Initially, I thought I had COVID — or just anxiety from helicopters flying over Brooklyn nonstop. But when my period was late and then light after it finally arrived, I decided I was probably in perimenopause.
I never would have guessed that my first abortion would be when I was in my 40s, married, and a parent already. But that’s the situation I was in when my pregnancy test came back positive in the first July of the COVID-19 pandemic
I never would have guessed that my first abortion would be when I was in my 40s, married, and a parent already. But that’s the situation I was in when my pregnancy test came back positive in the first July of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Initially, I thought I had COVID — or just anxiety from helicopters flying over Brooklyn nonstop. But when my period was late and then light after it finally arrived, I decided I was probably in perimenopause.
It wasn’t until I spit out a glass of wine I was nursing that I finally knew. The only other time that alcohol had tasted like poison was when I was pregnant six years before.
So, I took a pregnancy test. Then another — and another. (A year later, when we were finally able to administer weekly COVID tests ourselves, I would think about how similar they looked to those for pregnancy. But I wondered why the indicator for COVID was just two straight lines, while the indicators on my pregnancy tests were plus signs — a silent judgment.)
My husband was excited when he found out the news, which made me feel worse, since I only felt panic. I was 41, and I had just come out of three months of remote schooling with my 6-year-old daughter. And then there was work. I had started my own business — a path I took after being pushed out of my previous job at a tech company because I was a mother. Whereas the flexibility and independence I had now were more desirable, it also became impossible for me to take any kind of maternity leave without losing massive amounts of income.
But weren’t these selfish reasons to be in doubt? Weren’t there people raising kids with much less?
Still unsure about what to do, I made an appointment with an OB-GYN. The one who had delivered my daughter moved from downtown to the Upper West Side, and there was no way I was taking the subway to her office while COVID was still spreading. Instead, I found a local place that I could walk to. It was my first visit to a doctor since the pandemic began, and I was scared. I double-masked. I wore gloves.
After arriving, I changed into a hospital gown from the nurse and waited alone in the clean, white room. My belly was covered with cold, wet jelly and rubbed with a transducer. I looked at the ultrasound screen even though I didn’t really want to.
“There it is,” the doctor said. “The baby!” I stared at this moving, living blob in my belly. “Congratulations, Mommy,” she said. “You are already six weeks!”
The doctor handed me a black-and-white image of my uterus. We had hung a similar image of my daughter on our refrigerator with a magnet. I folded this one up in my hand. From the look on the doctor’s face, I realized that it hadn’t even occurred to her that a married mother, with one child already, during a pandemic, might not want to keep her baby — that maybe I’d want to make a different choice.
“You’ll need extensive bloodwork and weekly appointments,” she told me, “since you are a geriatric pregnancy.”
How many times had my friends and I made fun of that term over mom wine while complaining about the gendered division of labor at home? “Geriatric.” Old. At 41.
“What if I decide I’m not sure if I want to have the child?” I asked.
She was not expecting this question, and I could tell it made her uncomfortable; she was used to giving positive news in a shiny, clean office so she could deliver beautiful, bouncing babies in Park Slope who would have full-time nannies and be fluent in Mandarin at 5 years old.
She looked away from me. “Well, then you have some options.”
But I didn’t want to burst her bubble — and maybe she was right. I told her I wanted my bloodwork done that day.
Later, I would learn that 59% of abortion patients already have a kid — that the majority of the women who choose the procedure do it so they can better support a child that they already have. That my situation was actually quite common. Since the beginning of time, women have made decisions like this. I would also learn that the birthrate in the U.S. was falling each year and that 74% of parents under 50 were not interested in adding another child to their lives.
On the way home, walking my bike down Vanderbilt Avenue and feeling woozy from all the blood taken for my geriatric pregnancy, with the ultrasound image folded in the pocket of my shorts, I started to cry from behind my mask. I could not have this child. Not right now, when people around me were suffocating because they couldn’t breathe and when I woke up in terror every night at 3 a.m. with an asthma attack.
When we were in bed later that night, I asked my husband if he was disappointed.
“It is your choice,” he said quietly, turning his face toward me. He still looked like a boy, my husband, with his wiry frame and shaggy hair. “I’ll support you no matter what.” But I knew he was already imagining a sweet little baby to dote on. I was picturing it too. Their soft puffy cheeks. Their first beautiful smile.
My previous pregnancy was not easy. My daughter was in distress. There was meconium inside me — and I had run a fever. It was by the saving grace of my OB-GYN that I didn’t need a C-section.
But I was very sick, and we were scared for my daughter. I had to be given an an antibiotic while in labor. And when she emerged, violently, I was only allowed to hold her briefly before she was carted away to the neonatal intensive care unit to be monitored and given antibiotics.