Meika’s Story
Dear Amy,
I was born in 1971, to a 19 year old college student, 2 years before Roe v. Wade was decided. She never intended to keep me and committed to placing me for adoption early in her pregnancy. I grew up in a loving home where adoption was celebrated and have always felt proud to be an adoptee. Yet I know adoption was the only legal option for my birthmother.
Twenty years later when I was in college, I also became pregnant. I had naively thought that I couldn’t get pregnant if I were menstruating. I didn’t know that sperm can live in cervical fluid for 5 days and that I ovulate early in my cycle.
In those early days of my pregnancy I thought of my birthmother, whom I’ve never met, knowing we were in the same situation, separated by two decades. I wondered if she felt like I did; totally alone and terrified. Like my birthmother, I became pregnant by my high school boyfriend, someone who I loved but had no intention of marrying. Like my birthmother, I wanted to finish college before starting a family. Unlike my birthmother I had the choice to terminate my pregnancy. I felt ashamed as an adoptee that I wasn’t capable emotionally to carry the fetus to term and place them for adoption.
My school nurse referred me to an inner city public health clinic for the procedure. I remember how quiet the waiting room was and the sterile smell and ominous gloom that filled the air.. As I waited for my name to be called, I looked at the women sitting around me, all there for the same procedure as I was. I expected to see other college students like me. Instead I saw older women, some with children and husbands sitting next to them, some crying and holding a rosary, some staring blankly at a wall, one was nursing a baby. Our circumstances were different but our choice was the same. I realized that abortion touched different people’s lives for many reasons: financial, physical, emotional, mental.
More than a decade after that abortion, I was married and ready to start a family. Despite several years of trying to conceive, my husband and I weren’t able to. I thought many times that I was being punished for having an abortion. And even through those painful years of infertillty, I never regretted my abortion.
My husband and I are now parents to two beautiful children through domestic adoption. While adoption, as you’ve suggested, is a viable option for some women, it isn’t a simple solution as you appear to present it. Adoption is a lifelong journey for the birthmother and the adoptee. Even in the best case scenario, which I feel I was raised in, loved, cared for, cherished and accepted for who I was, adoptees always live with questions on their identity and biological histories. Many feel an innate sense of not belonging even though they know they’re very loved. They carry a longing that is hard to explain to others.
Women deserve more than adoption as a choice for an unviable or unintended pregnancy. You don’t need to agree with abortion to support the right for others who do.
Thank you for reading my letter.
Sincerely,
Meika