“I’m afraid you’ll blame me,” Ryan said. “You’ll wake up in twenty years and wonder where your sixth baby went.” True, I’d fought, lobbied, and advocated for more babies, and now I felt nearly incapable of nullifying this one. But I’d go to the appointment. State-mandated counseling might help me decide. Maybe the ultrasound technician would confirm some anomaly, liberating me from the freedom of choice.
I drove to Milwaukee alone. Outside the clinic, which was hidden away in an old building on the east side of the city, a handful of protesters marched. My heart dropped like a yo-yo on a tight string. With some luck, I found a parking spot on another block, approached the clinic through an alley, and emerged a couple hundred feet from the entrance. “Don’t kill your baby today,” a man whooped, a fiery and scripted greeting. His sign depicted the word MURDER in thick letters like it was a trademark.
Was this, finally, my coup de grâce? Tina Last—my alter ego, my deepest fear—had come to roost. She remained confused when the state of Wisconsin charged her with child neglect. Love and negligence were incompatible, right? For Tina Last, crime was a matter of perspective. Wisconsin statutes define murder, or “first-degree intentional homicide,” in part, as causing “the death of an unborn child with the intent to kill that unborn child,” even if the Supreme Court has ruled otherwise. In the eyes of this man—one of the “nut jobs,” as he’d be referred to inside the clinic—I was a premeditated killer, but was I really? In my mind, I was intercepting an egg; but he probably would have pegged me far below the likes of Allison Shaffer, Alyssa Brandt, or Lucy Vasquez. Perhaps Brenda Lund, plunging that scissors into her baby’s skull, was the only mother figure one step closer to hell.
Months later, at a grocery store in Oshkosh, an old man in a motorized shopping cart would stop me in the coffee aisle. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Can I give you this?” He offered me a plastic silver cross embossed with the words GOD LOVES YOU. “Sure,” I said, “of course.” What would my protester in Milwaukee have to say about that? I wondered. In life, everybody is a judge, everybody serves on a jury, or so they believe.
Outside the clinic, the protester jockeyed for eye contact and tried handing me a tract or Bible, but I’d wired my arms to my torso, my legs miraculously still moving. A tall man in an orange vest and rainbow sash said, “You don’t need to listen to them.” Completely unprepared, in the blitz of assaults and crowding, I couldn’t divide up the camps—pro-life, anti-abortion, pro-choice, God’s choice, no choice—comingled into a furious and baffling cluster. When I hit the silence beyond the clinic doors, I felt as if I’d slipped underwater into a muted version of the world.
Apparently fifty-six million women worldwide get abortions each year, and about one-fifth of all pregnancies are electively terminated. These numbers seemed impossible until that day. Women were coming and going, separately but in droves. As if entering some secret underground nightclub, I grasped for my bearings, my eyes adjusting to flashes of light. Did I dissociate, rising above my body, in that moment? Nothing seemed real. The doorman welcomed women and their boyfriends, lovers, parents, and siblings to this moment in women’s reproductive rights. Tall, short, slim, rotund, white, black, brown, young, and middle-aged, wearing everything from booty shorts to button-up blouses, every woman on earth seemed to be there with me, a blessing, as Ryan was home with our children, and nobody in my life knew. We could not think of a single babysitter to ask for help at a time like this, and we needed the money for gas and to pay the clinic.
After filling out paperwork, getting a finger prick—a dot of pain that would linger for days—and waiting indefinitely, clinic personnel called me for my ultrasound. According to law, the technician was required to aim the screen at my eyes. “You don’t need to look,” she said, squeezing jelly onto my flat stomach from a tube the size of travel toothpaste, but my whirling black uterus was like a crystal ball that drew my gaze with secrets of my future. Neither of us discerned anything significant, not even the tiniest speck of life. “Are you sure you’re pregnant?” she asked. “Yes, but only about five weeks,” I told her, though now I doubted myself. She sent me to the bathroom for a urine sample; then I waited longer. Bad daytime TV elicited sarcastic comments from a rowdy redheaded woman and her boyfriend, as if they were impersonating Siskel and Ebert. Loud and indiscreet, this woman was either in denial or seizing her rights without shame. When a staff member confirmed my positive test, I was called to meet a nurse.
“Are you sure you want
