Paper Trail: Dirty Little Secret

I was 15 when my sister asked me to help her find the money to get an abortion. And while she never regretted her decision, it became a part of her life she was scared to discuss. How would people react? Would they hate her, judge her, shun her?

It was with my sister in mind that I started the “I Had an Abortion” project in late 2003 to encourage women to come out about their abortion experiences. The premise was simple: I’d create an awareness campaign, including T-shirts, a documentary film called I Had An Abortion, and eventually this book, to put faces on what has been reduced to a divisive “wedge issue” -- similar to gay marriage. Within a few months hundreds of woman sent me their stories.

Gay people know about being silenced -- and understand the power of visibility and honesty. But those aren’t the only links between gay rights and abortion. Norma McCorvey (i.e., “Jane Roe” of Roe v. Wade) identified as a lesbian for many years, as do many of the 1.21 million women who seek abortions in the United States each year. According to a 1999 University of Washington study, bisexual and lesbian women are about as likely as straight women to have had intercourse with a man. But queer women have a significantly higher prevalence of pregnancy -- due to a variety of issues ranging from a higher chance of rape to lesbians being less likely to be on birth control pills.

Folk singer Ani DiFranco, who has written about abortion in her songs for years, wore an “I Had an Abortion” T-shirt in a photo shoot for Inc. magazine. The dozens of outraged letters sent to the magazine proved that my sister’s fears were true -- many people, even those who call themselves pro-choice, harbor deep feelings about a woman who’s had an abortion. Ani DiFranco's abortion story was excerpted in the October 7 issue of The Advocate.

What follows are the stories of three other women, Dawn Lundy Martin, Jenny Egan, and Marion Banzhaf, which appear with stories by Gloria Steinem, Ani DiFranco, and Barbara Ehrenreich and others' in my book Abortion & Life, photographed by Tara Todras-Whitehill.

Dawn Lundy Martin, born April 8, 1968

I come from a family of secrets, a house of padlocked bedroom doors and virulent privacy. In my childhood bedroom I could smoke cigarettes and pot, make out with girls, and play my music as loud as I wanted -- all of it hidden by the pervasive drift of nag champa. No one in my family ever talked about sex, sexuality, or any topic fluttering about the edges of what my mother might call "decency." There were other secrets too: My father's rather comprehensive drinking and the accompanying violence; my brother's depression; and the several men who circled around the prepubescent me like would-be coyotes after the hunt. Although my parents, I suspect, sought in the manner of silence to create a home that would shield my brother and me from the dangers and dangerous pleasures of the world, we were mostly left to our own devices of discovery when it came to sex.

Perhaps, however, this is not the story I want to tell -- as there is not a singular story of my abortion. There are stories -- multiple -- that lead to that singular event. It could begin with the raced Other, the kid who attended all-white schools in an affluent suburb and never went on a date until senior year; he was black like me and from another high school. It could begin with sixth grade, when girls and boys started making out at school dances and I stood on the raced boundaries of sexual exploration. We all somehow knew that interracial friendships were OK but that interracial kissing would break the tenuous social contract of unspoken segregation.

It seems then that these stories might converge, that the story overarching those stories might be a tale of a girl who is locked outside of the sexual world and eager, too eager, to get inside, to indeed, be free of decency and discipline.

The summer of my junior year in college I got pregnant by a boy I met at a bar. We had a short love affair, and one night we fucked on a deserted hillside. It started to rain. Hard. Something about the rain and the wet ground in summer and a boy's nylon body felt magical like everything in the universe lining up just right. It was a week before my period was to come, but I wasn't really keeping track. We did not use a condom. I was not on the pill. I, too, was a secret keeper, and obtaining birth control pills meant crossing into the terrain of utterance. It meant saying to a stranger, I am having sex. Most of the sex I had had during these first two years of sexual activity was unprotected. Until the moment on the hill, I had been extraordinarily lucky.

That year, 1988, I was one of 1.4 million American women to have an abortion. Mine was relatively devoid of physical and emotional trauma related to the abortion itself. My doctor, an African-American man who attended Howard University College of Medicine, was gentle and kind, and referred, like the other medical staff, to my abortion as "the procedure" and to my situation as "the pregnancy." I was grateful for this manner of speech in which the objective article was placed before the noun. It reminds me now of the way one of my poetry mentors says "the poem" when talking about her own work, as if the poem just appeared. No one's at fault here, my medical team seemed to imply. The pregnancy happened. The procedure will happen. It will be as if none of it ever happened. And for the most part, this was true.

I walk into the hospital attended by two friends and enter a waiting room of young women who look sad, most of whom are alone. I am almost 13 weeks' pregnant, so in preparation for the Dilation and Evacuation, my gynecologist has helped the cervix to open slightly by inserting a number of thin seaweed rods a couple of days prior. I am in the surgical room. I am given intravenous Valium. It seems like seconds later that they are shaking me alert. It is over. In the aftermath there is only a little blood -- like a bad period, the doctors were fond of saying -- and a cramp or two. The body had been invaded, and it is now its own again. No moral or visceral sense of a "baby," only a vague and muted sense of what might have been, an alternate possibility, ended.

I tuck this experience away in the cavern of silences I am used to. I do not tell my mother. Perhaps this is why when my friends drive me to my parents' house; I go quietly upstairs, crawl into my mother's bed, and fall melancholically asleep.

Sometimes loneliness is a girl who cannot say "This has happened to me," who has no one to witness what it means to be alive. Although to this day I have not told my mother about my abortion, I have worked to dismember the walls in the cavern of secrets. When I came out to myself as queer, I came out to my mother too. When for years she denied my orientation, I pressed her to recognize it. "This is my life," I told her. "I need you to see it."