My life could be summed up by the extreme human experience of abortion. For years, reading or hearing about an abortion immediately turned the words into a maelstrom of emotions. Every time I came upon the song by America “A Horse with No Name” or the book The Last of the Just, which accompanied me during a shameful decade of my life, I was deeply upset.

It is not a comfortable thought to contemplate the morality of my actions. The moral issue of abortion is a difficult one, I think, because it is unusual. And it is unusual because the human fetus is so unlike anything or anyone else, and because the relationship between the fetus and the pregnant woman is so unique, so unlike any other relationship.

I began this book in 2001 as the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady story of an older man and a teenager, a teacher and a student, and the predictable but not uninteresting dissolution of their mutual fascination. But this changed. The story that needed to be told was that of an addiction. Despite my efforts to fight it, I became obsessed with the idea. Following through with the book seemed a terrifying prospect, especially for those close to me. I was warned about the possible hatred directed at me from both pro-choice and pro-life camps. My testimony was fated to be misunderstood.

The other choice would have been to just remain silent. Yet, the fact that my personal experience of pregnancy and abortion is a difficult thing to understand did not seem a good enough reason to dismiss it. Furthermore, that clandestine abortion is a thing of the past does not make legalized abortion a “normal” event. Those who choose to have one, no matter the reasons, tend to remain silent; a veil of secrecy hangs heavily. I, myself, have eluded until now my feelings about abortion and about the identity of an embryo and a fetus.

This testimony, though, does not grapple with the political issues revolving around abortion, nor does it have anything to do with illegal, unsafe abortion, a historical and important concern for generations of women. Instead, my story is an exploration of family trauma, self-inflicted wounds, compulsive patterns, and the moral clarity and moral confusion guiding my choice. This story won’t fit neatly into the bumper sticker slogan “my body, my choice.” In order to protect reproductive freedom, many of us pro-choice women usually choose to not talk publicly about experiences such as mine because we might compromise our right to choose. In opening up the conversation on abortion to the existential experience that it can represent to many, for the sake of greater honesty and a richer language of choice, we run risks.

***

Abortion is a painful event brought about by inadequate actions. “Pro-life” advocates exploit and sensationalize the experience and ignore the mistakes. One such human “mistake” is the economic pressure compounded by ignorance that is the most common reason for undergoing abortion. It is inevitable to see an anti-life sentiment in the pro-life movement when it protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives. A recent article in the New York Times disclosed Latin America’s abortion statistics and the alarming results of a rigid fundamentalism combined with poverty and ignorance. The United Nations reports that over four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, and up to five thousand women die each year from complications from the procedure. The rate of abortions in Latin America is forty per one thousand women of childbearing age, the highest outside Eastern Europe.

These figures reflect, among many things, the ineffectiveness of teaching abstinence as the only form of contraception, which is the general program followed by churches and schools. Latin America holds some of the world’s most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the world’s highest rate of abortions. In the United States, however, where abortion is legal and sex education is broader, the abortion rate reached a twenty-four-year low in the 1990s with its lowest level in 2002, when there were 20.9 abortions per 1,000 women ages fifteen to forty-four, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Nevertheless, Western European youths who are as sexually active as American girls but have a significantly greater exposure to sexual education and informed use of contraceptives, are seven times less likely to have an abortion and seventy times less likely to have gonorrhea. It becomes unsustainable to identify at any level with the “pro-life” movement when it fundamentally calls for the United States to regress to Latin America’s horrific abortion and female-mortality figures and bluntly ignores Western Europe’s impressive low abortion statistics.

As much as I am determined to tell the account of my addiction to abortion without dwelling on the political and philosophical debate surrounding Roe v. Wade, I cannot go on without acknowledging that thirty-three years after the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its landmark ruling, states are placing an increasing number of restrictions on abortion. The ruling gave women a constitutionally protected right to choose abortion in the early stages of pregnancy. Unlike “pro-life” beliefs, the ruling acknowledged and addressed the fact that the human missteps leading to the painful reality of abortion, like the psychological ones afflicting me or the economic ones pursuing so many, are beyond control. Thus, a nation’s obligation to ensure a woman’s right to life and health --- which anti-abortion laws violate --- had to be the overriding principle. With the alarming increase in abortion limitations, the missteps and lapses that make up the reality of abortion can only be compounded.

Mine is a story that in part reveals the lack and then emergence of a sense of responsibility when I exercised my right to abortion. I want to explore how when abortion takes on repetitive and self-mutilating qualities it can point to an addiction. In the process, I hope to address questions that might elucidate how pro-life and pro-choice advocates are, as it is with many profound and extreme human positions, both right and wrong.

For years, it didn’t occur to me that there was anything to tell about abortion. Quite the opposite. There was much to forget. But I discovered that many other women were hungry to come to terms with a past scarred by cowardice and the need to cloak themselves in someone else’s power. Many had a history of repeat abortions. They, like me, were eager to find a language to articulate an experience they had seldom spoken about. My testimony is not unique. Beyond the antiseptic, practical language of Planned Parenthood and the legalistic or moralistic discourse of Roe v. Wade and its pro-choice and pro-life counterparts, there are few words to articulate individual, intimate accounts. About half of American women having abortions in 2004 (of 1.5 million reported) had had a prior abortion. Close to 20 percent had had at least two previous abortions and 10 percent three or more. A considerable number of these repeat abortions occur among populations with high levels of contraceptive use.

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“I had twelve abortions in eleven years and they were the happiest years of my life.” (Fifteen in fifteen years, when counting three others by another man.) I wrote those words years ago, before I came to understand the truth. I know I’m destined to be misunderstood, that many will see my nightmare as a story of abusing a right, of using abortion as a means of birth control. It isn’t that. My nightmare is part of the awful secret, and the real story is shrouded in shame, colonialism, self-mutilation, and a family history that features a heroic grandmother, a suicidal mother, and two heroin-addicted brothers.

I know this account can’t resolve the moral dilemma of my actions. Yet, I wanted to understand the spell a pregnant body exercised over me, my flawed desire to become someone, or something, else. The diaries I kept guided me. My promise to the reader is to deliver an account of my addiction, a steady flow of unhappiness, the X-ray of a delusion, and ultimately, the redeeming face of motherhood.

Halfway through working on this book I got pregnant for the sixteenth time. I don’t think I would have been able to give birth without the call to accountability and self-reflection writing this story down demanded. My daughter became the coherence emerging from the shameful mass of thirty-five years.

Yes, I was an abortion addict and I do not wish for a scapegoat.

Everything can be explained, justified, our last century tells us.

Everything except for the burden of life interrupted that shall die with me.