By Elizabeth
The seediness of the New York city block felt like an incredibly appropriate location for the clinic I was about to enter. I had arrived early but was sitting in the parking lot watching the color drain from my knuckles as they gripped the steering wheel. I knew I couldn’t enter the building until I was able to slow down the cyclical thoughts confounding my brain. So I sat. Unable to move, reliving each emotion attached to the situation that led me here, a situation from four weeks earlier:
Confusion when I looked into the toilet and saw something other than urine.
Disbelief when my friend said that the guy she brought home had spent the night in my bed. Embarrassment when he confirmed that we had sex and shame when he told me that I “seemed” to be awake.
I played these scenes over and over as I sat alone, my shame and anger growing rather than diminishing. Finally, I pulled myself together and walked towards the building.
I entered the clinic and approached the receptionist, my angst growing as I noticed that I was the only person there alone. I signed in and sat down, doing my best to avoid eye contact and steady my erratic breathing. The couples around me laughed and talked, kissed and joked. Their casual interactions were a stark contrast to my own internal misery and aided nicely in compounding my discomfort.
A woman escorted me into a poorly lit, filthy room. She told me to undress and situate myself on the table, feet in stirrups, and to wait for the doctor to come.
The doctor was cold. He didn’t shake my hand or exchange pleasantries. He didn’t feign interest or try to ease my visible pain, but I didn’t need that from him. I didn’t need niceties and I didn’t deserve to be coddled. Coddling prevents a person from experiencing a situation fully and it hinders growth. I needed no shielding from my reality. I simply wanted compassion: to look into the eyes of the only other human who knew my secret and see some semblance of understanding or sensitivity. Instead, my gaze was met with callous judgment.
He didn’t ask questions about the circumstances that led me to his examination table. Instead, he asked if I understood that I would be “taking a life today.” I nodded miserably, resolving that at least I couldn’t possibly feel worse. But then he made me look. He made me look at the heartbeat inside of me. He told me I needed to fully understand what I was doing. As if I was a child. As if I couldn’t possibly understand the gravity of my situation. He spoke to me like this was a choice, as if this life had been put inside of me with my permission and that I had now changed my mind. I stared at the monitor and at the tiny heartbeat, feeling immeasurably more mortified than I had when I entered the room.
Abruptly, as if he finally felt satisfied by the amount of pain I was in, he turned off the monitor, handed me pills that would induce the process, and shut the door to leave me to my decision.
There are so many things I wish I could have said to that doctor. I wish I had mustered the courage to tell him that I was raped despite making all of the right choices that night. That I had been in my second year out of college, volunteering in a foreign country, felt myself getting drunk, and made the mature decision to go home. I wish I told him that I went to sleep alone, but that this predator let himself into my bed and that he took advantage of me while I was passed out. I could have told him all of this but instead I did nothing, because after only a few minutes in his care, this doctor made me feel like a monster.
While I’d felt nervous, anxious, and guilty prior to the appointment, I never hated myself. I never felt at fault. I knew that this pregnancy was the result of something that had been done to me, not because of me. I had resolve. But this doctor, this man that had pledged his professional life to helping others, took that from me.
He stripped from me my right to be at peace with my decision and in doing so, left me with the burden of undeserved guilt that took years to wash away.