to detect. Or the pregnancy could be ectopic, growing outside of my uterus. She doubts it; ectopic pregnancies are rare. She tells me I can wait a few weeks to figure it out. Or I can go through with a medical abortion today. I swallow the pill.

I didn’t expect the shame I felt upon discovering my pregnancy. I am surrounded by people who are pro-choice. But making the choice myself felt different, like I’d failed somehow. The messages get in whether you subscribe to them or not, a slow seeping of shame. This shame will serve a darker purpose following the death of Roe. It will help to keep quiet the personal tragedies that unfold in the wake of the decision. It will help to silence the women who suffer in its aftermath. Shame and silence have always been co-conspirators in rendering women’s bodies deviant and women’s experiences unmentionable.

I’m consumed by shame and fear as I sit at home waiting to bleed. When I say I’m afraid of blood, what I mean is that I have a deep, unyielding phobia of my own blood. A cut finger leaves me paralyzed on the bathroom floor, my fingers curled into claws as I vomit. Having my blood drawn results in such severe panic that my body goes into shock and it takes me hours to leave the hospital. While my period has never bothered me, the warning from the nurses that I may bleed severely enough to require hospitalization does. I sit silently on the couch in panic that night. But, as dark falls and through the days that follow, I never bleed. And this frightens me too.

When I find out the pregnancy is ectopic two weeks later, I feel a kind of relief despite knowing this news might mean surgery. This is an easier story. In the future, if I want, I can leave out the part where I had a medical abortion altogether. Instead, in this new narrative, I become that saintliest of all creatures: a thwarted would-be mother. Never mind that I don’t particularly want to be a mother. I’m ambivalent enough that, a few years ago, the mere idea of kids started a fracture that ended a nearly decade-long relationship with the person I had imagined growing old with. I still sometimes picture our life together or wonder how I could have made it work. When I picture us together, I don’t picture children. The thwarted mother story isn’t true, but it will come in handy when I don’t want to explain myself.

I sense the pregnancy is ectopic before the bloodwork confirms it because of a pinprick of sensation on my right side. Without the abortion care I received, my suspicion might have remained just a hunch. When the clinic calls about my irregular bloodwork, they urge me to go to the emergency room as quickly as possible. Another day of waiting, this time with an IV in my arm under a heated blanket with Al Sharpton on television announcing the conviction of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. Had fear of seeking care or distance to a clinic or a law limiting my options kept me from the abortion clinic, I would have bled out sometime in the weeks that followed.

As I type an update to my friends from the hospital bed, I discover that my phone doesn’t recognize the word “abortion.” Instead, it leaves my misspellings of the word in place. Abortion is an error it doesn’t acknowledge. My phone doesn’t know the word “fuck” either, which makes me wonder if the people who programmed it decided abortion is a similarly dirty word. It’s an erasure that’s part of the larger project of erasure around women’s experiences. Long before iPhones and now through them, the stories of women’s bodily experiences have been told by men. Abortion is largely absent from these tales. I remember vividly the few films I’ve seen that reference it explicitly. It’s a lonely, unmentionable kind of shame.

There are unwanted pregnancies in our inherited mythologies. But they usually appear as a result of rape. While abortion is absent from the familiar stories and archetypes, rape and loss of bodily control for women shows up time and again. We seem to be comfortable enough daylighting the most shameful elements of male behavior. Zeus rapes tens to hundreds of women—some asleep, some his children, some in different animal and human forms. He makes a menagerie of rape and remains all-powerful. One can almost picture him—pressed against an unwilling girl the night of some party, grinding against her or trying to pull off a one-piece bathing suit while her hippocampus records. Someday he will take control of her body—and the bodies of American women at large—in a different way. A menagerie of power.

In Greek myth, there are only three outcomes for a woman after she is raped: pregnancy, transformation, or death. When a woman is raped by a god in Greek myth and becomes pregnant, she births a hero child. She carries within her body redemption for the crime committed against her. Giving birth is a redemptive act, we are subtly instructed to believe. We are not asked to consider whether or not the woman in question wanted to give birth. The redemption in question isn’t for her but for society at large. Her body is sacrificed, first through violation and then as a vessel for the greater good. This narrative hasn’t left us. In Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson puts predators behind bars: a kind of hero’s redemption for a character who was conceived in rape.

Those victims of rape in Greek myth who don’t birth hero children are left with two options. Some choose to abandon their physical form entirely. Female bodies are vulnerable to assault, so some women escape through metamorphosis and live life in another form. After her assault, Daphne becomes a laurel tree. She trades her very humanity for escape.

The final option is death.

Women don’t, in any of these versions, gain mastery over their own bodies.

As I begin to tell my own story to family and friends, it occurs to me that destruction of the self doesn’t only happen through death but through storytelling. Parts of us die in certain tellings. Sometimes we kill parts of ourselves to survive our own stories. Sometimes we substitute a myth for reality. We answer the loss of bodily autonomy with a story of our own that arrives at some semblance of justice. Survivors of rape engage in storytelling. They become mythic. They become victims. Lonely, I look to the canon. Though women have been telling each other their stories for millennia, survivors of abortion don’t have a celebrated myth or story to turn to. There’s precious little echoing in our collective narrative. In place of a chorus, there’s an empty space.

Instead, there’s an endless barrage of subtle reminders that you can’t trust your body. Even the most minute systems are often designed to infantilize day-to-day decision-making. When I realized I was pregnant, I went to a local Walgreens to buy a pregnancy test to confirm. A box with two pregnancy tests costs $13. The tests are kept under lock and key. In order to purchase a test, you have to ring a doorbell that pages the entire store, letting every shopper know that someone needs help with feminine care items. I pushed the button and paged the store four times before someone came while a parade of customers gazed curiously down the aisle. Anyone can buy a $40 bottle of Advil without assistance, but I was required to ask an employee to unlock the $13 pregnancy test and escort me to the counter, holding the test in front of him, so I could be rung up. You are not allowed to walk the test to the counter yourself without an escort; I asked. Throughout the process of deciding to end a pregnancy, I was surprised how often I just wanted to be left alone. That’s another thing about shame: it renders one distrustful of others. It separates you from the herd.

Sitting in the abortion clinic, I did feel the relief I mentioned—a relief to be among women in the same situation as me. But I had another, darker feeling too. This was my first pregnancy. How many of these women had been here before, I wondered. It seems like an innocuous enough curiosity, but it had a sinister underbelly. Which of us was the least bad, I meant. Which of us had made an understandable mistake and which of us just never learn? I don’t like these thoughts, but I own that I had them at my most pained and frightened. When I try to understand why, I can only think that I wanted to be able to still conceive of myself as good. I was reaching for a redeeming story. In a location where everyone is already condemned, I wanted to be the exception to the rule. I forgot, in that moment, that our collective liberation is the only liberation. I forgot that accusing those women to spare myself only reinforces a set-up where any of us are judged at all.

Emily Parzybok is an essayist and political consultant living in Seattle, Washington. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Balance Our Tax Code, advocating for policies like a wealth tax and guaranteed basic income. She has been published in Poetry Northwest and Points in Case, among others. Her work appears in the Uncertain Girls, Uncertain Times anthology, a collection of inspiration and encouragement for young women. She is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at New York University and a 2022 Jack Straw Writing Fellow.

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