Bad Abortion
Long story long, my abortion was bad vibes and I’m allowed to be mad about it.
This abortion was my third, and my absolute worst. My previous experiences of abortion were vacuum aspirations, in which one was more pleasant than the other, but both quick and easy. This time around, I didn’t want to spend twice as much money on getting a vacuum aspiration procedure in addition to the stress of scheduling an external appointment. I remember thinking about the stories I’ve heard about the abortion pill. In my community and in firsthand accounts I’ve heard, their stories have mentioned the simplicity of the pill. I remember hearing specifically that the cramps feel “like period cramps” as a constant narrative in different spaces, advocacy language, and online forums. When I finally had my telehealth appointment, the doctor also mentioned that there would be cramping but the ibuprofen and Zofran should help ease me through the pain and nausea, and that overall, it should be similar to heightened period pain. None of this was true for me.
I remember there was a snow day that shut down my local area on the day I was supposed to pick up the medication bundle from the clinic. I had to immediately call and request that they mail the meds to me so that I could have my abortion before my best friend’s wedding. I took the mifepristone the night before and prepared for the next day when I would take the misoprostol. The night of my abortion, I was calm and ready. Because of the storm, I couldn’t be with my partner but thankfully, my mom was home with me. I told everyone what I was doing each step of the way, and I was supported the whole time. Leading up to the final stage, the misoprostol, I read the directions again. The doctor and the bottle both said to take the pills buccally and to let them dissolve for a full thirty minutes in the sides of my cheeks.
I sat on the phone with my partner in my period underwear with a towel and prepared myself. I ate my favorite cookies with my favorite ginger ale, and turned on one of my favorite “I have zero capacity” background shows – Degrassi: Next Generation. I verbally processed my concerns about the pain to my partner but continued to convince myself that because this is such a common method for abortion, there’s no way it’ll be worse than a difficult period – especially because I still hadn’t heard a traumatic abortion pill story yet. So I continued to kiki and discuss anything else to take my mind off of it.
The most difficult part about this phase of the abortion is that you cannot drink any water, and you can’t swallow hard so as to not disturb the pills from dissolving properly. My mouth was dry as hell, and the pills had a mean chalky taste. After thirty minutes, I couldn’t wait to get to my water. But I didn’t realize that one of the pills didn’t dissolve all the way, and the littlest bit of the pill accidentally went down my throat while drinking my water. It burned like hell. And I mean BURNED. Like the back of my tongue and throat were scorched with hot food and a bad cold. It was so uncomfortable that I couldn’t unfeel the burning anytime I swallowed. And this was only the beginning of the chaos.
An hour and a half later, I felt like someone was kicking me in my pussy and I needed to empty my bowels all at once. It took me another hour of pain later to realize, “Holy shit… this is fucking labor.” Years in the game, as someone who’s never had a full term pregnancy, I never realized that the abortion pill was expediting labor, and therefore, a miscarriage. Which just goes to show, you can agree with political access and reproductive justice and not always know the actual inner workings of medical care for wanted and unwanted pregnancy. But this shit was hell! I sat there so angry asking myself, “Why would anyone choose this?” The vacuum aspiration is easy peasy even when it hurts; it’s over quickfast and there is no concern of incompletion. As the time passes, I realize that I have made a grave mistake in not paying the additional money for the quicker option because WTF, why was I willingly sitting through labor for hours?
Pain continued to build and I realized that I was not feeling any relief. As I sat in my bed in excruciating pain, holding onto my nightstand for dear life, I found myself crying so hard I threw up. Mind you, this is also between frequent rounds of being on the toilet with small bouts of diarrhea or the urge to push. I thought the pain was making me delirious, but through the sweat and blood, I realized I was extremely itchy – voraciously itchy. I started scratching on my butt, my back, my arms, my legs, and my chest. Slowly, as my vision blurred, I realized I couldn’t breathe the same. I began sneezing and large amounts of snot came running out of my nose. I became really stuffy very quickly, all while I was itching everywhere. I found it difficult to figure out what was happening to me versus what might have seemed exacerbated because I couldn’t think straight through the labor pain. As my symptoms of a (now obvious) allergic reaction continued while my body was in labor, my throat began to close up and I was struggling to breathe, and only by the grace of happenstance, I threw up everything in my stomach and opened my throat just enough to not suffocate.
I was screaming and crying and scared. I tried calling for my mom but I couldn’t talk because of the pain in my throat. I texted her to come, and when she came downstairs, she told me my face was swollen and she was deeply concerned. My mom suggested I go to the ER or call an ambulance, but I didn’t want to risk Covid exposure from unmasked healthcare professionals or experience any criminalization of my body. I needed tea or something hot to open my throat more, because the swelling, the residual mucus (so gross), and the soreness from the pills from earlier made it so hard for me to swallow or talk normally. I stopped itching, but my throat and airways were still really impacted. My mom kindly made me some so I could try to ease my throat. Painfully, I drank the tea and took two more 800mg ibuprofen with my mom on speed dial just in case she needed to come back into the room.
I wanted to sleep through the pain and wake up when it was over, but I kept waking up every 20-35 minutes screaming in more and more pain. I kept trying to sleep through it, and while I got a few spells of rest here and there, I still woke up in pain for the next two hours. I thought I was dying. Although nothing was worse than the allergic reaction that literally almost asphyxiated me, this entire experience was the most physically painful experience of my life. Eventually, after hours of turmoil and chaos, I fell asleep in completely blood-soaked underwear, a half-stained shirt from my puke, and my heavy head propped up to the side so I could breathe enough through my sore swollen airway.
The next day, I woke up around 5 a.m. feeling like a new person but shackled to the memory of what I survived. I sounded like myself again – my nose wasn’t stuffy anymore and I could breathe somewhat regularly. The labor pain was finally over and so were my pregnancy symptoms. I was alive and no longer pregnant. And looking back at it now, I can honestly say that was one of the worst nights of my life that I never want to relive.
To be clear, I am deeply pro-abortion. In the past, I have written and shared my story on my two abortions for two extremely different circumstances of pregnancy that were transformational for my life and my future. None of that has changed. But I was so traumatized by this recent experience for multiple reasons. I felt like I was going to die, I might’ve died, and I experienced such a heightened level of pain for hours that I wince every time I remember it. I wish we lived in a world where I wouldn’t fear for my safety and health by calling for help outside of my mother. Every time I recount the details more and more, I remember that I never want to experience that shit again.
I felt like I couldn’t share my experience because I feared that my story could be used to advocate against abortion access and against medical abortion. I also hold the tension of what it means to hold the movement’s reputation in my hands, to inherit the burden of silence or strategy…that my experience could create a catalyst for more uncertainty in the cultural landscape of reproductive oppression and body terrorism. But the truth is, I had a very very bad abortion. And nothing about the world or my politic changes that experience for me.
Every abortion is not neutral, amoral, or painless. Abortions should be framed as a utility in the sense that they are medical interventions that have no inherent or homogenous moral implication. But abortions can have psychological and physical impacts that are circumstantial to each person. The desire or need to foreclose abortion as one singular reality is what makes the political narrative of abortion as “either/or” instead of “both/and.” We have to make room for expansive experiences while not giving into the appeal of the “sentimental” narrative that every abortion is tied to the death of personhood, death of a future, death of a performance of bodily or domestic duty, or death of the demand of care.
The dominant narrative of death and abortion being interrelated morally, philosophically, and consequentially is what is maintaining the citation for anti-abortion movements and criminalization of all forms of reproductive care. Abortion, sexuality, partnership, care, family, kinship, bodily modification, and reproductive choices will still hold individual significance that will break the rules of assumed philosophical, moral, and personal neutrality.
“Abortion is easy.” Meh, sometimes…but regardless, abortion should always be accessible and safe. “Abortions are traumatic.” Meh, sometimes…but regardless, abortion should always be accessible and safe. Some people will mourn abortions because that’s their experience, it’s their story. Some will regret their abortion. Some will experience high levels of pain throughout the abortion process. Some will remember every second of it. Some will only be reminded by receipts or in a moment of brief reremembering. Some will scream about how much it sucked (hi, it’s me). And some will never tell anyone how it betrayed, how it failed expectations, how it left a memory without consent.
Sometimes, our movements rely too heavily on the desire to (re)define abortion in ways that disrupt the centuries-long propaganda of the moral and physical impacts of abortion. And while this makes sense in essence, it becomes interwoven with the erasure of individual interpretation which is an extension of the fourth principle of reproductive justice – the right to bodily autonomy. The grammar of abortion is directly correlated to the political war waging of the state’s antiblack terror to maintain ‘family’ as a performance and measure of humanity. Family is a system of oppression, and a structural prison. It maintains dominance, hierarchy, patriarchy, gender, sexuality, bodily capacity/incapacitation, social isolation, capitalism, and whiteness.
The family as a system of oppression and the language used to describe reproductive access absolutely impacts how abortion is criminalized, demonized, and perceived in our societies. The dominant representations and narratives about reproductive decision-making indict the body and lynch agency. The ground on which the battles of abortion are argued and defended hinge upon the family (antiblack capitalism) being maintained and defended. The family is America, and America is family. The war on terror is a war to defend the family as a white supremacist capitalist embodiment that maintains the order of bodily production, gender and sexuality obedience, forced and performed natalism, child-rearing to build more units of family, co-habitation to protect the family from outside influence, and individualism to supplement the family as your only connection to care and resources.
Abolishing the family would actually make abortion more possible, and make room for more experiences to be shared that fail the sentimental narrative.
Should family still be abolished if it means that we have the choice to have a shitty abortion? Absolutely. Should abortion be accessible if it means it might suck? YES.
Our collective brilliance, ancestral experiences, and cultural traditions have shown us that our commitments to end reproductive oppression are always evolving and expanding. I believe that the unacknowledged grief of reproductive experiences can sometimes be smothered, understated, or uninvited due to the overwhelming levels of violence and co-optation lurking for political loopholes and gotcha! traps. I am not the first and I will never be the last of those who absolutely fucking hated a reproductive procedure. But it’s time for more stories to highlight the nuances of personal experience that shape abortion and reproductive care as inconvenient suffering.