I Had An Abortion — And Didn’t Realize It Until Several Weeks Later

“I feel just like … college,” I’d dreamily slurred.
According to my husband, Mark, I’d said these words to no one in particular while staring up at the ceiling tiles through drooping lids. Then I drifted off to sleep in my hospital bed and was wheeled down the hall for my abortion.
All the hours of scans, doctor discussions, drive time and admissions paperwork leading up to this moment had been fraught with severe emotion. So by the time the sedative finally worked its way through my veins, I must have willed myself to regress into a breezy 21-year-old at an Indigo Girls concert in Denver, high on communal weed. When I awoke in the recovery room later, I was sobbing.
I didn’t know I had an abortion.
That’s the first thing I’d like to tell anyone who opposes the choice I made: It was several weeks after my abortion before I even knew I had one.
While grieving, I’d wandered into an online group of women who’d ended their pregnancies under similar circumstances. We leaned on one another for support, tearfully told our stories, and used various terms to discuss our procedures, like D&C or D&E and the catch-all word “termination.” But then one woman tossed in another word like a grenade, and my heart felt like it came to a screeching halt.
Abortion? But I didn’t have an abortion.
It may sound unbelievable that an adequately educated person, one who could aptly decipher a Dostoyevsky novel in her college literature class, could listen to what was said to me during the ill-fated ultrasound appointment in which the doctor told me my baby was fatally ill, and come away with no awareness that what she’d just heard described was the option of abortion.
In the face of irrefutable evidence from my doctor that my baby was dying, when she got to the part about whether I’d want to wait for the baby to die at birth (if he would even live that long) or whether I’d want to end the pregnancy soon, the decision I ultimately made simply didn’t fit that word. At least, not what I’d known of it.
I was married, for one. And I wanted to have a baby — this one. And importantly, I loved my baby.
“Abortion” was intended for other women and girls, those who’d found themselves in other situations. I supported their right to choose this — I’d supported that choice as far back as I could remember. But given my special situation, my choice certainly needed no justification, was nothing that would be illegal in any state, nothing that would appear on the angry protest sign of a Sunday roadside picketer. Surely that sign didn’t have anything to do with me.
My baby wasn’t a full person in my mind back then. I don’t mean religiously or gestationally speaking. I mean he wasn’t entirely formed in my imagination either — more like a character in a dream. You may talk to the dream person, go on adventures together in your sleep, but their face seems to remain maddeningly out of view.
Over the years, I’ve tried to fill in the blanks. What did he look like? Who might he have become if he were healthy and had lived? Would he have the same cowlick as me? The broad forehead of my husband? Would he have my double-jointed toes?
I realize if I had carried him to term, I would have seen him, and not just in pixels on a screen. I would have held him, cried against his tiny face, kissed his 12 little fingers and caressed his rocker-bottom feet. I would have loved him in the flesh.
Yet I prefer to know he left the world in another form: still nestled in the only home he’d known, that my abortion had spared him from further growth, further development of a complex nervous system that would enable him to suffer, from the violent ordeal of being born only to gasp for air and expire, all under the glaring lights of a joy-filled hospital maternity ward.
I’ll never know if he looked like a Noah, but this is the name we chose. A caretaker of animals large and small, that was what I wanted him to be. Mark and I had mourned a couple baby birds and a squirrel that fell from their nests in our yard that year, dutifully burying them in the garden. With three cats and a corgi, eventually we’d have more animal burials in our lifetime. It felt comforting to think of our lost son looking after these creatures in another world.
But would I have been a natural caretaker to Noah? This “what if” particularly haunted me later. I didn’t like to babysit as a teen and I didn’t know how to change a diaper. I never once gushed over an Anne Geddes poster. “But it’s different with your own,” everyone had assured me. As I’d eagerly planned for Noah’s upcoming birth, I took them at their word. I began to feel elated for our new baby on the way, his life we had planned together. Then came the ultrasound appointment where we learned that life was never meant to be.
After losing Noah, for months I wrestled with my initial ambivalence and lack of mothering skills. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be his mother in the first place. Would I have known how to love him? Maybe nature knew what was wrong there all along — and not with Noah but with me.
And then there was that word. Abortion.
As I staggered around in the torturous months to follow, I’d rub my vacant belly and imagine him there. Sometimes I’d take long drives around town or in endless circles in parking lots at night, just to cry and sing out loud to him — to wretched hair band ballads from the ’80s, to whatever the radio station played. Like I was 17 again and newly dumped. And much like back then, every sappy-shit lyric seemed written just for me — me and the boy I loved.
Eventually, with all my driving, I ended up here: No one could know him better than me. No one could know me as he did. Our understanding of each other was not in the heart or mind but way down deep at a cellular level. In the same sense, no one needed to understand my choice but me. And I did.
This year marked 18 years since my abortion.
Much has changed in those 18 years. Mark and I now have three children, which of course doesn’t change the past. My grief journey is ever-changing and I continue to process that painful period of my life.
Abortion access has changed since then, too. Now in Nebraska, where I had my abortion, women no longer have the right to end a pregnancy after 12 weeks. The exceptions to this are rare and do not even take into account the poor health outcomes of the fetus. When Nebraska first tightened its restrictions in 2010, at that time to limit abortions to before 20 weeks, I was aghast to hear it proudly proclaimed the “Fetal Pain Prevention Act.” Never mind that sparing her baby pain is more often the exact reason a woman would choose to end a pregnancy at that stage.
To say that abortion rights are on the ballot this year is an understatement. Voters in 10 states will choose to either restrict, enshrine or expand their states’ abortion access. Many of those voters falsely believe — as I once did — that abortion will have no direct effect on their lives or their loved ones.
That’s why I need to continue telling my abortion story. It’s the least I can do to honor Noah’s memory, which is all I have of him. I will tell it the only way I know, as a love story.
This April, sparked by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I finished writing a memoir called “Feral,” about my messy grief that followed the loss of Noah, which had been complicated by a messy stray cat we’d adopted to pull us through. It all seemed to end horribly from there. With abortion rights in the U.S., for one. And with our cat adoption (though, God help us, she lived a long life).
It hadn’t ended well for me either. I completed my grief memoir, enjoyed the euphoric high of kick-assery that follows writing a book, and then promptly had a nervous breakdown, lost hair by the fistful, had to cancel a long-awaited overseas trip and ended up on Prozac.
I was still dealing with the mental aftermath of this when I found myself lying in a bed at a natural medicine clinic, trying to forget the acupuncture needles jutting out of my face, legs and stomach.
“Ooo, I see some gorgeous blood forming here,” an acupuncturist named Kate said with a triumphant grin. “It means we’ve hit something critical.” On hearing this alarming news, I inhaled and held my breath for a count of six like I had been taught by my new therapist, Beth, before exhaling slowly for a count of eight.
Kate leaned over me and wiped away the tiny trickle I felt running down my nose. “See, this spot in the forehead has a tendency to bring forth our deepest thoughts,” she told me. “I always say, ‘Pay close attention when it bleeds.’” Well I should hope that you do, I thought. Then Kate quietly left and shut the door.
I bit on my lip as I counted down the minutes until her expected return, tapping nervously against my thighs in an act of stimming. Then I suddenly stared up at the darkened recessed lights along the ceiling.
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In a pair of rimmed circles in rows of two, I saw a set of eyes. They seemed to stare back at me brightly with wonder. I blinked away some tears as a vague familiarity sunk in. Then below those eyes I saw a set of nostrils, round and opened wide, deeply breathing in the incense-filled air. A hippie-esque grass wall hanging nearby formed a swath of new blond hair.
As I stared at the picture forming in front of me, I felt my muscles relax into a deep exhale against the bed as my heart pumped warm blood through my chest. Then I calmly drifted off to sleep, thinking of the boy of my dreams.
Angie Zmarzly is a Nebraskan living in Australia with her husband, three kids, two cats, a golden retriever and several backyard kookaburras. Previously she worked as a political speechwriter and an award-winning humor blogger. Her unpublished memoir “FERAL: What the World’s Worst Cat Taught Me about Love, Loss and Fleas” is now complete. Learn more at www.angiezmarzly.com.