Young and Twenty

Judith Skillman

*Content Warning

I should have taken up my mother’s offer.

“Should we see Dr. Brew?” she had asked upon learning the news. Dr. Brew was her OB/Gyn. My mother is liberal. A PhD, a superwoman, a magnificent role model, despite the fact that I had some issues with her rather dispassionate mothering style. But I was twenty. I wanted to do things my way. Her doctor didn’t appeal to me.

“No, Mom. I’ll take care of it.”

My boyfriend at the time drove me. It could have been his baby, or it could have been another’s. I did not know who the father was. It could have been man A or man B. I was twenty, and didn’t want to have a baby while a junior in college. Nor did I want to raise a child alone and sacrifice college. And I certainly didn’t want to give up the chance of having a full life, one with a career and family.

What did I know? Not a whole lot, but in my gut there was a voice that repeated over and over during that infinitely slow three weeks between learning I was pregnant, and deciding to get an abortion: You can’t do this. You are not sure who the father is.

At Planned Parenthood, I filled out the paperwork and sat in a room with other women who would also be getting abortions. There were maybe ten of us. They explained in detail what would happen. Then the person who led the presentation offered each one of us a valium. I was in what would be a twenty year-long anti-pill phase. I refused. It turned out, however, that once I was on the table and my cervix was being dilated, the pain was excruciating.

It gets worse. I have a heart-shaped uterus. The doctor doing the machine-facilitated suck-out of the fetus—that is, the baby in utero—had to scrape everything with a knife. I had a D&C, dilation and curettage, a procedure no one should be awake for—

To his credit, the doctor saved my life. There would have been an infection had he not gotten every little bit of baby and placenta out of my womb. He tried to explain this in what seemed a Spanish accent. I was in too much pain to listen. I recall a woman—perhaps she acted as the nurse at Planned Parenthood—held my hand. She reminded me of an auntie with her unreserved sympathy for what was happening in that moment. I held on to her hand tightly. I still carry a lot of warmth for her caring presence.

Then it was done, and she began to help me up; I almost passed out. She put some smelling salts under my nose, and that brought me around. I recall being taken to another room, the recovery area. There all of us, young girls who had had abortions, were given drinks and crackers. We rested in padded chairs. But I felt shaken up and didn’t share in what seemed to be a collective sense of relief.

My mother recently told me she never knew what had happened after I was returned home by the boyfriend who is my husband now. I remember stifling tears upon entering my original family’s house. I just wanted to get into bed and be alone. I was not prepared for the hormonal plummet. No one mentioned it at the clinic.

Pregnancy creates hormones that make you feel immortal, happy, and quite simply, very good. To suddenly not be pregnant anymore, well, I was plunged into a very deep depression. I cried for days. I wanted to die.

At the time, I blamed myself for all of it: getting pregnant, having an abortion, having a heart-shaped uterus, and not knowing about the abnormality beforehand. I blamed myself for all of the suffering. There are so many side effects that remain taboo. The side effects of having an abortion remain removed from the locus of the simple human need for understanding and attunement. It is forbidden to even mention, much less, discuss them.

This is another tragedy. Because for a woman, there is not only the emotional and psychological difficulty of making such an excruciating decision. The woman who has chosen not to bear a child, has before her the task of healing. Offering herself forgiveness. And, in my case (I can’t speak for others), of dealing with a lot of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Some two years later I returned to the University of Maryland clinic, where they’d told me I was pregnant. I was pregnant again. They seemed to remember. Someone, perhaps the person who delivered the results of the test (this was before home pregnancy tests; many years have elapsed) was worried about how I would take the news. I was thrilled. Because I was married and wanted a baby. I had no idea what having a child meant in the big picture, but I’d had a dose of those pregnancy hormones.

Nine months later, my husband and I had our first child. A daughter proclaimed, “the most beautiful infant I’ve ever seen,” by Dr. Sweet, the doctor who delivered her. She is the most beautiful daughter in the world, and forty-four years later, remains so.