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| Image credit: Photo by h.koppdelaney on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
Four years ago, I was horrified by where we in the United States were as a country. I was sickened and disgusted by our (in my mind, then as now) morally inexcusable invasion of Iraq. I was frightened by the religious conservatives who were in power and whom I perceived as daily threatening the liberties that we as a nation hold so dear. And at the head of it all, hiding greed and lust for power behind a cloak of evangelism, I saw George W. Bush as the deceiver, the spin master, the trickster.
So, on November 2, 2004, after many donations and months of campaigning for what I saw as the side of right and good and intelligence, I went out -- with hope, fear and desperation mixed -- and cast my vote for "Not Bush" (as my husband and I referred to John Kerry). When I went to bed that night, the results of the election were not yet clear, but I laid down with the fervent hope that Ohio would swing for Kerry, that Bush would be out of the White House and all would be right with the world. I slept restlessly and dreamed that Kerry lost.
When I woke up in the morning, I took a deep breath before I turned on my computer to check the results. I hoped that dream was meaningless, just a dream. But there was Ohio, shining red on my screen. Kerry lost. Bush won.
Deeply saddened, I threw on some comfortable clothes and heard the doorbell ring. I let in the friend who was there to take care of the kids for the morning, and we commiserated on the election. Then my husband and I got in the car and drove to the hospital.
I was about eight weeks pregnant, and I had an appointment for a D&C, a procedure to remove the contents of my uterus and terminate my pregnancy. I thought it was nice of the hospital staff to call it a D&C and not an abortion, as if maybe I had a miscarriage already and this was just to clean things up. But ultimately, it really was the same medical procedure. The difference was in the outcome.
My husband stayed with me and held my hand until the nurse wheeled me away into the bright lights of the operating room, where a friendly, gentle anesthesiologist talked to me, and my own beloved doctor met me. She was the one who saw me through my last pregnancy. She was the one I cried to when I learned my husband was a sex addict and who gently ordered a few additional STD tests as a result. She was the same woman who had delivered my daughter and brought life into this world. I wondered what she thought of now, after she and I had both seen that flickering heartbeat on the ultrasound monitor a few weeks earlier, when she had watched me collapse into hopeless tears. I wondered if she hated this part of her job, the one that prevented life from coming into this world.
The anesthesiologist told me to count backwards from 10, and I remember thinking I might never fall asleep, and then hearing a voice call my name out of the darkness. I felt sick and didn't want to wake up or open my eyes. The voice was very insistent. I tried. I remember people in blurred bits. I remember the nurse who called my name giving me something to help with the nausea. I remember my husband telling me he loved me. I remember that my doctor came to check on me and I felt an overpowering gratitude and love for her. I held her hand and cried and mumbled, "Thank you." Thank you for taking good care of me. Thank you for doing your job well. Thank you for keeping me safe. Thank you for not judging me. Thank you for helping me do what I think is right. Thank you for taking the life of my baby. A strange thing to thank someone for.
My husband drove me home, still groggy and bleeding. I had pills to help with the bleeding, and rest would help with the grogginess. My husband would watch the kids. I stayed in bed all day watching the wind and rain lash the trees outside the window. It stormed. Stormed like the end of days. There was rain and hail and lightning and thunder and falling branches. It seemed like Nature was really pissed off. George Bush had won the election and I had aborted my baby and everything was wrong with the world. At the time, it seemed like a sign that I had done the right thing, that somehow it would be wrong to bring a baby into this world, into the middle of this storm. Those two losses -- the child that wouldn't be and the country that I perceived as spinning into ruin -- seemed twined together for me, and processing their pain, figuring out what they meant to me, couldn't be done separately.
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