“Oh Honey, You Shouldn’t Be Here.” — Our Abortion Story

This was originally published under a pseudonym. With the repeal of the Roe v. Wade decision, it seems a more important topic than ever to discuss openly.

My wife and I make great kids. We’re just really bad at being pregnant.

It took us 18 months of trying to get pregnant the first time. Nothing fancy, we just got off birth control and let life ensue. When we finally did get pregnant, we hit the trifecta — preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, and he was footling breech. For us, there was never any question of a natural birth. Instead there were injections, bed rest, and twice-weekly visits to check my wife’s blood pressure. It was a race to 36 weeks to make sure our son’s lungs were complete and ready. That, against the possibility of my wife going into seizures.

The running joke was that whenever our doctor said, “There’s only a 10% chance of this bad thing happening”, it would invariably happen. None of it was disastrous, all of it was hard. We occasionally wished it was a little easier, but there was a promise of our son, and a duty to see him through, so we endured (I say ‘we’. It was mostly ‘she’).

The week we hit that magical goal of 36 weeks, we breathed a sigh of relief. We went for the next visit to our OB late in the afternoon, and as she took my wife’s blood pressure, she said, “Okay. What are you doing tonight?”

We glanced at each other. “Um — having a baby?”