The misoprostol begins to take effect on the ferry from the island to the harbour: my uterus contracts, the contractions ripple through my body. The pain is unbearable, unfamiliar. I feel an urge to throw myself into the sea – anything to make it stop. Instead, I curl up against the window, knees pulled to my chest, hood over my head. Only once all the other islanders have left the ferry do I stand up and, unsteady, make my way down the stairs and outside into the pale winter air.

Such is the situation: I’m living on an island off Sweden’s west coast as a Scandinavia correspondent when I discover I’m unexpectedly pregnant. I do want children and am initially thrilled. But my partner lives in Amsterdam, and neither of us has a real income to speak of. We are both writers without steady positions, chronically lacking any real business sense. He can’t leave the Netherlands, and I can’t just leave Sweden. My life is here, for now, and I have no idea how I could upend everything within the timespan of eight months – a baby, moving back, a place to live, a new job.

Alongside the nausea arrives a growing dread. It’s January on the west coast: a constant, biting wind, my island bare and deserted. Gradually, I become entangled in a web of misery – winter blues, hormones, and the fundamental uncertainty of having a child without a monthly salary, without parental leave, without family nearby. After weeks of deliberation, weighing it all up while vomiting incessantly I decide to have an abortion. I see no other option. 

Early on 7 March, my partner and I travel to the hospital. The previous times I visited the abortion clinic – first for the ultrasound, which revealed I was already fourteen weeks pregnant and that you were in fact real, already had a face, and later for the first abortion pill that inhibits the pregnancy hormones – I took public transport from the harbour. But this time I insist my boyfriend call a taxi.

We’re assigned a room and a nurse. Still wearing my winter coat, I crawl into bed. The nurse, Åsa, gives me something for the nausea and, without questioning my pain, administers morphine. Then she strips off my down jacket and explains how the day will unfold. Every four hours, I’ll get a new dose of misoprostol, until the abortion is complete. Moving around helps – I’m definitely not doing that – and there’s a bedpan dangling in my toilet. Everything I expel is collected for inspection.

Through the window, I see a rectangle of blue sky. My partner sits silently in a chair in the corner of the room. An indeterminate amount of time later, I wake up with Åsa beside my bed. The pan contains no foetus, meaning I have to go through another round of misoprostol. Alongside the morphine, local anaesthesia is listed as an option. “Go ahead,” I say.

In the treatment room, Åsa inserts a needle into my cervix. As she administers a second injection, she says: “Your water broke.” And then: “Please look away.” My partner presses my face to his chest. Something leaves my body.

The emptiness creates room for tears. I press my nose into my partner’s sweater, I feel Åsa tear the paper from under my bottom, clean up the bloody mess, and make the whole scene seem presentable again before I’m wheeled out of the treatment room. Åsa remarks that this must be my first wheelchair ride, and I have a feeling that all the crocs-clad-staff can see what I’ve done – that they watched me enter pregnant and leave without a baby.

The physical relief is immense, and less than five minutes after the induced miscarriage, my body is screaming for food and fluids. Around five o’clock, after I’ve delivered the placenta and my fever has subsided, I’m discharged from Östra Sjukhuset. Bleeding heavily, yes, but as long as I don’t have to change my diaper-like pad more than three times an hour, it’s not considered alarming. I’ll bleed for weeks and will end up in the hospital twice, where it will eventually turn out that part of the placenta had remained.

I don’t believe in any God. Yet, I interpret this bleeding as a punishment that takes the form of reminding me, over the course of six weeks, of what’s no longer there. It’s the punishment for interrupting the natural course of events, the sublime process for which my body and life are ultimately intended: the making of a new body and new life. 

Over a plate of fast-food in the city, on the way home, it seems to sink in for the first time: I was three months pregnant, and now I’m empty. Then: the child I saw on the ultrasound, with that tiny nose and those little fingers – we’ll never know her. Who would she have become? Who would I have become as her mother? Panic rushes to my head. We have to go get her, I think. We have to go back. I cry, but keep quiet, afraid of coming across as melodramatic. It’s just an abortion; everyone has an abortion. Besides, it was your own choice.

Was it my choice? Certainly, in the sense that no one forced me. And also not, in the sense that, had circumstances been different, I wouldn’t have chosen this outcome and would never have wanted to make this choice. The decision, if you will, was driven by hormones and physical suffering, by financial concerns and lack of suitable housing, by the absence of a community, as in: it takes a village. My friends in Sweden would have helped me where they could, but each of them has a busy life, children of their own, a full-time job. At times I prayed for a miscarriage, not to diminish the experience – which must be horrific – but so that I wouldn’t have to make the unimaginable decision myself. Who am I to choose right, I, who know nothing about life? 

Let me be clear here: I wholeheartedly support the right to abortion. Opponents will at this point in the story proclaim: if that poor woman had been given a box of diapers, God’s child would have been saved. But this is not a plea against self-determination. I am grateful to live in a country where the right to abortion is enshrined. Where every pregnant person can, up to twenty-two weeks, access a free termination without explanation or external consent. I’m not arguing against abortion, rather against its limited portrayal. Search for abortion stories and you’ll essentially find two flavours: the loud anti-abortion voices under the self-appointed label of pro-lifers, as if those who do not identify as belonging to that group are, by definition, against life. You may Google that cheerful movement yourself.

The pro–choice camp is more diffuse, but essentially just as one-sided. Firstly, abortion is rarely discussed, even though according to statistics, my network is overflowing with women sharing the experience. In the Netherlands, a yearly 30,000 to 39,000 people with a uterus terminate a pregnancy. About one in three pregnancies ends in abortion. No one is obligated to speak out about such an intimate thing, but the silence is lonely: you have no frame of reference, no examples, no one to mirror yourself against.

Thus I turned to the arts, and there, contained in brilliant and less brilliant forms, I found a narrative almost as monotonous as that of the “against” camp: a woman falls pregnant unexpectedly, encounters resistance, gets the abortion she sought, is relieved, and begins a childless future. Examples include the magnificent The Event by Annie Ernaux; the film 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days by Cristian Mungiu; the recent April, a Georgian art-house film about an illegal abortion doctor in the misogynistic countryside. The lighter films Obvious Child by Gillian Robespierre and Never Rarely Sometimes Always by Eliza Hittman. The storyline depicted in these artistic expressions is as legitimate as it is important. And it’s not a story shared by all.

My experience is messier and doesn’t follow either of the two prescribed scripts. Can I be pro-choice and yet, after the initial relief from nausea, feel no relief? Even more controversial: am I allowed  to grieve this self-chosen loss? Not if I’m to believe the canon. You can’t be pro-choice and have conflicting feelings. Still, I experience them all: not necessarily my ratio with its cerebral arguments, but the soft animal of my body, as the poet Mary Oliver so aptly puts it. My body feels regret, misses her unborn child, and avidly and pointlessly tries to turn back the clock. She sheds red tears.

This is not a loss, I admonish myself. You didn’t lose; you relinquished. But the more I insist on my self–determination, on my individual choice, the greater becomes the angst. How could I reject you? Who would you have been today? An open conversation about the complexity of the abortion experience would have spared me so much self-hatred, so much doubt, so much isolation. Not the anti–abortion propaganda enforcing eternal regret and suicidal tendencies, but stories spanning a spectrum of emotions, and of the lack of a right choice. For those who recognise themselves in this piece: you are not crazy, not alone, and it does get better, though I still carry her with me every day. The sense of loss doesn’t necessarily diminish, but life around it will cautiously grow larger.

Daphne Latour–Oldenhof, policy officer at Fiom, the Dutch foundation specialising in unwanted pregnancies, agrees that I’m “absolutely not the only one who feels this way.” Fiom tries to counterbalance the dominant narrative. “For those who haven’t experienced abortion, an uncomplicated story is more appealing to hear,” says Latour–Oldenhof. Moreover, in some pro–choice circles, there is also the belief that any caveat about abortion, any discomfort, fuels the anti–abortion movement. This, apparently, causes self–censorship. “Many women are relieved, yet we also see plenty of women with mixed feelings. Women who step out of the abortion clinic and are not just relieved but are also emotional. That causes confusion: does grief indicate a wrong decision?”

There is apparently an established term for my belief that I have no right to grieve: unacknowledged grief. Latour–Oldenhof: “The choice for abortion is rarely a 100% yes, and almost always a matter of deliberation. Many women who choose the procedure have nevertheless considered carrying the pregnancy to term. Besides the loss of the pregnancy, they often lose something else: their former self–image, sometimes their relationship. These losses can cause grief.”

Let me take a moment here to take the wind out of the anti–abortionists’ sails. Yes, mixed feelings. No, depression and eternal regret. According to the scientific journal Social Science and Medicine, the strong post-abortion emotions gradually subside, and five years after the fact, 99 percent of women support their decision. In other words: the initial ambivalence, fuelled by the process of physically recovering from pregnancy, fades in almost all cases. Post-abortion grief doesn’t indicate a wrong decision. It is simply a choice you would rather not have had to make.

In early September the due date passes and I flee to the tundra. Far away, I long to be, from where I was aimlessly pregnant. A long winter later, it’s March, and I reflect on the day you came and went. I have nothing tangible to remember you by. No ultrasound, no footprint, no flowerpot grave. I feel the need to speak to someone who knows you existed. Who knows that, for a brief moment, I was somebody’s mother. 

I contact the hospital and a day later, I receive a call from the nurse, Åsa. The call comes unexpectedly, and I have to compose myself. Does she remember anything? “Your partner spoke English,” she says. She clearly has my medical records in front of her. “You came in at eight o’clock with fever, pain, and contractions. I administered morphine, and in the afternoon, when I administered an anaesthetic, the foetus arrived. Everything went as it was supposed to.”

“Can you remember what I was like?” I ask. “It’s been over a year ago,” she replies. It’s sobering: a traumatic event for me was, for her, just another day on the job. A successful medical abortion at fourteen weeks and two days, the placenta delivered, the fever subsided, the patient was given pancakes and discharged. The normalisation of the absurd, of walking into the ward three months pregnant and leaving without  pregnancy or baby.

“Do you feel any moral qualms?” I’ve seen the photos from the anti–abortion movement, the dissected foetuses. Once it concerned my own womb, when something had taken up residence in my body, it suddenly felt wrong – infanticide, as it’s still described in Dutch criminal law. “Your body is trying to protect it,” she explains. “It’s not your reason speaking.” The animal in me wanted to keep that new life at all costs. But Åsa doesn’t hesitate for an instance . “It’s an important right. Nothing more, nothing less.”

 Then I ask if that ultrasound still exists, and she says no, unfortunately. A silence. “Where is she now?” My voice breaks. “We cremate the foetuses and scatter them at the Kviberg cemetery, at the minneslund, the memorial plot.” That moves me: a normalised right and a normalised procedure, yet an acknowledgement that this is not the same as having a tooth pulled. That if not the foetus itself, then the person who carried that foetus deserves dignified closure. “There’s a place to lay flowers,” she says. “It’s a beautiful place.” 

I thank her – for that day, for her work, for taking the time to call me. I’ll go visit that plot at the cemetery in the north-east part of town. I’ll come see you there, little girl. I think it’s for the best. I really hope it is.

Further Credits:

  • Teri van der Heijden – Editor
  • Anna Vossers – Editor
  • Rosa Snijders – Illustrator