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Breaking my silence: My family needed me. I had to survive, so I had an abortion.

I did not intend to write this story, but our present moment, with the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court and the challenges almost certain to follow in regard to Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act, have led me to break my silence.

In the fall of 1993, I had an abortion. My husband went with me to the hospital. My parents met us there. They circled me in the curtained room of the pre-operative area. My 12-year-old son was at his middle school. Like many children that age, he was having a hard time of it.

My story involves complications of health.

Fourteen years earlier, I had been diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes. My internist told me that if I wanted children I should have them right away because I would never be so healthy again. I was in the first year of my Ph.D. coursework at Emory University. The program was competitive. Nevertheless, five months later, I got pregnant on purpose. I had never yearned for a baby, but I wanted one now, before it was too late.

The pregnancy brought immediate life complications. We had to move because our apartment complex didn’t allow children. I wondered if my professors would take me seriously now that I was pregnant. I had never seen a pregnant woman in college or graduate school in 1980. And could I continue to work? Because not only was I a full-time Ph.D. student managing diabetes, I was working part time in a community college. But those were complications of schedule and ambition and desire.

My baby and I survived but barely

As the pregnancy progressed, I suffered physical complications. I retained water in my lower extremities. I could hardly bend my legs to get in a car and drive to work or school. Finally I was toxic. The placenta was disintegrating. At six and a half months, I went into early labor. We rushed to the hospital where I had an emergency C-section. I was so physically depleted that I hardly cared if I lived. When I woke in enormous pain, the baby was elsewhere, being cared for in a neonatal unit. The pediatrician told me he had saved himself by coming early. I also learned that my body had been depending on his tiny pancreas to stabilize my blood sugars.

We survived, but I knew I could not manage another pregnancy. The risks were too great.

The child was a miracle. He brought into my life a kind of love I had never known, an absolute devotion and delight. On his fourth day of life, when my husband and I gave him his name, he went from baby to Joel and became himself. Still, when he was only 3 weeks old, I went back to classes. There was no time off. There was only dropping out, and I was not going to drop out. My husband worked second shift and I worked first, so I would go to classes at Emory or to my job at Dekalb Community College in the morning and then come home and be the mamma. The walks I took with Joel through apartment building parking lots filled me with joy, the child nestled in the stroller, his hair lifted by the breeze, his face alive with curiosity and delight. I wasn’t tired yet. I was immensely alive.

Elaine Neil Orr is an author and a professor of English at N.C. State University in Raleigh. She also teaches in the Spalding University School of Writing.
Elaine Neil Orr is an author and a professor of English at N.C. State University in Raleigh. She also teaches in the Spalding University School of Writing.

When I became pregnant at age 39, my body was much less capable than it had been 13 years earlier. I was barely holding on, trying to manage my disease, be the primary parent and bread-winner (my husband had recently made a professional move that was promising but risky and required work in the evening), and press forward for tenure. Without it neither I nor my son would have health insurance. I had a pre-existing condition. My family needed me. I had to survive. When I was told the pregnancy might be viable if I could spend several months in the hospital, it hardly mattered. Who would be there to meet my son when he came home from school? Who would finish the book that was my solitary ticket to job security and health care? Who would supplement my salary for years on end if I couldn’t make it in my profession? No one.

My single thought was that I had to survive for the living, including myself, for the sacred trusts and responsibilities I held with my child and my family. My parents’ primary concern was for me. As was my husband’s.

Real life, not a caricature: I was in the pro-life movement. But then, widowed with 6 kids, I prepared for an abortion.

Growing up as a daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries, I never heard any teachings about abortion. I never heard anything about it in any Baptist church I attended ever and I was a member of a Baptist church as recently as 2007. Now that I am a grandmother, I can understand how hard it might have been for my parents to say goodbye to the possibility of another grandchild. But they embodied the Christian ideals they had taught me. Because what I heard a great deal about growing up was grace, charity and compassion. My parents stood with me in my decision because to have done otherwise would not have been true to who they were.

Might I not have had the abortion under different circumstances? Absolutely. Say that I was a healthy woman in her 30s who didn’t have to worry about losing her insurance and who could work through her pregnancy and keep her job and meet her son’s needs and be assured of her income and move forward in the profession she had spent 15 years building because she had experienced a call to teach and believed in the power of literature to awaken us to our common humanity.

In that case, I would not have had an abortion.

I have often wished for a second child

I had an abortion because none of those things was true and collectively their absence imperiled my family.

Now imagine the woman who has little education, little or no family nearby, is 18, does not have transportation, health insurance or a job (or works for minimum wage).

In 1998, I was diagnosed with end-stage renal disease and spent two and a half years doing dialysis. I continued to teach because my students expected me to show up. They saved me as much as my doctors did.

I have sometimes, even often, wished I could have had a second child. When my son really left home, after college, after my successful organ transplants (pancreas and kidney), as I was beginning to regain my strength and focus optimistically on the rest of my life, I often thought how lovely it would be to have a 7-year-old daughter, a companion, a little explorer. It was magical thinking because it was a dream that required another woman’s body, another woman’s circumstances.

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What I was actually wishing for was never to have been seriously ill, never to have been threatened in my chosen profession, never to have been forced to choose between my living child and a potential life. And then a grace I could not have foreseen entered my life in 2013 when my granddaughter was born, completing a circle of life. I sing a song of gratitude for her every day.

No one but the woman herself, in her body, with her history, and in consultation with her physician knows what she can do, what she can survive, what she needs. I confess. I am as guilty as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I want women to be able to choose.

Elaine Neil Orr is an author and a professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. This column first appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal. Follow her on Twitter: @ElaineNeilOrr

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This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Amy Coney Barrett nomination: It is time to tell my abortion story