Is There Something Missing in Me?

I recently read a comment from a woman who says she just does not regret her abortion at all, and she wonders, rhetorically, I supposed, if there is something wrong with her.

It caught my attention because I have often wondered if there is something wrong with me because I do have such sorrow over the choice I made myself. In this day and age, we are supposed to be comfortable with whatever we do simply because we have done it. I’m okay, you’re okay. Do your own thing, and if it feels good, do it. As long as you are happy, then it’s a good thing. Relative morality – it it’s right for me, then it’s just plain right. We can justify all kinds of immoral and criminal behavior if we believe that right and wrong are in the doing.

True, I had some of the best coercion possible – when your mother drives you to the clinic telling you it’s for your own good and that you have merited the punishment to follow, well...it’s a bit powerful. Sure, parental influence in adolescence only stretches so far. She wasn’t in the room when I chose to have sex and create that child. She made sure that mistake wouldn’t be repeated with the abortion, and personally escorted me. She had no regrets about my abortion. But what about her own?

Years later, when I was in my early twenties, Mom and I had us a conversation over a few dozen beers and a couple of boxes of wine. My goodness, how alcohol loosens the tongue. It was then I learned for the first time about the little brother or sister I had lost when my mother had an abortion. She was a single mother and would certainly have lost her job had she continued the pregnancy. She had to choose between the children who lived with her and needed her financial support, and the child not yet born who would endanger supporting those children. Or did she?

No, she didn’t - not in reality, only in her perception of it. She believed she had difficulties because she believed she was on her own. She made herself that way. She had family to whom she could have turned for help. All she had to do was swallow her pride and go home. This was less acceptable to her. So she went to California, where it was legal at the time, and had an abortion.

Her story came out while we were sitting at the table that night, both of us drunk, when she asked me for the first time to tell her about my abortion. When I told her I had sodium pentothal, she laughed, her mouth and face twisted with bitterness. Tears were in her eyes, but she would not shed them. She stared into the distance, lost in horrifying memories, and told me she had had no anesthesia. “It took two nurses to hold me down, one on each arm. I screamed the entire time. The sound...I’ll never forget the sound.” And when I recall her speaking those words, my memory ends. Recalling the sound – forgedda about it. That’s as far as I can go before denial shuts down my thought processes.

My mind having gone into sleep mode, I don’t remember what else she said about her abortion experience. Part of that is probably due to the revelation she hadn’t intended. I was distracted by the thought that not only did she know what I was going to go through, she thought it was going to be so much worse – and she did it anyway. I was trying desperately to find the motherly love in that, and failing. My abortion was my punishment. I had known it at the time because the baby’s father was forced to go along to the clinic, “to teach him a lesson.” So, of course, I was supposed to learn a lesson too. But this way? Mom, why didn’t you lock me in a closet for two weeks without food and water? Take a belt to me? Use your fists, even? For heaven’s sake, if you wanted me physically punished for getting pregnant, why didn’t you have the guts to do it yourself? Perhaps because those things would have been illegal, but abortion was not?

But why punish the innocent child who had nothing to do with my actions or yours? And this must be where her quite bizarre expression of motherly love comes in, because I do remember some of the conversation that followed about whether or not she had done the right thing by insisting I have an abortion.

Either she had convinced herself that she felt it, or she truly felt at the time that nine months of pregnancy would have derailed my entire life. What bunk. An hour in the abortion clinic derailed my entire life instead. But she desperately wanted me to tell her it was okay. I think she might even have wanted me to thank her. In her own experience, she convinced herself that there were no regrets to be had about either of our abortions. She thought she had done the best thing possible and had even been protecting her children.

The problem is that she was wrong. She was so wrong, and I believe that on some level she knew she was wrong, or she wouldn’t have been looking for validation from me. I can’t answer the commentator I mentioned above because I cannot see her face when she says she has no regrets or sorrow. But I could have answered my mother, who was asking the same question whether she knew it or not, because I saw her expression. It isn’t polite to tell people they are in denial, so I have heard. But denial is what she was in. No one who feels neutral about a subject, or good about it, should look the way she did when she described her choice. I’ve seen that look since then – in the faces of the women who are Silent No More, and in the mirror. Grief-contorted mouths, tear-filled eyes, and deeply furrowed brows say, without words, “Oh, God help me, what have I done?”

She said she had no regrets even as her face belied the words. There are women who will tell you they have no regrets, and who will assign their sorrow to something more ephemeral than a real, living child – “I mourn the perfect child I should have had,” was the comment by a mother who aborted her baby after tests revealed he was defective. But she wouldn’t say she regretted her abortion.

At times, regret takes the form of the “If onlies.” “If only I had already had my career started when the baby was conceived,” or “If only the baby’s father had been there for me,” etc. So it was the child’s fault for choosing a really inconvenient time to be conceived. “Come back later, when I have more time, more money, more love, more of myself to give.”

Sometimes regret takes shape in the plans we make for the future, where we hope to make it right. “Next time I get pregnant, it will be planned and I will have the child.” That’s a good one. Some women get to do that. For others, the perfect moment never arrives, and suddenly, we’re past child-bearing, and “some day” has come and gone.

When our regrets and sorrows stem from our own actions, we often displace or deny these emotions in order to protect ourselves from the fact that who we think we are doesn’t match with what we have done. When we say “yes” to abortion, we say “no” not just to the child who wants to share our lives. We say “no” to selflessness. This is hard to accept about ourselves if we feel we are otherwise good people. I wouldn’t take food from the mouths of children. I think I’m a decent woman. I wouldn’t pass a dog shivering alone and cold in the street without taking action to help. But this image of myself as a compassionate and caring person who loves the young and helpless is not just tarnished, but completely obliterated, by the image of myself on the abortionist’s table failing to cry out with everything I had for him to stop, and let the baby live.

My mother died seven years ago this December. We never had a chance to finish that conversation properly. I simply could not continue discussing it with her, because I could not tell her what she wanted to hear – my life had not been made better. Drs. Burke and Reardon have found that post-abortion sorrow may not be fully realized until years after the fact – sometimes decades. Often there is a life-altering event that brings the abortion into a woman’s mind, and it seems she suddenly discovers grief. It isn’t that she suddenly feels it – she discovers it was there all along, because something has happened to bring it to mind. In my own case, it was my mother’s death. Because she was so wrapped up in it, even directly responsible for refusing to hear of alternatives, when she died, I had to face all of our unresolved conflicts.

Her ghost haunts me in every word I hear from women who say they cannot regret their abortions because if they had not had them, their lives would be too different. I am plagued by my own case of the “if onlies.” If only we could have this conversation today. If only I hadn’t run from her and her cancer, leaving her alone to contemplate her own mortality and robbing us of the chance to talk about death. Perhaps we might have come to the heart of her sorrow, and we would not have parted in this life with so much left unsaid. Her regrets were there, just under the surface where anyone else could see them, but not so close that she could put her own finger on them because she was deliberately pushing them away by thinking them through. It isn’t hard at all to convince ourselves that we are good if we think about it long enough. We know all the facts, so we can find all of the excuses for ourselves. What is hard is acknowledging our own shortcomings and trying to come face to face with the woman in the mirror who has killed her child to further her own interests.

The commentator who is not sorry wonders if there is something missing in her. I wonder how she can be so certain she has no regrets considering how much she wonders, and whether the answer lies in her having asked the question. Go ahead, call me rude if you like, but if you have no regrets, spend a few minutes saying it to yourself in the mirror. Look at your expression as you say out loud, “I killed my child, and I am not sorry,” and try to ascertain if there is more truth than wishing in that statement.