I arrived in the cramped basement of the Washington Surgi-Clinic at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning. Birth-control brochures and women's magazines were scattered throughout the waiting room. I lay down on my side, on one of the padded benches that lined the wall. Nausea and fatigue blotted out everything else.
It was the start of the July 4 weekend, two summers ago, and I was there for a "no-frills" abortion, provided by the clinic for $400. Four other women were there - young women, most with mothers or friends, one with a man who appeared to be her boyfriend. At 37, I had a good 15 years on any of them. I had been married for seven years, my husband and I had good jobs, and I was pregnant - isn't that what women my age wanted?
While I had never exactly yearned to have a baby, I had always assumed that eventually I would. I loved my husband, William, and wanted to spend my life with him; not to have a child, it seemed, would be to leave a piece of the picture missing. Although choices about the "when" and "how many" of having children have changed a great deal for women like me over the past couple of decades, the "whether" has not. The media oozes it: having a family makes you whole. Look out or you will become one of those miserable women in their 30s and 40s, desperate to get pregnant, to adopt a baby from China. Motherhood still seems less a choice than a sine qua non .
William said he wanted to have a child at some vague point in the future, and I believed him. But the years went by, and it was never the right time. "When I finish my dissertation," he would say. "When I get hired." After he got a job teaching philosophy at a local university, the answer was, "After I write my book." We avoided lengthy conversation on the topic, probably because we both sensed that the outcome would be something neither of us wanted to face.
In fact, in those last years of the marriage, we weren't talking much about anything. Our relationship was disintegrating, like a satellite slowly breaking apart in the atmosphere and falling to earth. We argued daily about everything, from my leaving a stray tea bag in the sink to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I would threaten to leave him. He would ask me not to, tell me things would get better. The hallway of the apartment we had moved into a year ago was still stacked with cardboard boxes; we had never even finished unpacking.
Years ago I had fallen in love with William - a charming, good-looking and outstanding teacher - but even then I knew that he was obsessed with his work. It took me longer to see his other obsession: pointing out my shortcomings. He criticised the way I talked, walked and dressed. He was unkind to me most of the time - not abusive, but impatient, or, alternately, neglectful. I had grown up around men I was afraid of - my father was a frustrated academic whose unpredictable rages sent me scurrying to hide in my room - so it didn't seem that extraordinary. And, of course, I thought I loved him too much to live without him. Absent a catalyst like an affair or a drug problem and a bad relationship can grind on for a very long time.
Meanwhile the desire to have a child burned a separate, parallel path in my mind throughout my mid-30s. I was consumed with the fear that it was too late, that I would not be able to get pregnant at my age. My younger sister had become pregnant several months before, piquing my envy and anxiety. That spring, I began using an ovulation predictor kit, expecting it to demonstrate that my fertility was on the blink. But it didn't. William and I actively tried to conceive. If that sounds irrational, it was; no doubt he, like me, felt terribly unhappy in the marriage, yet found the idea of splitting up unthinkable.
That year, over Memorial Day weekend, I went to California to visit my sister and her new baby. I noticed how much calmer and happier I felt without William there criticising me, bickering with me. I went home, thinking about the possibility of life without him.
One evening not long after I returned, I doubled over with abdominal pain and threw up so violently that I thought I had food poisoning. William took me to the doctor the next day. We navigated a maze of offices in the medical building as I went from one doctor to another, taking one test after another.
William was impatient. Emergencies or crises of any kind, agitated him. He testily criticised me for not being assertive enough with the receptionists and not being articulate enough with the doctors. In the waiting room he began reading the book he had brought, ignoring me.
Eventually we were seated in an exam room, and the doctor came in and said, "You're pregnant." My first reaction was a fleeting giddiness - I had done it! - immediately followed by the conviction that I did not want to, could not, raise a child with William. If this was the way he treated me when I was sick and in pain, how could I depend on him during a pregnancy, and in the years thereafter?
I spent most of the next few weeks floating seasick on the bed or the couch. I went through all my miserable options: single parenthood, separating but having the child, not having the child or staying with my husband and giving birth. I never felt a moment of utter clarity; just a consistent pull toward the conclusion that I could not have a child with William, could not count on him to treat me with respect, could not by way of a child yoke myself to him for the next 20 years.
And, with or without William, the idea of having a child overwhelmed me. I had few local friends or family, and lived in a city I detested. And, yes, I was selfish: the prospect of having a child and raising it on my own felt insurmountable, like the end of my life. For a woman like me who had lived an independent life, the idea of giving birth and raising children began to seem almost a retro, labour-intensive enterprise, like growing your own vegetables or sewing your own clothes. There is a reason why women in the 1960s and 70s tried to escape this way of life - it is hard work, and it is not for everybody.
Yet when I suggested terminating the pregnancy, I hoped, against all the evidence, that William would pull me back from the precipice, assure me that we would work things out, that he would take care of me. He didn't. Panicked about the impact a child would have on his career, he readily agreed to an abortion. I scheduled the procedure for the earliest date I could have it.
It took another year and a half before William and I could untangle our lives and separate. The abortion blindsided me: humiliated and humbled, I could not believe that I was capable of terminating an intentional pregnancy. My big fear had been that we would be biologically unable to have a child; it turned out that we were emotionally unable to do so.
The abortion never troubled my husband deeply: it wasn't his body; he had never wanted a child all that much to begin with. While I don't regret ending that pregnancy, it still hurts to be childless. I shut the door on motherhood, quite possibly for ever, and in the starkest way possible.
When, as happens with ever-increasing frequency these days, a friend announces that she and her partner are expecting, it quietly knocks the wind out of me. When I come home from spending a long weekend with my raucous two-year-old niece, my apartment seems filled with too much quiet, empty space. At those moments, I tell myself that I have ruined my life. It's not that simple, though.
· Laura Walters is a pseudonym. This article first appeared in salon.com. If you have strong feelings about the issues raised please email us at women@theguardian.com.
