Baby Love (11 page)

On Saturday, I made the mistake of going swimming in the middle of the day, when the pool was overrun with, in my humble opinion, bratty, privileged kids. They bumped into me, swam across my lane, threw footballs over my head, and generally ran around paying no attention to anyone but themselves. I kept standing in the shallow end at the break in my laps so that their mothers would see that I was no ordinary lap swimmer, I was a
pregnant
lap swimmer, damn it. I deserved some modicum of respect, even if just for safety. But the mothers ignored me, too, and kept chatting and glancing approvingly at their kids as they whooped all around me.

The whole time I was thinking about how I will be with the baby, and how he will never be so rude and how I as a parent will never be so checked out. Then I thought, Well, maybe those moms are over there talking about their mastectomies or their husbands’ affairs. Maybe this is the first break they’ve had in weeks. Who knows? They could have been talking about their vacation in Tahiti, but I certainly felt less bitchy toward them when I imagined that they, like everyone else, have problems.

Glen and I went to have the amnio. We went, even though I was on the fence and even though if there were something wrong it would be too late to do anything about it. “Something wrong” being Down syndrome or worse. “Anything about it” being an abortion.

The receptionist warned me that it would be a three-hour appointment, because in addition to the procedure itself, I would need to undergo routine counseling. She didn’t say what kind, and when I asked, she made it sound like preparatory counseling, like you might get before taking an HIV test. How to be prepared for the worst. When we got there, the counseling, which we had to agree to have before they would administer the amnio, turned out to really be “genetic counseling.” We were taken into a little room by someone who worked not for the hospital but for a biotech company based in Los Angeles. This very nice woman proceeded to do a “genetic intake” on me and Glen, asking about the race, national origin, and health of family members as far back as we could remember.

The flow from signing in to sitting in the woman’s office was so seamless that it took me about ten minutes to realize that something other than what I expected was going on. I was, like I suspect most of the young and middle-aged women in the waiting room, so focused on doing something beneficial for my baby and so excited about seeing him in the ultrasound preceding the amnio that the nice woman could have been asking for rights to my firstborn’s stem cells and I wouldn’t have noticed.

Glen was less distracted, and as I felt his discomfort I asked the relevance of the information being gathered. I also asked who would own the information, and if my privacy was protected by law. Again, call me paranoid, but I saw the movie
Gattaca.
Genetic discrimination, though not as prevalent today as other forms of discrimination, is not just a paranoid delusion. We don’t know what kind of world our children will inherit.

The very nice woman explained that this was a way to screen for potential genetic disorders. She explained that all the information was confidential, and that her computer linked only to the company’s database and she had to have a special access code to even turn it on. She explained that the results, my baby’s genetic tree, would be shipped to a completely secure facility somewhere in Southern California. She explained that there are, in fact, laws in place that prohibit her company or any other company from using the information for testing, research, or anything else.

I started to feel very uncomfortable. How harmless could it be if it required so much security? It is not too difficult to imagine my son’s genes being used against him. If he is predisposed to sickle-cell anemia and heart disease, for example, and potential employers can call this up with a stroke of the keyboard, will this make him less employable? If insurers can call up a family history of diabetes, dementia, or some other disease that is costly to maintain, will they insure him? At what price? These are only two scenarios that gave me pause. I shared them with the very nice woman, and she reminded me about the laws. I reminded her that laws change, you know, and usually to facilitate economic expansion. I can’t think of another industry with as much momentum as biotech.

I think she was shocked when I decided against the amnio, but she tried to appear nonjudgmental and supportive. I was a little shocked myself. Amnios are as common as breastfeeding. Even though I was on the fence, I never really thought I’d go through my pregnancy without having one. But what can I say? When she told me that she wasn’t sure, exactly, where the fluid was transferred after the test, I lost faith in the whole system. Was I sure I could handle a child with special needs? Absolutely not. Did I feel certain that my baby was going to be more than healthy? Absolutely. Was that anything other than magical thinking? Hard to say.

I did go for the ultrasound, though. To make sure the baby has all ten fingers and toes and both legs and arms, and none of the early signs of other problems. There was also the issue of finding out the sex.

As I lay naked from the waist down on the metal table with cold gel slathered across my belly, a woman who has been doing ultrasounds for thirty years zipped from one side of my baby’s face to the other, one hand to the other, one organ to the other. After a few clicks and a few anxious questions from me about whether or not everything looked normal, she asked if we wanted to know if our child was a girl or a boy. I looked at Glen and he said it was up to me. I’ve never been able to stand someone else knowing something I don’t, so I said yes. Well, the technician said, he’s definitely a boy. Without a doubt.

A boy!

I knew it.

My boy!

Then she showed us his face and butt and elbow, none of which were the least bit identifiable to me.

As my son squirmed in response to her prodding and poking, at one point turning all the way around to avoid her probe, I wondered aloud if we might be disturbing him with all of our measuring. The woman looked at me with, what can I call it? Disdain? Condescension? I shook my head, trying to meet her halfway, after all, she
had
spent thirty years doing this. I’m just a newbie. That’s ridiculous, she said. You’re just projecting. And then she roughly wiped a fraction of the gunk off my stomach and told me to wait for the doctor.

It is an understatement to say that I was ready to go home after all this. Maybe I am just hormonally challenged, but as we walked into the bright sun of the parking lot I thought about how fiercely protective I am of this being growing inside of me. That medical office might as well have been a lion on the prowl for fresh kill.

I felt a sense of dread as I wondered about the hundreds of skirmishes before me, and the long and obstinate arm of the culture reaching into my boy’s mind and possibly into his very DNA. I clutched Glen’s arm more tightly, straining to imagine how I would negotiate it all without his stable presence and fierce intelligence.

Together, we might be able to make it. Alone, I am not so sure.

OH, that it were possible to write about having a baby in America without writing about not having a baby. I am talking about abortion of course, arguably one of the most controversial medical procedures of our time. As I write, teenagers are taking up collections to travel across state lines to “terminate,” and twenty-something women are giving birth to babies they don’t want and can’t take care of because they think abortion is murder. Right this second, medical students are protesting the ban on teaching them how to perform abortions, and doctors are being stalked and murdered for making abortions available.

In our country, the issue of abortion is used as a litmus test for personal morality and political loyalty, which makes writing about having one dangerous. It doesn’t matter that more than one million women have abortions every year, or that you would be hard-pressed to find a family or group of friends in which no one had gone through the ordeal. The moment you talk about abortion publicly, you run the risk of being attacked. Or your story being co-opted and pressed into service.

A few months ago, I was doing research for an article. Amid the 679,000 entries that flashed across my screen, I came across my name in the blog of someone claiming to be a former class-mate. He cited a piece I wrote a decade ago on using an abortion as an opportunity to reflect on what life would be like if women were forced to bear children they didn’t want. In an attempt to provide a counterpoint to the emotional trauma of abortion, I posited a way to think about the choice as an empowering option that was the result of many years of political struggle.

But the blogger didn’t see the piece in this context, and accused me of being “defiantly proud” of having had an abortion, and of “coming close to suggesting that it would be a good thing if all women had abortions.” Both of these statements, in my view, were gross misinterpretations, and yet I suppose they were also understandable extrapolations in light of the author’s point of view.

Continuing my search, I began to think about approaching actions in terms of their result rather than their “truth.” The question was not whether the blogger’s statements were “true”—they were not to me but were very much so to him. The question was about the result of his statements. What is the effect of saying that I am proud of having had an abortion, and that I think it would be a good thing for all women to have one?

I ask because when I think about conceiving a child at thirty-four, carrying and giving birth to another human being, I have to revisit the experience of conceiving and not carrying, conceiving and not giving birth to another human being. I have to revisit this because the two are inextricably linked. I have to preface the discussion because it would be easy to distort what I write here and use the distortion as another log on the out-of-control bonfire that is the abortion debate in America.

That is not my intention.

I had an abortion at fourteen, in a little medical office on Geary Street in San Francisco, in what was then called the French Medical Building. It was a foggy San Francisco day and I was wearing pink
Flashdance
-y leg warmers over the calves of my faded jeans. The procedure itself was uneventful. I remember a hideously long needle and then the pain of it piercing my cervix, followed by the whirring of a machine. I remember the doctor, a severe, quiet, older woman with small hands and gray hair. I remember the assistant telling me what was happening, step by step. I remember it being over much more quickly than I anticipated and feeling relief as I walked out of the building and felt the cool San Francisco air against my face.

For years I thought very little about the experience. It was behind me, a choice I made to save my life, a choice I made because there was no other choice. At the time, I lived with my mother in a small apartment in a modest neighborhood. I had just finished the ninth grade. I was headed to a private school that held much promise. I loved my boyfriend, but I was a child, and so was he. Though my boyfriend would second-guess our decision twenty years later, at the time I did not. I added it to the list of experiences that made me who I was at the time: a young woman who had been through a lot. A young woman who was beginning to expect that life would be difficult, complicated, painful.

It wasn’t until college that I began to think about the abortion, to reflect on it as a series of moments—the needle, the doctor, the subsequent blocking out of any emotion connected to the event—that lurked in the crevices of my mind, powerfully shaping my self-image. But in college, political necessities took center stage. I was more invested in fighting for the right of women to have abortions than I was in fighting for my right to wade through the aftermath of having my own.

But there was an aftermath, and when I decided I wanted to have a baby, it came flying up at me in the form of a mocking, conspiratorial inner voice. This voice attacked my self-esteem. It challenged the idea that having a baby was something my body could actually do. It said awful things. Things like, The doctor sterilized you, remember? And, Your womb is too damaged now to conceive, let alone carry something as beautiful and important as a baby!

I tried to ignore the voice, to shake it off, but where it had been barely audible before, when I started trying to get pregnant it turned ruthless. In the beginning, I battled it alone, and acknowledged it only when talking to gynecologists. I insisted they convince me I wasn’t broken, that having had an abortion did not lower my chance of a successful pregnancy. The doctors looked at me strangely when I pressed them for reassurance. I think it shocked them that I, a “modern woman,” would have such fears.

But I did have those fears. Before I became pregnant, they came in the form of the face I sometimes saw in my mind’s eye: the Being that hovered. She was a she, with large, dark eyes and an easy laugh. She looked at me, not with anger or blame, but with a quiet sadness. We missed our time, her face said to me. I made it to you but you weren’t ready.

I do not regret having the abortion. I regret being lonely and having sex so young, that the Pill was not foolproof, that the permissive culture around me did nothing to prepare me for its consequences. But the abortion itself I do not regret. It is only that I have had to learn to manage the aftermath. First to acknowledge that it exists, and then to reroute it when it appears, to re-lay the cables in my mind so that A no longer connects to E.

Because ultimately, I could not hurl myself into the future and keep a death grip on the past at the same time. I had to wade through the muck, to wake up to the poisonous thoughts I hoarded like jewels. I found that there was a time and a place where I lost faith in my body’s ability to sustain new life. There was a time and a place where doubt and shame took the space where hope and confidence should be.