I don’t want to hear about how I murdered a baby. I don’t want to hear anyone tell me I was wrong. I can’t look at myself in the mirror. I don’t need your judgement. The memory of that procedure is sharp and severe, and it cuts clean down to my soul.

I couldn’t keep it, even if I had ever the desire to be a mother. The way I live isn’t conducive to motherhood. The father isn’t my first choice donor, and I am not a choice person for motherhood. I am flawed and selfish and this baby would be born into an unfair game, a life with so many problems, and I would be to blame for them.

I won’t go into it; suffice it to say that my body is not the ideal environment to spawn new life, and my actual existence is even less conducive to such a mature, wholesome, pure thing. I am haunted by what happened in those stirrups, my legs strapped down, the sound of my heart monitor racing as I was pried open stone-cold sober. A milligram of Ativan was a joke. They couldn’t get an IV in me, so I was present for the entire thing. If this weren’t the second week I’d tried to have this done, the second time I’d taken off work at a new job, and what had to be the last time I heard the threats from my boyfriend about my intentions as a pregnant woman, maybe I could have seen a real doctor and have gotten the care I needed, instead of these memories that mix and filter into one another, memories of past pain, this new trauma, my yesterday and today bleeding into now...