By K Tyler

At the time of writing this essay, Politico has obtained a draft of the majority opinion from the Supreme Court calling to strike down Roe v Wade, which gave child-bearing individuals the constitutional right to abortion access up to twenty-three weeks, thus outlawing abortion in thirteen states and counting. Let the record show that people with a uterus will always get abortions. Changing the law won’t change this, but it does change one thing: how safe abortion is.

For my twenty-fourth birthday, I got pregnant. 

I’ve always wanted to be a mom. I’ve pictured myself with a round belly and long wild hair, radiating the same energy as a pregnant Birth of Venus. My fiancé would be there too, rubbing shea butter on my stomach. I’d be on the couch with him while we picked baby names for girls, hoping for a daughter; there would be a few backup names for boys, just in case. 

I wasn’t ready to be a mom, though, at twenty-four. 

I was up to my ears in bills. Actively working to pay off as much debt as I could before I started planning my wedding, aggressively paying down my credit card, keeping up with rent and the rising cost of gasoline prices. Groceries were suddenly a luxury at big brand stores. Memories of following my mother around every grocery store in town to find the best prices were refreshed as I did the same thing by myself. 

In this space and time, I would be inviting a life into the world that I was in no position to take care of, trapped in the shrinking American middle-class to a mother with no health insurance.  

Chicago is in a blue state. I know where all the Planned Parenthood locations are from the various times that I’d been on birth control in years past. I remember the vitriol in the faces of God-fearing Christians when I’d go into one of the downtown locations. They’d tell me I was murdering my baby when really, I was just getting my next birth control injection. I would never kill my baby, I had thought at the time; being a mother is the one thing I want to be. 

There I was, though, freshly twenty-four and not even a week into the new year, I was pregnant. I didn’t want to be. I felt too much like a child; I had too much to finish before I was ready to grow up in that way. 

I chose to rip the band-aid off. I had an abortion. 

I made an appointment and pretended that I wasn’t growing something inside me. I called it a parasite and cursed the ferocious hunger within to cancel the appointment and grow up quicker. Becoming attached to the cluster of cells was futile, though. It wasn’t our time yet. 

I took a small handful of pills (one mifepristone and then four misoprostol) about three-and-a-half weeks after making the appointment, and I terminated my pregnancy in the confines of my home, a place in which I could mourn my dreams of motherhood, where I could split open at the seams with sobs without the judgement of those that demand I be sent to Hell. I wrapped myself up in my blanket, becoming my own womb, and I made peace with the fact that for the first time in my life I made a choice that I regretted even though it made my life unimaginably easier. 

I terminated an unwanted pregnancy, not a living and breathing self-sustaining life.

Sex Ed in America teaches you this: use condoms. If you don’t, you get pregnant. If you get pregnant, you become a parent and you live happily ever after with your new family. It doesn’t matter if you’re twenty-four or twelve. You are a mother now. And if you can’t take care of it, there are so many people looking to adopt (unless, of course, your baby is disabled, deformed, or another ‘disqualifier’).  

I can be heartbroken over the choice I had to make, but still be pro-choice. 

If I were to get pregnant again a week from now, and I still wasn’t ready, I would make the same decision. I can mourn and still do what is best for me and my body. I will be a mother when I want to be a mother – when I am ready to be a mother. I wish anyone with the ability to get pregnant the same right. 

When I was twenty-four, I got pregnant. If I were in Kentucky or Texas or Idaho or Mississippi or Arkansas, I would be twenty-three-and-a-half weeks in the family way right now with a baby I didn’t want, thinking about a life I could no longer have.