This post first appeared on Role Reboot and has been republished with full permission.
Having a baby would have changed my entire world. Mine, not his. So yes, it is my choice. But that doesn’t make it feel any better.
The line appeared quickly, so faint you could hardly see it. My hands shaking, I grabbed my phone and quickly Googled “faint line, pregnancy test,” which resulted in pages of infertility blogs with posts screaming “I had a really faint pregnancy test and now I have a beautiful 1-year old.”
Now in full panic mode, I drove back to the shopping centre I had just left an hour before, cursing myself for buying the cheapest, generic pregnancy test I could find, and purchased two additional (more expensive) tests, both of which confirmed what I already knew in my gut: I was pregnant.
I have always wanted kids, but I knew that this wasn’t how I wanted to become a mother. After an agonizing day, spent crying on my couch with a few of my closest friends, I woke up the next morning feeling clarity, knowing that I was going to have an abortion. While I cannot even put into words the anguish that came along with this choice (as my mother simply put it: “It’s a lot to give up”) it was, in the end, a pretty clear decision for me.
What was not as clear a decision, and something that has proven to be the most complex thing to navigate, has been my decision to not tell the guy. He wasn’t someone I dated—we had been having casual sex on and off for about five months when I got pregnant. A professional athlete who traveled a lot for work, he would call when he got back in town and we would pick up where we left off. From the moment we met, I had a very visceral, physical reaction to him. I joked to my friends that my loins reached out to him.