EMILY’S ABORTION
It’s funny how life sometimes is exactly like TV. The missed period ignored because you’re not that regular anyway. The tiredness and soreness, explained by working hard and partying harder. But then you’re in the midst of ringing up a sale and you have to abandon the register before you fill the cash drawer with vomit. And there you are, having an out-of-body experience in the Westfield dunnies. Look at her, this smart girl who’s done something so stupid. Look at her, not even able to realise her predicament in any kind of interesting way. Dumb, embarrassing cliché, from the bile dripping down her chin to the dramatic clutching of her terrifyingly inhabited middle.
Unlike any of the women I’ve seen spewing their way into pregnancy awareness on a screen, I do not have one second of doubt about what to do. The only TV character I identify with right now is the trapped wolf in a nature documentary I watched when I was too drunk to sleep one night last month. The wolf that chewed off its own leg to escape the steel claw. I think of the bare, jagged bone stabbing the snow. The way the wolf whimpered but didn’t hesitate, kept moving.
As my school friend’s mum once told me I should be, I am grateful abortion is (sort of) legal and that organising it is, with the help of the Yellow Pages, a shopping centre phone booth and a pocket full of change, simple enough. But I know that I’d do it anyway, anyhow. I would, if it came to it, die trying.
Like Cindy, I don’t want to talk to my mother. Unlike her, I don’t talk to a friend’s mum, either. Or anyone older than me. I know I should have been more adult than to have got into this situation. I cannot let the real adults know of my mistake.
On the day of my appointment my boyfriend and I call in sick to work and he drives me to the clinic in an old, fancy-looking house in a leafy, rich neighbourhood. At the front door, I
This is an edited extract from Choice Words: A Collection Of Writing
About Abortion, edited by Louise Swinn ($29.99 Allen & Unwin), out now
identify myself to an intercom and though I am buzzed in without fuss, the presence of the security camera makes me think about the explosion in 21 Jump Street and start shaking.
I am forced to speak to a counsellor before anything else can happen. I don’t know if this is because I’m shaking a lot or if it’s normal procedure. I tell the woman across from me that I already know everything she’s going to say and I’d like to get right to the surgery. As I’m saying it I remember that Andrea said something exactly like this to her pre-abortion counsellor, but they made her wait, and her douche boyfriend got in her head and now she’s bloody marrying him. I tell the counsellor that if I don’t get the abortion today I will resort to measures I’ve read about in old books. She tells me that won’t be necessary, I’m all ready to go in.
We’ve had a hard time coming up with the money and so I am getting the cheaper procedure. The nurse checks that I understand that I will be awake throughout, that the anaesthetic will be local, that I may experience discomfort or even a bit of pain. Yes, I say, I know. I know how it’ll be.
Why did I think that? Given that the abortions I’d seen and read about were illegal ones performed by misogynist, punishing butchers and the fictional ones that weren’t that, the ones that were, like mine, legal(ish) and performed by kind, gentle medical professionals had never been shown at all? Why did I think I knew anything at all about how it would be?
I didn’t know you could be in this much pain and still conscious. I use all of my courage and energy to ask if something is wrong. Everything’s fine. I ask if I can have more anaesthetic and someone tells me it’s nearly over. I sob. It’ll hurt less if you
relax, they say, which is what everyone said about first-time sex. I flash back to the wolf, her mouth dripping with blood and bits of her own leg and think, bitch you have no fucking idea.
At least, I think later in the recovery room, I didn’t have a doctor like Nora’s. At least when I said it hurts I was only told to relax and not to stop that noise. I wasn’t told that I deserved the pain, that I made him sick and had no decency. Poor Nora.
I know she isn’t real, but she and the other made-up foetus-expellers are all I have. I am the only person I know who has been through this.
In the weeks following I amend the thought: I am the only person I know that
I know that has been through this. I realise that when it comes to abortion I have never stopped being the headmaster from
The Facts Of Life. Even when I was Annie, my inner Mr Parker insisted that girls who had abortions could be easily identified. I was sure that what I’d done must be written all over my face. I was sure, when people talked about abortion in the abstract, that they were talking to me, personally.
Who else felt the same way, I wonder? How many of us are sure of our uniqueness in having knowledge about which we could not speak?