On Pregnancy and Schools

1.

I was pregnant in the same year as one of my students. I was twice her age (14) and then some. She had her baby first so that on the day that she stayed after class to tell me that it was just so hard for her to finish her homework while caring for her newborn son I was myself entirely not up to the task of grading that homework because I needed to get up from my desk every ten minutes and contemplate puking in the classroom trashcan.

2.

Once, when I was in fourth grade, I finished my work early (as usual) and picked up the book I was reading for fun. There was a word I didn’t know, so I went up to Ms. Maricle at the teacher’s desk and asked her what it meant. She gave me a concerned look and told me to ask my parents. But then, about ten minutes later, she called me back up and said, “‘Abortion’ is when a woman removes a pregnancy from her body.”

3.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away 24 days ago, 46 days before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In spite of the refusal to consider Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat nine months before the 2016 election, Senate Republicans quickly affirmed their commitment to push Trump’s nominee through a vote. That nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, is widely believed to be the vote that would overturn Roe v. Wade, should she be confirmed.

4.

What would I do, I wondered at age 14, if I became pregnant? It was a mostly hypothetical question given that I had only held a boy’s hand at the awards ceremony for our state Latin competition, but I had a lingering anxiety over the possibility of insemination via public toilets. I imagined jumping off a cliff or opening my wrists or any other of the dramatic ways I had seen in the movies of ending my life along with the one inside of me. I could not imagine telling my parents, who had made it clear that their position was that sex before marriage was immoral in spite of an anecdote they liked to tell about my mother burning breakfast when they were dating that had me wondering what she was doing over at my father’s apartment so early in the morning.

5.

I knew from the moment that Ms. Maricle told me about it that I believed that abortion was choice that a woman should have, but when I finally became pregnant myself, my feelings changed. I don’t mean that I came to think that abortion was wrong but that I now understood it as a nuanced and complicated issue rather than an abstract thought experiment. After years of taking the pill, my fiancé and I were surprised and disappointed to find that we didn’t seem able to conceive. So when things finally worked, after check-ups and shots and procedures, I felt deeply guilty for feeling so physically and emotionally miserable. When I thought about everything that I was giving up to become a mother, I felt panicked and suffocated. (I had to quit taking my antidepressant during my pregnancy.) I couldn’t sleep more than an hour or two at a time. I developed ovarian cysts. The low, deep ache near my cervix never seemed to let up, and around month five, I lost feeling in my fingertips. And through it all, I thought — how could a woman endure this for a baby she didn’t even want?

6.

Project Self-Respect was the name of Clear Creek ISD’s sex education program, delivered to students over three days via their ninth grade biology classes. They showed us a slide show of close-up images of a gonorrhea infection that developed in a woman’s eye after she touched her face after touching a man’s penis. We watched a ‘90s VHS tape of a testimonial of a 16-year-old girl in the late stages of AIDS; her skeletal frame told us that she knew that she didn’t have much longer to live but that she wanted to pass along the message that abstinence was the only form of safe sex. The session concluded with the instructor telling us that condoms were essentially useless as preventing the spread of HIV.

7.

Although my daughter is only seventeen months old, I know that it is possible that she will someday be pregnant when she doesn’t want to be. I know it’s possible that she will experience a very much desired pregnancy but face the devastating news that the child she is nurturing will only experience a very brief time in this world full of suffering or that her own life would be in serious risk by carrying to term. During the time that I was growing her inside of me, I began to feel my duty to protect my tiny, beautiful miracle, and that didn’t stop once she joined me in this world, and I don’t expect it ever will – not when she’s fourteen or twenty-seven or thirty-nine. I never want her to be without the choice to be safe and healthy and happy.

8.

My student dropped the honors English class in which I had her, but I still sometimes saw her hanging around in the halls. I showed her a picture of my daughter when she was born, and she told me about her son. “Maybe you’ll have him someday, miss,” she told me. I thought about all of the conferences that I had had with mothers whose teenagers I taught and the realization upon talking to them that they were my age or younger. When I was in college, you had a toddler, I thought. When I was traveling through Europe, you were packing school lunches and helping with science fair.

9.

I believe that everyone who might become pregnant has a right to choose to have an abortion; but I don’t believe that the people who have sincerely worked through the moral calculations of this issue and arrived at a different answer than I did are evil or misogynistic or backwards. Instead, I feel like we should be united in the end goal of having fewer people who want or need abortions in the first place, and it’s obvious to me that schools plays a critical role in that dynamic through the disseminating information about pregnancy and its prevention, facilitating conversations about healthy relationships and consent, and supporting students in creating stable financial futures that will allow them to plan for their families. To me, those goals are pro-life.