Dear You

​In writing this letter I researched stories on abortions. Abortion sits in one of two categories – wrong or right. Pro-life or pro-choice. I tried
​to read up on the middle ground, there just isn’t a lot out there. There isn’t anyone saying, “it’s okay to do it and feel sad, but not be angry”. Either women feel a sense of power in their choice, or completely devastated. What if you feel neither, but still want that to be okay? What if it just made sense at the time?
But what if you do feel devastated, do you not have the right the be heartbroken and grieve? Do you not have the right to process your grief, to verbalise it, to express it?

I never thought I would write about this. I’ve never known how, I’m still not sure I know how.

Dear you,

(You? I don’t know what to call you, sorry.) I never thought I would write to you and maybe it seems ridiculous that I am. We’ve never met, and we will never ever meet. I do want to acknowledge you and your existence, though, however brief it was. And I want Alexis to know about you. This blog was created for her. I had no doubt that one day your existence might be addressed, but I never thought I might address you in the way I do your sister.

Yes. You have a sister, she’s wonderful.
And your sister, she had a brother? A sister? I’m not even sure what to call you.

I carried the shame of you for a long time – first for allowing you to exist, then for taking away your chance to exist. Both of which I felt the need to repent for. But I don’t feel that need anymore. I don’t feel sadness when my thoughts gravitate towards you. I don’t feel ashamed. You once were, and now you’re not. My heart doesn’t break for you. There aren’t silent tears for you. And it is because of this, that I want to write to you now.

To be honest, I don’t how to refer to you. Baby? To me, that’s a pet name. That’s the name I call Alexis. Fetus? That’s too cold, it doesn’t feel respectful enough. Despite my choice, I still hold you in my heart and to call you by that word doesn’t reflect how I feel about you.
You were - still are - my child. I did think about names for you, even if it was briefly. Again, as brief as it was, I imagined what gender you would be, what you would look like, sound like, what your life would be like. I thought about it, and I thought about you.

Right now, as I’m writing, it’s late. Well not that late, but late enough that I should be sleeping. Late enough that my laptop should be turned off, as should my mind.
But you have been there, stealing my thoughts, for the past week or so.
I have thought about you. I have thought about me. I have thought about Alexis.

Very few people know about you, and I’ve kept you to myself on purpose. I know too many people who are against my choices to acknowledge you or talk about you freely. Recently, I was talking to someone about their journey and it made me think of you. And then I made the decision to write to you. But how do I write to someone I’ve never met? How do I write to someone whose existence I ended? I mean, no matter what someone believes, that’s ultimately what I did, didn’t I? I was not only responsible for the creation of your existence, but also the end of it.

When I found out about you I was sitting on a public toilet. Band-aids were worn as accessories on my arms and my breath smelt from the chemicals I had just inhaled. As I write this, I’m shaking my head. It’s so clichéd. It is something out of a movie, not something out of what was a very clean, tame, and predictable life.

Two lines appeared. Fuck.
I closed my eyes. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

When I saw the lines, I was not excited to learn of your existence. You deserved to be celebrated. But I didn’t celebrate. Your life deserved more than what I felt like I could offer. More than what I would offer. Those two lines did not represent life, they represented an inconvenience. I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have time for you. I need you to know that I’m not heartless, nor have I ever been. But when you existed, I wasn’t on a healing journey, I was on a hurting journey.

The plastic stick that declared your existence hit the bottom of a bin. I walked into the daylight and allowed more smoke to not only weaken me, but weaken your fragile, growing lungs. I was already destroying you.

I started to feel angry. I wasn’t angry at you though. I knew that you were innocent. You didn’t ask for this, you didn’t ask to come into the world, a fatherless child with a broken mum.
This wasn’t you. This was me.
I was angry at me.
I was angry at a whole lot of other people too.
I was angry at God. I was so very angry at God.
I was angry at him for a whole long list of things, and I added you to that list too.

In making the decision to terminate you, I shattered myself. Even though my choice made sense, even though it still makes sense. I had grown up as part of the church. I believed - believe - in God. I thought that God gave life and took life, and that those decisions were for God and God alone. When I made that choice, I played God. In losing you, I lost myself. I was the girl who was so pro-life that she wrote an entire essay on it. I had built my life on the foundations of faith, and in a moment, I blew those foundations up.

But at the time, despite everything I believed, it still made sense. How could I possibly be responsible for another life? I could hardly hold onto my own. At the time, I had a plan. The plan was that I wouldn’t be here. I didn’t want to be here. There wasn’t room for you in this plan. You living, meant me living. And I really didn’t want to live. You had 9 months until your life started, but according to my plan, I only had about 6 months left of mine. I just wanted the hurt and the sadness and the pain to end. I just wanted to die. I believed that if the pain hadn’t eased up in 6 months’ time, it was never going to.

I thought through all my options. Maybe if I did keep you alive, I could just take my own life after. It didn’t make sense though, you were already coming into the world without a dad, I couldn’t leave you without a mum too. I even thought about how it would be if we both made it through this. But I had no idea how I could support you. I would just resent you. I thought I could just take both our lives at once.

As I reflect on it now, I can see how unwell I was. The person I am today would find a way to make it work. The person I was then, she just couldn’t. She just didn’t have it in her. Please forgive her. I’m still learning to sometimes. She was so unwell, she was so sad, her emotions were so fragile.

I booked a doctor’s appointment straight away. Walking in, I told the doctor what my next step would be. I called the clinic to book an appointment. They explained to me I had two options, medical and surgical. I asked questions and decided on surgical.

My mind played back all the stories I had read on abortions, all the pro-life stories. The women talked of cold, sterile clinics. I didn’t feel that way. It was just a waiting room. A waiting room full of people who supported my decision. People who didn’t care about my decision. I looked at those around me and wondered why they were making the same decision that I was. I remember looking at a couple. They filled out the paper work together and I wondered why. Too young? Not enough money? Not the right time? It was the first time I didn’t feel pro-life. The way I did about 7 weeks before. Now I sat with those people because I was one of ‘those people’. The teenager who once wrote her essay on being pro-life no longer existed in me. Instead I was a girl who wanted forgiveness for making a choice about something that she really didn’t understand.

I thought about you. I wondered if you were a life. When was a life deemed a life?

My name was called. Sitting down with the surgeon I asked him, “When is it a life?”
I knew my answer. Now I was asking a professional for his answer. To be honest, I hoped he wouldn’t agree me. If he said that you weren’t yet deemed alive then I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But he did, he agreed with me. The man who faced me responded with a chill in his voice, a frustration almost, “It’s a life now.” Guilt washed over me. And I left. I walked out after he growled at me for wasting his time and wasting the time of his other patients. I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t understand. For some reason, I expected some small amount of grace from him. Surely, I wasn’t the first to ask, the first to want to think it over a bit more. I think what I wanted was for him to tell me that I was stronger than I thought. That I had made it through so much and I could make it through this too. I wanted him to tell me I would be okay, that I could do it. I’m not sure why I thought a complete stranger would tell me that.

It wasn’t long before they called me to apologise for what took place and the way I was treated. From here I was offered a medical abortion and I took their offer. I went in that day and told myself that it was the better option. I told myself that if I was hurting you, I deserved to feel the pain you felt. I left Alexis with her dad for the weekend, read the instructions and went to bed. And without going into too much detail it was the most painful thing I had put my body through, and it didn’t go well. Despite doing everything right, pieces of you still existed within me, meaning that I would need the surgery anyway.

I assumed this was God’s way of letting me know he was angry with me. I assumed I was getting what I deserved. I assumed I was paying the price for removing something that others begged and longed for. Others cried for your life to be inside them. I cried because your life was inside me. And I felt so sad that you were placed in my body and not the body of someone else. I felt heartbroken for every baby who miscarried and every mother who carried the heartbreak and hopelessness of an empty womb. You should have been placed in them, not in me. It’s what you deserved and what they deserved.

When I woke up from surgery, a wave of grief hit me. The grief overwhelmed me. I had lost you forever. I was empty. By removing you, I removed a piece of who I was. I’m not sad anymore, but when I woke up, I was. I lost a baby, yes it was by choice, but I still lost a baby. I still lost you. I would never compare my loss with the loss of an unborn child who was longed for, but I still lost you.

I had lost so much in such a short space of time.
Family. Friends. The future I expected. My support network.
However, I think you were my biggest loss of all.

Your life should have represented fresh hope, a new start, growth.
And when they told me that all had gone well, that I no longer had you in the safety of my body, your life represented brokenness, sadness and deep sorrow.

I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself, and I don’t. The person I was though, I feel sad for her. My heart breaks for her. I feel sad for who I was because she didn’t feel as though she was allowed to grieve. When she walked out of the hospital that day, she left her grief in there. Because of her life-long belief that abortion was wrong, she believed that grief was a right and that she didn’t have that right.

My heart also breaks for you. You would have loved the person I am now, and the person I am now would have loved you beyond measure. I feel sad for you because you didn’t get to meet your wonderful big sister. And I feel sad for Alexis, because she was made to be a big sister. She would have doted on you and loved you an annoying amount.

I hope you’re in heaven. I hope unborn babies go to heaven, no matter how they leave their mums. You deserve to be in heaven. You didn’t do anything wrong, so I hope you get to spend your days with the God who created your life.

Baby,
I want to say sorry. Sorry, from a strong female who was once weak. Sorry that I didn’t fight for you, or hope for you, or pray for you like I did - and do - for your sister. Sorry that I didn’t give you the life you deserved. I’m sorry that your role in my life was to teach me something, that I’m writing you a letter because you were a lesson. I’m sorry that you didn’t have the chance to learn your own lessons. I’m sorry that you were a part of my past and that you don’t get to be a part of our future.

I wanted to write this to you because there are so many females who have gone through similar experiences and I want it to be okay to talk about. There is such a push for everyone to be either pro-life or pro-choice. But what if you don’t know? I still don’t know. I don’t write to you as a strong female who is proud of the choice she made, who exercised her female right. But in saying that, I also don’t write to you as a broken female who deeply longs for her unborn child.

I once read a story about a woman who grieved for her aborted baby for so long, that years later she still dreamed of her baby when she slept. I was never that woman. I didn’t know how to grieve for you and I didn’t know that it was okay or acceptable to. Pro-choice feminists would have celebrated my right to decide, while pro-life Christians would have told me that I didn’t have that right. There is no space for grief in either of those options.
Its either black or white. Right or wrong. And if you’re in the middle, it’s not talked about. It should be though.

I now know that I had the right to grieve, that I should have.

I don’t know what I’m trying to gain from this letter. Maybe it’s more for Alexis than it is for me. I want her to know that sometimes we make a decision, that years later still confuses us. I want her to learn that no matter what she goes through she will not go through it alone. That I will always stand by her, no matter how messy things become. I want her to know that she doesn’t ever need to justify her story.

I want Alexis to know that just because she lives a lifetime believing something, it doesn’t mean she can’t change her mind. I want her to know that situations aren’t always just black and white, right and wrong. I want her to know that she doesn’t ever have the right to judge someone on their past. Their decisions belong to them, just as her decisions belong to her. Her job is not to judge, only to love.

I want her to know that all feelings should be acknowledged. That should she ever feel the need to stop and grieve or cry, that there is no shame in that, but there is strength in it. I want her to know that you can only move forward when you forgive yourself. I want her to know that the God she believes in, he’s a forgiving God and he doesn’t just give us what we deserve. Instead, he gives us love. The same love that I know he gives you.

Baby,
Thank you for teaching me, for helping me grow, for making me own up to who I am and for showing me that I shouldn’t carry this shame. Even though I did something that I thought was bad, it didn’t make me a bad person. It made me… well, it made me a person.

The truth is that I’m sorry that you’re not on this journey with us.
Tonight, in this moment, I wish I was praying for and tucking two babies in, not just one.
I love you.