There Is No Modern Love Without Legal Abortion

The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the United States Supreme Court this year has the effect of criminalizing being a woman. Premarital sex can be considered criminal because it involves the risk of unwanted pregnancy—and women have always found ways to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Because you can lose rights over your autonomy at any time, you cannot really regard yourself as a full citizen. Female bodies are being made into crime sites.

After Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022, I found myself rereading her works. My favorite work of hers has always been Happening, which recounts the story of an abortion she had in 1963, when she was twenty-three years old.

In the book, Ernaux as a young woman is desperately trying to find someone to perform an abortion on her. Because of the strict laws against abortion in France at the time, everyone she approaches is frightened. They beg her to not ask them questions, to not get them involved in this criminal activity. Even discussing the abortion with her makes them complicit in a crime. She is illegal.

Again and again she is scorned and turned away. But, on her own, through persistence, she manages to find a middle-aged woman in a small apartment who performs an abortion on her.

What made this book memorable to me was that it captures the existential loneliness of being a sexually active young woman and being all alone. Abortion laws are a practice that keeps women in this shameful condition, where everything that happens to them is taboo—even to speak of or voice their concerns about.

*

I remember being struck by something Alicia Elliott wrote in her essay “Weight” about becoming a teenage mom: She said that despite everything she had learned in sex-ed class in high school, when the time came to have sex with her boyfriend, she wanted to say no but didn’t really know how. It can be almost impossible to communicate about sex when you are a teenager, let alone talk about contraception.

I can’t recall anything as particularly cringey as asking teenage boyfriends to wear condoms. It was a total disruption and ruined the already-awkward moment. They always looked at me startled, as though they had never heard of this object I spoke of. Then they frantically looked around their room, throwing things out of the way, as though they had misplaced a pair of keys. Sometimes they would run out of the bedroom to ask roommates. I had two different boyfriends make an attempt to put a condom on and then say they couldn’t figure it out before throwing the condom to the side.

The conversation around birth control only happened once sex was underway. What could you do if they said no to a condom? I could barely whisper the word condom; I did not have the wherewithal to argue for it. Honestly, I would have been more comfortable climbing out a bathroom window. The fear of upsetting a boy, or having him call me a tease, or him not enjoying the sexual experience was paralyzing. And a boy who says no to a condom is likely to be a boy who is going to pressure you for sex. Camille Paglia was on talk shows at the time, saying that if you went up to a boy’s room, that was it: Sex was on the table.

*

There was an expectation from all the guys I dated that if I got pregnant, I would have an abortion. I lived in Montreal, where abortions were covered by universal health care, so they could care less. It wouldn’t even cost them a cent. I resented this.

In the movie Fatal Attraction, Alex, played by Glenn Close, gets pregnant after having a fling with a married businessman. She, horrifyingly to him, chooses not to have an abortion. The consequence is that she has to be killed. The woman who gets pregnant must not drag a man into her drama. She is a terrifying woman.

When I was in high school, a friend of mine found out she was pregnant. I went with her to the children’s hospital to get an abortion. To get to the hospital, the quickest way was to pass through Pigeon Park. It was plagued with pigeons. If you sat down, pigeons would alight all around you and stare at you. If you tried to eat a sandwich, they would attack, trying to get it out of your mouth.

I never walked through the square ordinarily. When you are a child, you know there are certain areas that are off-limits to you. They belong to adults, grown-ups who are engaging in activities that children are not supposed to see. The pigeons were a sort of magical force field that kept average citizens out of the park. It was left to drug dealers and other sorts of shady goings on. But we were headed for an abortion. The criminal history of abortion relegates pregnant girls to the fringes: We were the riffraff now. The pigeons flew all around us, as though heralding our fall from grace.

It was strange to be going to the children’s hospital for something so seedy and secretive; we were skipping class and her parents didn’t know. There was a very popular telethon that would take over the airwaves every year to raise money for the children’s hospital, in which they would talk about all the types of procedures that they performed in the hospital. They never said there was a part of the hospital that gave teenage girls abortions.

The criminal history of abortion relegates pregnant girls to the fringes: We were the riffraff now.

Following the abortion, my friend was not upset about the lost fetus. But she became enraged about having needed the abortion in the first place and how she alone had been left to figure the whole thing out.

She began writing angry messages and poems and putting them in the locker of the boy who had impregnated her. On Valentine’s Day, she spent all her money to have single roses delivered to his class with anonymous messages detailing her hatred of him. She snuck into a classroom before the bell rang and wrote in large letters on the blackboard, “I DID NOT GET PREGNANT ALONE.”

Anyhow, she made it her business to remind him of the abortion every day. She’s the single pundit I’ve met who has actively shamed men for abortions.

*

The week after her abortion, I went back to the children’s hospital and asked if I could have some birth control pills. I had no idea how to get them before that.

I was on the pill for years. On the last day of a term in university, I realized I was out of birth control, so I went to the university’s health clinic to get a prescription. When I arrived at the clinic, the receptionist told me that all the spots were filled and I could not see a doctor. I explained my situation, that I just needed a prescription or a refill to get through the holidays, since they were closing down for Christmas. She said, “Nope.” She said I should go look for another clinic to get a prescription.

This was terrible news. To go to a walk-in clinic would involve going at seven in the morning, and if I wasn’t turned away, I’d have to wait five or six hours to see a doctor. I called two clinics on the pay phone, but they were not taking new patients. I thought it seemed easier to just make it through the holidays. And then I would go back to the school clinic and ask for another prescription.

I did not make it through the holidays. I had sex on New Year’s Eve with an ex-boyfriend. If I had easy access to Plan B, I would have taken it. But back then, Plan B involved a trip to the doctor’s office, waiting five or six hours, and explaining what had happened, hoping they would prescribe it to me. And it was the holidays, and most of the clinics were closed.

When you are a girl and you awaken in the morning after having unprotected sex, you are often mortified, filled with regret. You might imagine that sex between two people would be a moment when you are in the same boat, but my ex was not at all concerned. When I brought up my fears of pregnancy, he looked out the window at the snow falling. “We will name the baby after Franz Kafka,” he said.

He had other plans anyway. He wanted to take all his Christmas presents to the pawn shop so he could buy drugs. We were both barely twenty years old. Instead of finding an emergency clinic, we got high and listened to music. The flowers from the quilt grew all around, and we were hidden away where no adults could find us.

*

In Happening, the stress of Ernaux’s pregnancy causes her to fall behind in her schoolwork. The undercurrent of her anxiety is that if she does not have an abortion, she will return to the working-class roots from whence she came, and all her dreams of being a writer will be dashed.

I didn’t have an abortion. By the time I did realize I was pregnant from that encounter, I was four months along. I had symptoms, but I was still having a light period, and I did not know you could just go into a pharmacy and get a pregnancy test. I did not know anything! I had a degree in English literature. I only knew what the Victorians did when they got pregnant. I thought you had to go see a doctor and wait for blood-test results.

I found having a baby shockingly impossible. I couldn’t help but see how having a baby deferred all my hopes and dreams. My body had betrayed me. My lower-class body. I had thought I could cross class lines. I had thought going to McGill made me middle-class, like the other kids. But, of course, it did not. I was penniless, breastfeeding a three-week-old baby, exactly like any other girl from my background.

I begged everyone I knew for help when I had a baby. I begged my family. I begged the baby’s father. I begged the baby’s father’s family. I begged my friends. They all made it clear that this was my predicament. There are few conditions as alienating as motherhood. Being poor and giving birth to a child that would exist in poverty was part of my punishment for being an unwed mother.

I was like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, who is cast out of Salem society and walks around in a cape with a red A emblazoned on it for being an unwed mother. At her side is her wee daughter, Pearl, who must slink around in infamy along with her mother.

In situations where abortion is not an option, forced birth and forced adoption of the baby has been the norm. But these children are not treated well. In the 1940s and ’50s in Quebec, where I am from, unwed mothers were encouraged to give their children up to the Catholic Church. There were wide-scale abuses, including diagnosing children with mental illness in order to receive larger stipends from the government.

In contrast, there are no consequences that befall women who have state-sanctioned abortions. The process of getting them can range from being inconvenient to awful. But 95 percent of women express feeling no regret or remorse after having an abortion.

If a tiny fetus was actually a baby, then how could this statistic be possible? Wouldn’t some women’s maternal instincts kick in? Wouldn’t they feel some sort of guilt over being a murderer? They do not. And the only conclusion we can draw from this is that a fetus is not at all a human being.

Once a fetus grows into a baby, most mothers love with an immediate fervor that really has no parallel. Only 9 percent of women turned away from an abortion put their baby up for adoption: They can’t bear the trauma of separating from their child and not being there for it, even if they did not want this baby and knowing full well it will upend all their future plans, because they can’t help being attached to the baby once it is a human being.

But lawmakers are obsessed with this mythological fetus, which is spoken of in religious terms.

I lived a couple blocks away from the Morgentaler Abortion Clinic for years in Montreal. Every day there was a group of people who sat across the street with homemade signs about women going to hell. They had the same vibe as the groups of people who stand together at the subway with handwritten signs laminated with Scotch tape that say, “God is upset.” In the Bible, it says that pain during childbirth is meant to be a punishment. Getting pregnant necessitates some sort of punishment.

*

There’s a rhetoric of death and seediness that hangs over abortion. This is because of the dark history of illegal abortion. Even when people talk about abortion now, they speak of “back-alley” abortions, as though young women will be once again forced to go into small upstairs apartments, with the wallpaper of a social realist film, to be operated on by knitting needles or other household items. Despite the availability of abortion pills, we still think of abortions as this barbaric act. Wouldn’t an illegal abortion now most likely involve someone mailing you a pill?

That, again, is part of the deliberate ignorance imposed on women’s health. Abortifacient drugs have been used by women to induce abortion since antiquity. Abortion pills began to be developed in France when women in Brazil began to take an over-the-counter medication for ulcers, one whose side effects included abortion. And then doctors made it a long, convoluted process to get these pills.

An unwanted pregnancy is not considered a medical condition. It is a curse, something wrong. It is proof that you have been a whore, and pregnancy is the true punishment. That is why the lawmakers want to make it illegal: So that women cannot enjoy sex and are forced to take on all the responsibility and blame for getting pregnant. While Roe v. Wade has been overturned, there are no laws being put in place that will charge men with getting women pregnant without their consent.

I got pregnant almost thirty years ago, and it was surprising to me how much I related to the existential loneliness that Annie Ernaux felt in the 1960s. It breaks my heart that the same hurdles are in place to accessing reproductive health care now, over fifty years later. Even now that the abortion pill has become widely available, the same moral judgements hang over it. This has nothing to do with actually believing a fetus has inalienable rights, as fetuses continue to be harvested for scientific research—to find cures for health conditions men suffer from as well.

After the emergence of Covid-19, life became much harder for mothers. They began having to leave jobs en masse and return to the traditional role of homemaker. Women’s jobs and careers were suddenly dispensable during the pandemic. Then abortion rights came under fire. The rights and happiness of people with uteruses have never been inalienable rights. We may awaken any morning to find that they are gone, in order to create new fascistic patriarchal control over our bodies. It’s always been a struggle, as a woman, to have agency over your own health, your own reproductive system, and your own sexual choices.

Sex is about so many other things than getting pregnant, even physical pleasure. We don’t only have sex because it feels good. We have sex because it is a way of sharing intimacy. It is a way to express love and affection. It is something two people can share apart from the rest of the world. And in that way, it is holy and sacred. But it can only be so if all people are allowed to speak openly about their needs—and for accidents that result in unwanted pregnancies to be treated with openness and care and help. These mistakes cannot be criminalized. There can be no modern love without legal abortion.

• 0