Unborn

We’re at some kind of rally. The night before, my mom was using spray paint and old boxes to make signs the night before in our garage, while my sister and I ran through the sprinkler, shrieking. All I know for sure is I’m between 6 and 10 years of age, because my mom is alive and healthy, and we’re living in our second house.

Now, in the crowded parking lot outside a building with a balcony, where a man will soon be giving a speech, she’s clutching each of us with one hand while my dad and Connie (my cousin who after my mom’s death would become a mother figure) carry the signs. 

“He’s the best thing we’ve had since Kennedy,” my mom tells Connie while he’s speaking. “I can’t wait to vote for him.”

I wish I could remember who we went to see, what the signs said. 

“I’m going to try to go meet him,” my dad says after the speech. “I want to find out what he thinks about Cyprus.” 

“You need to go up there and thank him for what he’s already said about Cyprus. That’s the way to do it. Start with that.” 

My father disappears into the crowd. We wait a long time. 

After awhile, the crowd begins to thin. I see a line of people waiting to shake a man’s hand, squint to see where my dad is in line. 

And that’s when I see him–a man with graying hair, short and stocky, wearing a bright red shirt, his face contorted in rage. “Foe to unborn,” his sign reads, and he’s screaming the same words that will be scribbled across my dorm room door over and over in 1992: baby killer. Jesus hater. 

Mostly, people are ignoring him.

 

“What’s he talking about?” I ask my mom, and she gives me a surprisingly matter-of-fact answer. 

“In the United States there’s a way that a woman who gets pregnant by accident but can’t raise a child can choose not to have the child. Some people don’t believe that’s OK.”

“Why wouldn’t it be OK?” I ask.

“Some people think it’s murder. But they don’t understand what it was like before that law was in place. Back then, men could make women do anything they wanted.”

“What does foe mean?” I ask.

“Enemy. Basically, his sign is saying ‘enemy of a baby that isn’t born yet.’” 

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “You can’t be an enemy to someone who doesn’t even exist.”

“Exactly,” says my mom, and then, we all notice at once that my father is walking toward us, smiling widely. 

“He said he agrees with me about Cyprus,” he tells us, triumphant. “He understood me.” This, I realize, is a reference to his accent, thick, foreign–which sometimes makes him invisible. 

But on this day, he has been seen, and he’s beaming, and I forget all about the man, even though he’s moving closer to us now, still shouting and waving his sign.

—

In 1992, I open the door of my single dorm room and walk sleepily toward the bathroom down the hall. I take a shower and hurry back, a towel wrapped around me. It is quiet; I’m the only one on my floor with an 8 a.m. class. When I try to let myself back in my room, holding the towel and my bag of toiletries awkwardly in one hand, the key in the other, in my lock, I see what either hadn’t been there yet or what I hadn’t noticed: my door is covered in photos of fetuses. 

Fetuses. 

I drop my keys, then my toiletries, then the towel. I hurry to pull it back around me.

It goes on for weeks. “Feminazi go home.” “Baby killer.” “Jesus hater.” “Dyke.” Stick figures of two men fucking. 

30 years later, I don’t remember what precipitated this barrage of harassment. I hadn’t yet come out, even to myself–that would happen the following year. But I was active in College Democrats, and it was an election year, and we were all excited about the young, intelligent, and very-unlikely-to-win presidential candidate named Bill Clinton and his very outspoken, pro-choice-with-no-apologies wife named Hillary. We sang their theme song, “I can see clearly now, the rain has gone,”--and we were happy, hopeful. 

I knew the girl across the hall, a College Republican, was letting her friends into our dorm. I even knew who they were, or thought I knew. But it never occurred to me to report it. I just laughed, and left notes on my door like “Proud Feminist” and “How do you know what sex between two men looks like?” and “Women’s bodies matter as much as this fetus’.”

“You need to stop leaving notes like that,” my Thea Katina tells me during a weekend visit. “These kind of people–they can be dangerous.” 

I am shocked. My Thea Katina is the bravest person I know. I had expected her to be proud of me for fighting back. But her lips are pressed together in a crooked line. I turn to my Thea Koula beside her, and she nods, her eyes wide with fear. Connie laughs nervously.

I shake my head. “They don’t scare me,” I tell my aunts. “What could they ever do to me?”

—

Every Saturday on our way to Greek School throughout my childhood, we pass them–a group of people, including kids, holding up signs with what look like baby’s deformed bodies covered in blood, the word “repent” beneath them. It’s such a familiar sight that I barely notice it. 

It isn’t until I’m a teenager that I put it together, realize we’re passing an abortion clinic, and also that Connie’s rolling down the window not to get some fresh air, but to flip them off.

Decades later, on a visit home on the way to a funeral at the church of my childhood, I’ll ask the old friend I’m riding with if the clinic is still there.

“It’s still there, and there are still protesters every Saturday, only they’ve gotten more violent now, and meaner,” she says. “So they took the sign down and let women in through the back door now.” There’s a long pause. “Don’t ask me how I know,” she adds, an afterthought, flicking her cigarette out the window.

—

I don’t remember how the abortion came up. All I remember is my father telling me, nonchalantly, that my mom had one. He was visiting me at college, and we were sitting in Country Kitchen on the edge of town.

Thinking he’s using the wrong word, I correct him. “She had miscarriages and a stillbirth. Not an abortion.” I know the story of how long she tried to get pregnant with me, how much heartache–not from her, but from family and friends who, after her death, pull me close to them and whisper in my ear how happy she was when finally, after so many years, she gave birth to me at 37. 

“No, I meant abortion,” he says. “It was after you and your sister.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because we only wanted two children. We could only afford two.”

I think about the miscarriages, the stillbirth, and wonder–if she’d been able to get pregnant earlier, would they have stopped at two? And if any of those other pregnancies had been carried to term, would I even be here?

I drive to my best friend’s house and cry into her shoulder.

“It doesn’t make any sense to think about it like that,” she says. “She had her reasons. Whatever might have happened or not happened, you were born. It doesn’t change anything about how much she loved you.”

Later, I’ll hear a myriad of versions of the story. 

How the doctor told her she might not live if she tried to carry the pregnancy to term–but she didn’t tell my dad that part because she didn’t want to scare him. (Without the abortion, I might have had her for even less time).

How it was unheard of to have a child at 37 (when she had me) or at 39 (when she had my sister) in the 1970s, how it was a miracle she’d been able to do that at all. She was getting old, losing her ability to run after a toddler. She knew her limits. (But my mom had endless energy. Or did she? What do I actually remember, and what parts are stories I tell myself now that she’s dead?)

How she already knew she had cancer, and she couldn’t possibly carry a baby to term. (This doesn’t add up, because the first time she had cancer, I was in second grade–or was there another time before that, but I just don’t remember or didn’t know)?

How my father’s business was failing at the time and we were in danger of losing everything. This, most likely, was true–I would learn several decades later that around this time, my father, without my mother’s knowledge, burned down his restaurant, making it look like an accident, in a desperate attempt to provide for his family.

Over the years, the version or versions of the story that are true matter less and less. Nobody loved us more than our mother did. Whatever her reasons, I’m certain my sister and I factored into them.

—

We’re sitting around my kitchen table and my high school friends, the Evangelical ones who have taken me to a Friday night gathering that culminates in people “getting saved,” are talking about abortion. 

“I think it’s a women’s choice,” I say, not even sure why I think this, or where I’ve heard it. It’s just been the narrative in the backdrop of my life, much like the assumption that we don’t have guns, we respect people of any religion, and we vote Democratic–always.

They, however, have a different backdrop narrative. “You think it’s OK to murder babies?” my friend responds, gasping. “I mean, really? People make their choices. They shouldn’t have sex if they can’t take care of a baby.”

“And don’t even bring up rape,” the other friend says. “It’s not possible to get pregnant from rape. You can only get pregnant if you’re enjoying it.” 

Everyone except me giggles. 

I feel sick. I go to the bathroom and stay in there, the door locked, for a long time. I heave toward the toilet, but don’t throw up. 

When I come out, they are still talking about it, repeating the facts they’ve learned at home, at church: how the baby’s heartbeat starts a week after conception, how the baby sometimes screams when he’s being aborted.

I go up to my room and lie down on my stomach. The crickets are loud through my open window. I can smell my father’s cigar smoke from the front porch below, wafting up. 

I don’t yet know about my mother’s abortion, but I do know my father will be mad if he hears them. I don’t even really know why. He already doesn’t like him–too American, too blond, too something-that-isn’t-us. 

I start to get nervous: my dad’s rages are sudden, violent. I call for them from the top of the stairs, “Hey, come up here. Let’s hang out in my room.” They come up, giggling again because someone has mentioned sex.

“What are you doing up here?” one of them asks. “What is it?”

But I can’t talk. I lie back down on my stomach, my back to them, while they sit down on my floor, the edge of my bed, asking over and over if I’m OK.

—

I know the girl behind the counter. I know she graduated with my daughter. I know who her parents are and what church she attends. 

I also know she’s not allowed to tell anyone, HIPPA, but I don’t trust her. I almost leave.

But then I think, this is fucked up. Why is this so fucked up? 

I ask for the pill and she gets it for me, sells it to me, not making eye contact. 

In the car on the way home, I laugh at all the things she’s probably thinking. Why does that dyke need the pill? Is she cheating on her wife with a man? Is it still possible for her to have a baby? I laugh, almost become hysterical, because it’s easier for me to think that she’s assuming the pill is for me.

He isn’t well. I know he is capable of hurting her, hurting the baby. 

I know she’s not capable of raising a baby, with him or on her own. I know that the medications she’s on would make it difficult for the baby to be born healthy, and that this would devastate her.

She cries but agrees to take it, agrees that my reasons are sound, opens her mouth. I know we’re doing the right thing, never question it. 

Later, he’ll become convinced I’ve killed his baby. He’ll convince her, too. Even though there never was a baby. Even though there never was a pregnancy. Even though she said she knew it was the right thing to do, just in case.

He’ll come after me, threaten to burn down my house, threaten to rig up my car so it explodes. Then he’ll come after my spouse, then my son. Then he’ll report that I abuse my children, try to get them all taken away. When the police come and my son overhears them questioning me, he’ll put a rope around his neck. If he can’t stay here, what’s the point? He doesn’t want to move again.

And then, finally, she will break up with him. Get a restraining order. My spouse and I do, too. In all three orders he’s not allowed to be anywhere near any of us, or any of our children.

Years later, he’s still posting that I’m a baby killer, baby killer, baby killer.

—

I vaguely know my church is against abortion, but nobody talks about it; in fact, I know many Greek girls who got abortions when I was teenager. 

It’s 1993. I’m in the process of coming out, sorting through my complicated childhood in therapy. 

Church is a place away from all of that. I don’t feel any of the strange confusion that other queer people do–I just know God is love, and that I can be present to the scent of incense, the taste of wine and bread, without worrying about the rest of it, and feel at peace.

One Sunday, though, the priest–a convert to Greek Orthodoxy–randomly decides to give a sermon about abortion. 

Just like my high school friends, he begins to describe the procedure, in detail, using many of the same scripted sentences my friends repeated around my kitchen table 10 years earlier.

I get up and walk out. I go into the church bathroom–where I first learned how to apply make up, where I got ready for countless Greek Independence Day plays, where I locked myself in a stall and wept after my mother’s funeral, where I got drunk for the first time at a church dance–and throw up. 

—

During my last year in college, the College Democrats and other organizations joined together to bring the woman who was Jane Roe in the Roe v. Wade case to campus. She had just released a book called I Am Roe. 

After she spoke, I stood in line to get my book signed. I told her about passing those protesters Sunday after Sunday, and how Connie used to flip them off. She laughed and signed a book for Connie, and a book for me.

Outside the doors, the College Republicans and the Evangelicals were standing in small half circle, smiling widely, with signs about Jesus’ love. No bloody fetuses. Nothing mean at all. I wave at a couple of them, whom I know from my classes.

But later that night, there will be a baby doll covered in ketchup waiting outside my door when I get home. By now, I’m living in an apartment off campus, and I can’t figure out how anyone got into the building, or even knew where I lived. 

I pick up the doll and take it out to the dumpster and throw it away. Then I realize I locked myself out of the building and get spooked. What if whoever did this is waiting somewhere with a knife? I bang and bang on the door until a drunk college student from another apartment lets me in, calling me a “loud bitch” and laughing. 

“Fuck you!” I yell back at him.

He shakes his head. “Crazy bitch,” he said, and his friends laugh, and he disappears again behind his closed door.

I never tell anyone, not even my roommate. (I came home because I had an exam the next day, while she and our other friends went out).

I don’t study for the exam. Instead, I take a long, hot shower, letting the water run until it runs cold, and go to bed.  

—

In college, being pro choice was part of my identity. But over the years, it became less important, no longer one of my top issues. 

For one thing, I came out, and for a long time, all of my activism was focused on my queer identity.

Then I adopted a teenager with trauma, mental health issues, other disabilities (and later, with my spouse, four more). I wanted my kids to be safe in our community, to have the support they needed. I met with local and state officials about racism, about educational equity, about the need for more support for queer kids and kids of color, about our broken mental health system.

Oh, and I had the audicity to want to get married and make a life as a queer family in rural MN, and fought like hell for that right, too. 

I’m still doing all of these things. Why, suddenly, am I writing in past tense? 

Because ever since yesterday, when my phone beeped and I absentmindedly glanced down at the headline–Roe Overturned–everything seems like past tense. Everything.

—

For my adopted kids, abortion is a fraught topic. They all know that unwanted pregnancy means them. They could have been the unborn. Sometimes, they tell me, when things are really hard, they wish they were. “I want to be unborn,” one of them says whenever he’s angry. “I should be unborn.” 

They know they could have been the unborn in the same way that I knew I could have been if the earlier pregnancies hadn’t ended in the most horrific grief. My second oldest was a teenage mom who was forced to have her child–forced. But now, she’s vehemently pro-life, because he’s here, and to think about his life in any other way except in the I-love-him-with-my-life way is too scary, too complicated. 

I love them all fiercely. I’m so glad they were born. And, I’m so sorry for the horrific trauma they experienced before they came to us. 

So, somewhere along the way, the abortion issue got too complicated to talk about. I stopped tracking it. At end of year giving, I gave to just about every liberal organization except the pro-choice ones. 

But why? 

Because my mother had already fought that battle, and won it, right? Any state laws couldn’t change the fact that in America, you can get an abortion. Full stop. Or so I thought.

Because I couldn’t even count the number of friends and students whom I’d helped through abortions, and once they’d made their decisions, it was always possible for them to get one. Never mind that I live in Minnesota. Never mind that I and most of my friends are at least middle class, with good insurance. Never mind that for every other issue, I could see the nuances, how inequality makes access more difficult. But it was easier, maybe, to turn a blind eye.

Because I wanted to get married.

Because other issues were easier to talk to my children about. 

Because the likelihood of finding myself in a situation where I would be carrying a baby I didn’t want was–well, unlikely. (Of course, I now know that the kitchen table wisdom of my evangelical friends was wrong–yes, you can get pregnant from a rape. Yes, there have been times in my life, plenty of times, when it would have been possible for someone to rape me. If you are a woman, it’s the luck of the draw: some of us get raped, some of us don’t).

Because it didn’t happen. It hasn’t happened. 

Because somehow, somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like my issue, or even an issue.

—

I show up at my student’s doorsteps with a morning after pill because she was raped the night before, and she called me, and asked me, and so of course, I help her.

Thank you, she says to me, taking the bag I hand her, her eyes puffy. 

Do you want to talk? I ask.

No, no. This is all I needed. For now. Well, this and an excuse to get out of my classes for the week. So I can think.

I promise her I’ll make that happen, then drive away. 

My heart aches for her. I am young and single and lots of students ask me for this kind of help–rides or advice or someone to talk to or whatever they need. On this day, it all of the sudden feels like too much, and I drive past my house and keep driving into the prairie, weeping because it isn’t fair, isn’t right, that this has happened.

It never occurred to me, not once, to feel grateful that I could get her the pill she needed. It was a no brainer, the easiest thing in the world–especially then, when I didn’t know anyone at the pharmacy in town and nobody knew me.

—

In a letter from a long lost friend: Remember the time years ago when you took me to the clinic and waited until it was over and bought me ice cream and told me I would be a good mother someday, but I was right to know this wasn’t the time? Well, I am having a baby in three weeks. Three weeks. I wish you lived closer so you could meet her, because you were right. That wasn’t the time, but this is. I don’t know why I had to write you, but I did.

The thing is, I don’t even remember this. 

The thing is, it never occurred to me when I got that letter 15 years ago that some day, in some states, it would become a crime to do what I don’t even remember doing. I’m sure it never occurred to me when we took that drive that there would be any reason for me to remember it 35 years later. 

—

Back then, my mother had told me, when I was maybe six, maybe 10, men could make women do anything they wanted.

This is what I remember: she was wearing a blue dress with a black belt. She was holding my sister’s hand with one hand, and a sign she'd painted the night before with the other, with words I don’t recall. 

It was maybe three years since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land, or maybe seven.

Back then, men could make women do anything they wanted, she had said, as if “back then” was centuries rather than years ago.

Her face, when she said this, was furious, and luminous, triumphant. 

Is it my imagination, or did she say it loudly, hoping the angry man with the sign I’d asked about would hear?

Back then, men could make women do anything they wanted.

This is what I remember. We were outside. The sun was bright. My father, who was unpredictable though not yet violent, who listened to her, who loved her, reappeared then, looking so, so happy. He understood me, he said. 

As we walked back toward the car, I pointed silently toward the man, who had apparently given up and was walking a little ahead of us with his sign upside down, almost dragging on the ground. 

Connie flipped him off, and my mom whispered, with a smirk, “Be careful. Those people are crazy.”

Back then, men could make women do anything they wanted.

I didn’t know what she meant, though, until they did the worst thing of all, until they overturned the federal law that granted women the right to choose, paved the way to overturn everything else, too. 

I don’t know what to do now besides donate money and show up for the marches and dialogues and offer these stories I’ve never told. Because we have to tell them, even if we are afraid, don’t we? Or else they will control the story. 

Or else, right now, men will be able to make women do anything they want.