Abortion stigma robs us of the true right to choose

“Mom, I think I might be pregnant.”

I called my mother in a frenzy after overhearing two coworkers at my waitressing job discussing how antibiotics make birth control pills ineffective, a critical fact the doctor at the college clinic who treated me for strep throat a few weeks earlier failed to mention. The prospect of pregnancy terrified me. I was a junior in college, fixated on going to law school, and in the throes of an emotionally unstable relationship.

I wish I could say the conscientious student I was translated into a thoughtful patient, scrupulously reading the information booklet accompanying her prescription. But in reality, I didn’t read anything beyond the label. That seemed like all I needed to know about the bottle of mystery pills I trusted to remedy my inconvenient bacterial infection. It never occurred to me they could cause any side effects, let alone pregnancy.

Unplanned pregnancies weren’t supposed to happen to girls like me. At the time, I believed they were a cruel, unfair result of rape, or a painful consequence of consensual sex for those who didn’t take proper precautions. I, on the other hand, was devoted to taking my birth control daily, and considered my ovaries impenetrable to sperm. Clearly, I was not particularly well-informed on the complexities of the issue.

When I broke the news to my boyfriend, he was eerily calm, reassuring me that if my period didn’t come, we’d be OK. I appreciated his sentiments, but a potential pregnancy seemed anything but “OK.” Pregnancy mortified me not just because of the prospect of compulsory maternity and motherhood, but because it meant doing so with a guy I didn’t get along with a solid 50% of the time. How could we be “OK” as parents when we weren’t OK as a couple?

“The family curse,” I thought. The curse of babies by accident that plagued two generations of women before me might now be my destiny too. My mother and grandmother both became pregnant as young unmarried women, my mother with me and her mother with her. My mother’s pregnancy meant dropping out of college, only to return years later while working a full-time job.

I would wake up in the middle of the night to see her shadowy silhouette, slightly illuminated by the light of a small table lamp, poring over yellow legal pads and vigorously highlighting textbooks. Although I credit this image with inspiring my work ethic, it wasn’t what I wanted for myself, and I knew it wasn’t what she wanted for me either. If being pregnant was my destiny, my future felt forced.

The matter of “choice” had always been no matter at all to me. Reproductive rights were central to my feminism, and I’d been fiercely feminist since the day I learned the meaning of the term. But with my dreams dangling on a thin plastic pee stick displaying one line or two, I realized the “right to choose” was a right I reserved for every woman but myself. For me, pregnancy was a prison that carried a life sentence, a sentence I was already serving within the confines of my mind — a sentence that could only end with a period.

I always knew abortion was a human right, but I was taught it was meant to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Safe and legal, sure, but what was meant by “rare”? Rare made it sound like abortion was only warranted in the most extreme cases, as if it’s otherwise so immoral that it’s only justifiable if the pregnant person is a child bride or sexual violence survivor. Former South Dakota state senator Bill Napoli described a justifiable scenario for abortion this way:

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated.

This kind of extreme anti-choice rhetoric went less to my head than my heart. My head knew it was political propaganda, but my heart couldn’t help but wonder.

Choosing abortion ran counter to much of the cultural socialization that cultivated the pleasing, perfectionist young woman into which I’d grown. I was taught that women are supposed to put everyone’s needs before their own, fading into fabric woven for lives that aren’t theirs. That is, of course, if they are “good women.” “Bad women” prioritize themselves, place their dreams above their biological and biblical destinies, reject traditional gendered dogma, and lean into roles as socially subversive “rebel women.”

The secret patriarchy doesn’t want us to know is that rebel women often live fuller lives — the kind of lives men take for granted. Rebel women are free. Good women live in shadows, shackled by lies in the face of liberating truth.

The choice that turned my stomach for days, and kept me awake — tossing and turning in my dormitory bed at night — is one I ultimately didn’t have to make. My period came, and I was suddenly free from the pregnancy nightmare I’d been living, fading it from palpable fear to a foregone figment of my memory. The blood I shed that month was not the typical menstrual aggravation I’d always loathed and detested; it was a baptism, a rebirth, a second chance. It was my salvation when I wouldn’t save myself.

In reflecting on how close I came to a pregnancy dilemma that could have cost me my dreams, I can’t help but wish I’d known better. I wish I’d grown up hearing more voices — louder voices, stronger voices — affirming that abortion wasn’t just a right available to me, but a right that was “OK” for me. I wish I’d been more empowered to claim myself over conception. I wish anti-choice rhetoric and moralizing hadn’t so clouded my conscience that my own happiness and future seemed inadequate justification for my “choice.”

With a conservative-leaning Supreme Court just months away from deciding a case that could once again outlaw abortion in the United States, destigmatizing abortion is one of the most mandatory, radical acts we can perform to preserve our reproductive rights. No one should be shamed or silenced for claiming their freedom, or future, through “choice.” Forty-five percent of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended; how many more of those confronted by unplanned pregnancies will be compelled to martyr themselves — their happiness, dreams, and spirit — to succumb to stigma? Until we create a cultural climate where abortion is no longer a dirty word or deep dark secret, the “right to choose” will never be, truly, ours.

Abortion isn’t politics; it isn’t religion. Abortion is humanity. It is a question of “choosing life.” The life I was choosing for myself was almost on the line. And abortion would have saved it.