I sat in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood, but a couple dozen unknowing other patrons. I joked with K- as much as I could, and hoped the Vicodin was kicking in. I could feel the anti-nausea pill already. I began to feel a bit sleeping, but not that lazy feeling Vicodin would give me. Much sooner than I wanted, they called my name. K- picked up his heavy pack and followed me back, wordlessly. A dark-haired, young woman brought me to a room with a gynecology exam table and a calender photo of a sandy beach with palm trees and a turquoise ocean posted on the ceiling above the patient table. K- sat in a chair near where I would be, and I was told to go pee if I had to and to put a pad into my underwear. I did so, and returned to the room. I tried to get comfortable on the awkwardly arranged table with the pillow much too low under the disposable paper. I had undressed from the waste down, had a paper sheet over me, and clutched a provided heating pad to my churning stomach and bloated uterus under the sheet. K- held my hand and tried to distract me. I looked into his eyes, and starting to feel the Vicodin a bit more, slipped a hand absently between the buttons of his shirt and started feeling his chest. I realized that perhaps this was inappropriate, and told K- so. “Yes, it might be inappropriate for me to have a boner right now,” he said. I took my hand out and held his instead. We listened to the sound of ocean surf and chimes that rolled in rhythm quietly from a tape player in the corner of the room.

After a long time, the doctor came in. She was gray-haired and beautiful. She was calming and smiling. I trusted her instantly. She had me put my feet in the stirrups and move my butt so it was hanging off the bed. She said shed tell me everything she was doing, and told K- he’d be helping me breathe. K- was on my right side and the dark-haired woman stood on my left. The dark haired women gently touched my shoulder, and K- entwined his fingers with mine and stroked the side of my face. I don’t know what I did with my left hand.

“Think of anyplace calming you’d like to be right now,” the doctor said.

“That desert island looks pretty good,” I replied, looking at the ceiling.

“Ok, start your breathing,” the doctor said. “I’d suggest this meditative breath: in through the nose,” she demonstrated, “and out through the mouth.” K- and I and the dark-haired woman began to breathe in rhythm as she had suggested. I was nervous.

“I’m going to used just my fingers now and feel where your cervix is. I felt a pressure inside me, and at the same time felt my labia mashed against my pubic bone. Painful, compared to the gentle caresses I am used to feeling in that area. I squirmed and my legs began to involuntarily close toward the doctor.

“This is the problem you’re going to have,” she announced after she had taken her fingers out. “You are getting very tense here,” she gestured at my thighs. I resolved to try to relax them outward as much as I could. I wanted this to be as easy for her as possible. I remembered K-’s fingers being squeezed by mine, and I remembered my breathing.

“Should I move the table up?” the young woman to my left asked the doctor.

“Oh, no, I’ll move it. Her cervix isn’t up top like the last woman’s. It’s the opposite,” the doctor replied. She moved the table up just slightly and said, “Now I’m going to put in the speculum in, so I can get a good view of your cervix.” She did so, and it felt like any other gynecological exam, except that I was so much more nervous. Breathe.

“Beautiful, I have a really clear view of your cervix,” she said. Good, I thought. “Now, I’m just putting this numbing cream on your cervix.”

Oh, I thought it was going to be an injection. This is okay, I said to myself. I felt the strange sensation of the numbing cream in a strange part of my body, and cringed. Okay. Breathe.

“I’m going to use this tool to hold your cervix still for me,” she said. I couldn’t feel anything on my cervix, but there was sure a lot happening on my vagina.

“And now, I’m going to just open up your cervix with these dilators. Do you know what these do? Good.” Oh, I am so nervous, I though. I started to breathe irregularly and panic a bit.

The woman on my left said, “Nice big breaths. She’ll go with the breaths for the dilators.” I tried to force my chest down, my muscles in my legs and stomach to relax. I felt the dilators in the form of cramps. It wasn’t so painful, or so much even the location of the cramps – that was hard to pinpoint – but it was the fact that I couldn’t curl up, I had all this stuff attached to my delicate parts. Yikes. Not too delicate, I suppose. After all, a baby’s head has to be able to pop through the cervix. The cramps cause me to involuntarily tense all my muscles up, though I fought it. Two or so more dilators, and the woman on my left said, “You’re almost done. Two-thirds of the way through. Breathe.”

I don’t remember then if I got a real warning, but I started to feel the suction happening, and I knew what it was. I moaned once, and tried to breathe. My uterus was convulsing. It is the most aware I’ve ever been of my uterus. Even today, I am afraid to clench my stomach too much, for I don’t want to encounter that unfamiliar organ so consciously again yet. I probably couldn’t do it just casually, but the remembrance of that moment is intense. “I’m doing the extraction now,” she said during a pause in the spasms. Then round two. I have no idea what any of this looked like. My eyes were shut tight.

And then it was really almost over. “I’m just going to make sure I got it all. I’m 99 percent sure, but I want to be 100 percent.” She left the room for a moment, but left all the gear in place, hanging out of me. She returned in a few moments. “All out,” she said. And she removed, very slowly, it seemed, the tools from my vagina. Phew. I felt shaky but good.

“Now, I really like to do a heart check-in,” she said. I nodded. “I don’t know if this was a hard decision for you, but I’ve come to really believe that you cannot hurt or damage spirit. So whatever happened today, if there was a spirit, it is off to go on another journey.” I nodded. I was tired of all the spirit business. I had already decided that there was no whole spirit attached to this tiny part of my body, this tiny other set of genes I was harboring. I said something to her to indicate that I understood, was a bit out of it, but was fine.

She smiled at me told me I did great. Asked me if I knew I’d do so well. I told her I hadn’t known what to expect, and thanked her as profusely as I could from the table. She left the door. I laid there for a moment, recovering. The woman with us helped me with my underwear and pants, and K- with my socks and shoes. I was helped off the table slowly, and K- went to the waiting room (he wasn’t allowed in the recovery room with the other patients) and I was led to the recovery room, my bag carried for me. There, I was given juice and heating pad and the most comfortable reclining chair in the world. The Vicodin must have been working. I felt weak. The woman who had gone before me was behind a drawn curtain, and she sounded sluggish when she spoke to the nurse. She must have gotten the stronger, shorter-lasting dose of drugs. She was eventually help out of the room to meet her companion in the waiting room. Her cervix was on her upper front, I happened to know. She was wearing high heels and a dress, even though I was told to come in a two-piece outfit. She was a tall but young-looking hipster. She was dripping a bit of blood when she stood, and she looked distressed. The nurses helped her clean up and she tottered out. Maybe she was farther along that me, I though. They do these up to 14 weeks, and many people opt for a drug-induced abortion if they are before nine weeks. I am only at six and a half. I tried not to look at her too much. My face was serious, even though I felt like smiling. I was dying to ask how I could help other women through this experience.

A nurse then popped in and said to another nurse, “There’s a woman in the waiting room, she’s been given drugs already, and she’s really nauseous.” Someone more nauseous than me! I thought happily. And she’s getting an abortion too! She knows what I went through. A pretty young woman in gray sweatpants was brought in and allowed to sit in this more relaxing environment to wait out the nausea. In the meantime, the nurse who gave out the drugs and filled the little paper bags with condoms and other forms of birth control was seeing women every few minutes and chatting with them as she filled their drug and water cups. The two I witnessed seemed much to friendly and perky to be getting an abortion. Both had asthma and one had gotten, and one was going to get, the H1N1 vaccine. Were they getting abortions I not? I would never know. I assumed they were.

After about 15 minutes of sitting around, 15 minutes that passed all too fast, my blood pressure was taken, I was told for about the third or fourth time about aftercare, and I was given my paper bag of drugs and condoms. I was told I should check my pad before I left, and report how much blood was on it. I went wobbling to the bathroom. “No blood,” I reported on my return. “I have one more question: how can I help other women through this?” The nurse smiled and gave me the number of Planned Parenthood’s volunteer coordinator.

As I picked up my things to leave, a woman came in and flopped down in the chair next to me. She was pale and her eyes were rimmed in red, like she’d been crying. She smiled at me weakly, and I smiled back. I felt intimately connect to her. I wanted to talk to her. But I didn’t want to harass her, and I knew I was supposed to leave now. So I did. I touched K-’s shoulder in the waiting room.

“Already?” he asked.

“Yes, let’s get out of here,” I said. “Will you carry my things?”

He picked them up and walked out with me. We’re OK, I thought. We have love on our side.

Once we reached the top of the hill, the water was much shallower and slower flowing. A few of us broke away from the raft for a hike upstream. I was with the hikers, but just tagging along. We hiked and hiked, and eventually I looked around more carefully to find myself in a canal built for the river, with the sides of an ancient building rising up on either side of me. White marble tiles lined the canal, and felt cold and smooth on my feet. Algae growing on the tiles was long, stringy and slimy, and waved between my toes. The building around me was built of white marble stones. There were arches and balconies and courtyards crammed in everywhere, and may once have had lush gardens and gilded edges. Now, green and black mold grew in the crevices of the stones, and it was all abandoned. Or was it? I asked one of my companions about it. No, it was now being used as storage, as it was too water damaged to be the grand apartments it once was. We waded to the right hand edge of the canal and peered though an arch and a window into a room inside. There were neatly stacked piles of old computers in one room, and paper boxes a bit more untidily strewn in another.

When I looked up, I realized I was alone in the canal – no, wait, I just saw a companion’s foot flick out of sight into an archway on the left. I followed to that archway, and climbed out of the sunken canal bed into the old, dingy courtyard. I picked my was around piles of old junk, and followed my companion the only way she could have gone, up a wall and into a crawl space. I followed the crawl space to it’s far corner, and realized that she had disappeared over a jump over a tilted, rotten roof and through a tiny cat door with a flap over it. My fear of steep thing and awkward jumps began to kick in. Should I turn around and go back down the river? No, I would keep going, I would see what was behind the cat door. I had come this far, and if she could do it, so could I. With some difficulty, but not too much, I burst over the roof and through the cat door, breathless, but intact. And I was climbing down a wall in a well-lit, pastel room, right over a sleeping college-aged women. I thought then about turning around. I didn’t know that this place had any occupants left. But the thought of climbing back through the cat door-rotting roof ordeal was none too inviting, and I opted for finding my way toward the front door and leaving that way. We couldn’t be that far from civilization. I jumped over her bed and her sleeping body once I had gotten halfway down the wall. How had we ended up in this person’s modern apartment? Did they know what lay just beyond their wall? And ancient and forgotten paradise, a secret river, an impossible refuge from life! I sneaked out of the sleeping woman’s room in search of my companion. I felt like a criminal, having broken into someone’s house like this.

I walked through a couple of darkened rooms, and then I saw a light ahead and heard voices. I saw two other people, presumably residents of the apartment. They both had their backs turned toward me. I approached them. They seemed unusually tall.

“Hello?” I said gently.

They turned around and looked at me, frowning and puzzled. Then my companion popped out. She was my old roommate, I realized.

“Oh, we didn’t mean to intrude,” she said. “I thought this place was abandoned. I used to live here when I was in college. I knew I had left some things here,” she held up a baking pan and some other odds and ends, “and I figured I’d pop in and get them.”

I assumed she was making this up, at least the part about her leaving things here, and that she had swiped some of their things from around the house, hoping that they wouldn’t notice.

I nodded in agreement with her. “Yes, we thought this place was empty now, that it was just storage. We were just exploring around. Dis you know that there’s a secret river canal behind your place?” And a lot more, I thought. I realized that this was student housing now. How had they covered up the beautiful facade on the outside of the building? But I would not find out. My companion was leading the two residents back toward the sleeping woman and the cat door, to show the student what they didn’t know about their apartment.

They climbed over the sleeping woman. I was astounded that she was still sleeping, lights on and with all the hubbub and shaking of her bed. I paused, getting up the nerve for the return journey over the rotting roof. I was hovering over the woman’s body, and she opened her eyes, and said to me, “I’m not asleep, you know.”

She had been awake the whole time. She was depressed. I knew then that she already knew about the canal. Her cat went somewhere at night, after all. She asked me, “Have you ever heard of….” and listed off a jumble of names. “They’re authors.”

“No,” I said, thinking carefully about if I had. “They must be literature, though.”

“Well, yes, their writings are a form of literature, I suppose,” she said snobbily.

“Are you happy at college?” I asked gently.

She didn’t respond.

“Have you seen the canal?” I asked. “Did you know know you live in such a magical place?”

She looked at me sadly.

“Let’s go,” I beckoned to her to get up out of her pastel, sweaty bed. She was already fully dressed. We climbed up the wall above her bed with relative ease, now that she was not laying in it, crawled through the cat door, and I woke up.

The Emotional Aspects

Guilt is an overriding feeling for many women. Some feel that they must suffer through the abortion without painkillers in order to validate the experience and feel the appropriate remorse. I can feel that guilt reaching for me, but I manage to outrun it. I am more embarrassed than guilty. But the fact is that many, many people will have an accident at some point. Sexual passions is a strong and make us haphazard, condoms break, and most methods have some kind of failure rate. Of course there are IUDs and other methods with extremely low failure rate, but everything has pluses and minuses, and we all must take risks of varying levels to live, and live well. We shouldn’t feel like this happening to us was our person failure, we should not feel guilty, because really it happened because we are human. The fact that the woman must bear the brunt of the physical pain, and often the logistical and emotional stresses as well, also doesn’t make it her fault. The man involved had at least as much to do with it as the woman. Believe me, I learned it in science class.

Adding to feeling of guilt over responsibility are also often feelings that the embryo had a spirit or a soul that we allowed to be created, or sent down, and then let float away. I don’t believe this at all. If a zygote, if an embryo, automatically has a soul because of its uniqueness, then so would every sperm, and every egg, have half a soul, and we are are throwing them out all the time. I don’t get overly mystical over the embryo. Yes, it is a possibility, a potential. But there are millions of potentials between my lover and I, and I’m not going to get bent out of shape over all of them. This one just made it a little farther along.

I could see being a lot more attached to a more fully grown fetus. But even then, I don’t believe that the unborn ball of cells inside us is separate from us, and so I believe that the choices we make about abortion are choices we make about our bodies.

I don’t believe that humans have souls separate from their bodies. The soul is formed at the same time as the body. If the body is not formed (don’t get me wrong, though, many different forms are beautiful), then the “soul” isn’t formed. I don’t like the common body/spirit separation. Too often, animals, women, and oppressed peoples are considered body and men are considered spirit or mind. Screw that, it’s a tool of oppression. Enough with transcendence. Life is here on earth, in these bodysouls, on this big green and blue bodysoul.

The Physical Aspects

I almost brought a voice recorder into the clinic with me so that I could post the sound file and hopefully soothe other women who are facing this procedure. But I was feeling to nervous and nauseous to go through with that. Instead, I can only try to describe the scene.

I got to the clinic at 8 am – I had an early appointment – and didn’t have to do much waiting around. I kept trying to guess who else was there for the same reason as me, but it was impossible to tell; most people in the waiting room looked stoic. If you didn’t know that there was an abortion clinic happening there that day, you’d think it was just another day at the Planned Parenthood.

I got called to the back, and my partner was allowed to come with me. They took my blood pressure and took my temperature, and brought us to a room to ask me if I was sure of my decision and to discuss the procedure and aftercare. I said I was certain, and after much deliberation, decided I’d be taking Vicodine instead of the more potent IV drug. They then gave me the drugs, asked me what kind of birth control I’d like to used in the future (condoms) and gently tried to convince me that IUDs were really the way to go. I declined the IUD and watched them fill a small paper bag with condoms, one dose of the morning-after pill, a small amount of antibiotics for aftercare and some uterine medication for in case I had excessive bleeding.

I then had a half hour wait in the waiting room.

[To be continued tomorrow, I have to go for now.]

Anyway, back then, I saw religion, and Christianity itself, as a huge problem. Christianity had case the inquisition. It had caused the murder and abuse of untold numbers of indigenous folks in colonized countries. It had been the cause of hate crimes and the degradation of women’s bodies. It stood in the way of civil rights in many cases, and it promoted the consumerism of the holiday season.

But today, listening to Your Call Radio on NPR, I realized what I different view of things I have developed in the ten years since leaving home. Today’s program was about the Atheist group Freedom from Religion Federation’s new billboard and bus stop campaign that features quotes and phrases such as

“I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.” – Clarence Darrow

Praise Darwin: Evolve Beyond Belief.

I’m not offended by these billboards, at least no more than I am by the presumptuous and eerie God billboards that have gotten popular:

“You think it’s hot here?” – God

“Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game.” – God

In fact, I like how the sassy atheist billboards are pushing buttons and agitating people a bit. They aren’t the gentlest way of approaching the religion-atheist conversation, any they may be counterproductive, depending on the intended purpose, but I don’t really take it too seriously, and I don’t think they are meant to provoke battle.

However, I do have a problem with equating scientific belief with atheism, and I also have a problem with the scientific foundations of this country and industrialized culture in general. For over the years, I have found that many people, while believing in God, or believing that they believe in God, in actuality give much more credence to science as a practice, belief system and justification than they do to religion. And I now see that for years, and still, a huge segment of the liberal/progressive/radical population have seen themselves as being persecuted by religious lobbies and politicians and sub-cultures, when really science has the upper hand these days and is perpetuating a great deal of turmoil. This is not to say that people aren’t still doing terrible things in the name of religion, on both institutional and personal levels, but that the overarching paradigm that we have slipped into is the scientific one. It’s impossible to say if it is better, the same, or worse than the Christian one of several centuries ago, or even polytheistic ones of other places and/or times. But it’s not great, and it’s not solving our problems.

From where I am standing, here on the left coast, most people in the US are already on the boat with Darwinism and modern medicine. They are believers in sexual classification and that “nature” is an other to be managed by humans. They want to protect poor mother nature, they think that women are best suited to raising children since our hips are wide, they often become social Darwinists at the same time as they learn about cells, mitochondria, elements, atoms, and quarks. They believe in the science of economics and capitalism. They trust the pharmaceutical companies and the surgeons. They believe in the number-crunching of polls and statistics, the strict counting of votes and objective assessment. They believe in the scientific method, and would like to silence anyone who talks hocus-pocus with a cynical look. “Come on, use your brain, stop lolling about with your emotions and intuitions,” they might say.

Whether a country considers itself religious or scientific, it must beware of bigotry, sexism, homophobia, genderism, racism, classism, and authoritarianism. For these things can be justified by Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, Atheism, Darwinism, and just about any other belief system, scientific or not. And conversely, most belief systems can also be beautiful, loving paths to healing the world. Even science, presumably.

So what do we teach in school? Evolution? Creationism? Something else entirely? Let’s start by teaching that we all see things relatively, and let’s teach that every single person has a different worldview, and let’s start to discuss how these different worldviews can change the ways we interact with one another and the rest of the planet. Let’s start choosing our belief systems according to the outcome we want. Teach beauty to create beauty. Teach that the world comes from the flap of a butterfly’s wings, because a world in which that is the dominant belief sounds like a colorful and fun ride to me.

I don’t deserve these feelings
This pain or this pride or this stamina
Because I’m not to be a mother, not now

I don’t deserve your caring or your helping hand
Showing me the ginger tablets in the health food store
Because I’ll have nothing to show for it

Just freedom, the freedom to hang in mid-air
To pretend to make something of myself
To make no bounce in the scale of average

Just what is my body for?
Baby-making?
Just because my breasts can swell and estrogen swarm?
Because my eggs leak at a steady rate month by month?
When I look down at myself right now I see
A mobile incubator with two strong legs
And a stomach ready to bulge
And I must be so wrong to truncate its purpose

And yet
I have danced and I’ve traveled
I’ve fucked for hours for nothing but pleasure
I’ve written and read, thought and provoked
Prodded and pranced, cried and took chances
None of it for reproduction at all
But it oozed out stinging bright life
So it mattered, after all

Morning sickness is currently understood as an evolved trait that protects the fetus against toxins ingested by the mother. Many plants contain chemical toxins that serve as a deterrent to being eaten. Adult humans, like other animals, have defenses against plant toxins, including extensive arrays of detoxification enzymes manufactured by the liver and the surface tissues of various other organs. In the fetus, these defenses are not yet fully developed, and even small doses of plant toxins that have negligible effects on the adult can be harmful or lethal to the embryo. Pregnancy sickness causes women to experience nausea when exposed to the smell or taste of foods that are likely to contain toxins injurious to the fetus, even though they may be harmless to her.

There is considerable evidence in support of this theory, including:

• Morning sickness is very common among pregnant women, which argues in favor of it being a functional adaptation and against the idea that it is a pathology.
• Fetal vulnerability to toxins peaks at around 3 months, which is also the time of peak susceptibility to morning sickness.
• There is a good correlation between toxin concentrations in foods, and the tastes and odors that cause revulsion.
• Women who have no morning sickness are more likely to miscarry or to bear children with birth defects.

In addition to protecting the fetus, morning sickness may also protect the mother. Pregnant women’s immune systems are suppressed during pregnancy, presumably to reduce the chances of rejecting tissues of their own offspring. Because of this, animal products containing parasites and harmful bacteria can be especially dangerous to pregnant women. There is evidence that morning sickness is often triggered by animal products including meat and fish.

If morning sickness is a defense mechanism against the ingestion of toxins, the prescribing of anti-nausea medication to pregnant women may have the undesired side effect of causing birth defects or miscarriages by encouraging harmful dietary choices. On the other hand, many domestic vegetables have been purposely bred to have lower levels of toxins than in the distant past, and so the level of threat to the embryo may not be as high as it was when the defense mechanism first evolved.

So when tomatoes and peppers sound gross to me, it’s to protect a potential fetus against nightshade toxins. In fact, while I’m usually a vegetable and spice lover, everything from leafy greens to celery to mushrooms to onions sound terrible to me now. I’ve been on a bread-dairy-fruit diet this past week. After reading that article, it totally makes sense – many fruits are the part that the plant want animals to eat them so we help the plant spread its seeds. (Poisonous berries and non-edible nightshades, etcetera, must have different options.) On the other hand, the leaves or the roots of vegetables probably contain more toxins because, except for cultivation, we are killing the plant (and its ability to reproduce) when we eat it. I know that these most vegetables have been bred to have less toxicity, but forget it, I’m not going to eat vegetables anyway, at least not until Sunday. Except for sprouts, sprouts sound good.

(Please note that I’m going to put off eating vegetables because I’m planning to terminate. But to all you pregnant people who are planning to carry to term, you might want to figure out some vegetables to eat.)

Here’s what I’ve found for minimizing my morning sickness:

o Eat what sounds and smells good. Don’t eat what sounds bad.

o If everything sounds bad, make yourself eat something that your body has recently accepted, like bread or juice. You’ll get nowhere if you can’t choke something down.

o Keep your stomach from getting empty. Munch all day.

o Keep from getting low blood sugar. Eat food that contain complex carbs. Sip juice mixed with water if you’re in a low blood sugar cycle.

o Stay away from bad smells. Cetain odors really do affect us, and avoiding them is a good strategy.

o Ginger is known to reduce nausea. I can’t stomach hot liquids right now, so I am taking chewable tablets containing ginger, honey, molasses, stevia and vitamin B6 (B6 has been shown to help morning sickness). You could also have ginger tea or ginger tinctured in honey.

At first, I wouldn’t admit the possibility of pregnancy aloud. But after hearing my symptoms – nausea, frequent urination, breast tenderness, late period – everyone else at the camp decided they needed to let me know that it was time for a pregnancy test. I had the opportunity to go to town a day later, and I bought the cheapest test available at the grocery store.

That night, for the first time in a week, I couldn’t urinate at all, much less whenever a patch of grass presented itself. I wasn’t too nervous about the test, at least on the surface, and I followed friends to a restaurant and bar, steadily drinking water throughout the evening. I was getting impatient, and at the time I actually wanted proof that I didn’t have blood poisoning or brain tumors, so finally I wandered off to find a bathroom and force a couple of drops out. Once in the bathroom, I immediately had to pee urgently, so I threw my purse to the floor, and shifting my weight from one foot the other, I tore open the box of two tests and pulled out the instructions. It said to read them thoroughly before use, and I perused its simple language as patiently as I could. Just pee on the end for five seconds, close the top, and wait three minutes. Then examine the number of lines. A pink line on the right will appear no matter what, and a pink line on the left – even if it’s faint – indicates pregnancy. I sat and finally peed, sticking the test under the flow and thoroughly wetting the entire test and my hand. I covered the top of the test, set it on top of the toilet’s water tank to do it’s thing, and rinsed my hands. When I glanced at the test about 10 seconds later, a florescent pink line had appeared vividly in the left side of the result oval. One line, I thought. Hmm. But it’s on the left. The pregnancy side. After another two minutes of waiting, a lackluster pink line appeared on the right side. The line that always appeared. Ok. I was very pregnant. Knocked up. Preggers. Prego. Fuckshit. But at least I’m not dying, I thought. But fuckshit, I thought. I left the bathroom to share the news.

I was uncomfortable and smiling as I faced those at the bar waiting to hear the news.

“Positive,” I said. “I’m going to call Kyle.”

And as I talked to the sperm carrier, aka my boyfriend of two years, I began to understand the magnitude of the situation. I had always thought abortion would be the obvious, easy choice. Nowadays, in the ’00s, with legal abortion available to any urban white girl with at least some financial means and a supportive community, it should be no big deal. And that night we talked a lot about the prospect of following through with the pregnancy, whether or not it was a good idea. But we it wasn’t until he had abandoned his insane, graduate student agenda to come pick me up, and we were riding home in the car, that the I realized that abortions might still be the choice we’d make, but that it wasn’t going to be easy and simple.

The five-hour drive was challenging. It was late, we were tired, and a lot of feelings and concerns were coming up. I was already beginning to feel ashamed and embarrassed and guilty. Ashamed that I hadn’t been more responsible. Embarrassed that I had just taught a class about the fertility awareness method (FAM) of birth control and, while I hadn’t been using it at the time of conception, my friends and acquaintances, often already skeptical about the method, would now assume that it definitely didn’t work and think that I was irresponsible to teach such a mystical method. And I was guilty that I had convinced Kyle that the withdrawal method was always safe when used carefully, and that condoms should not be a part of our realationship. In act, I had just taught about proper use of withdrawal along with FAM as well. Another strike. I felt terrible.

Much of this surfaced as we conversed. But on top of that, there was the pain I had to look forward to. I already felt terrible from the “morning” sickness, and depending upon what options were available to me at the stage I was in (we figured I’d been pregnant for about five weeks), I would be experiencing at least some of the following: nausea, vomiting, days or weeks of bleeding, weakness, pain in my cervix and uterus while I was dilated and sucked out, all of it banging up my delicate parts to the point where I wouldn’t be feeling normal possibly for weeks.

Today I’m home. I get an ultrasound tomorrow so Planned Parenthood can determine how far along I am, and hopefully give me my options. All I want to do is eat apples, and macaroni and cheese from a box, and drink soda. I am afraid of the upcoming pain, of Kyle’s fatigue as he tries to be there for me while keeping up at school, of what others will think of me when they find out I am home early from the farm and why. I’m afraid of my own body and the ball of slime that would be a tiny person if I did nothing to stop it. Afraid of a future of condoms and fear of pregnancy. Afraid of the pressure Planned Parenthood will put on me to take the pill. Afraid that I’ve been a fool, a naïve fool who thought that abortion would be easy just because Kyle and I and our friends are pro-choice feminists.

But I get strength thinking about all the women, friends of mine, who have undergone the procedure before me. They were strong. Stronger than I used to think a woman needed to be to go through this. And from them, from the non-critical love that I know they would show me, I draw the strength I need to create the reality I want to live in.

We need to be strong when we speak to porn guys. They will have to respect us if we demand respect, and it is essential for “boundary setting” (aka being comfortable) and not feeling used (although you may want to do something, when someone is pressuring you to do it, you often feel that you don’t want to do it).

We need to stick together. The idea of a sex workers’ union is awesome, and I know that at least one already exists. But we have power in numbers, and we have power when we watch each other’s backs, and we have power when we share knowledge and stories and advice and gossip about the industry.

I would do it again, because the money is good. But if I do it again, I’d want to work with a more conscious photographer. Or perhaps I could form a porn collective? That could make it a truly rewarding experience.

Because money wasn’t the only, or even the primary, object of my modeling session. I didn’t even quite understand it when I signed up for the job. But now I can see it quite clearly. I needed to be “bad.” I needed to be liberated. I needed to be sexy and hot. I needed to be placed in a position of power.

It doesn’t seem at first that doing porn would be empowering. In fact, it can be objectifying and degrading, especially depending on for whom you are working and for whom you are modeling/acting, and the setting in which this happens, and why you are doing it. There are all sorts of factors. For me, doing this of my own free will, able to leave at any time, the empowerment came from saying to friends and strangers alike, “I am mature, worldly, and able to handle any situation. I am sexual, experienced, and strong. I am self-confident and beautiful.”

I began by slipping in that I thought I’d probably call the whole thing off. He stated that he couldn’t say anything either way. He seemed to feel paralyzed by his respect for me choosing what to do with my body. After all, he knows that he doesn’t have any ownership over my body, and that to give even a small opinion about what I should do was walking a risky line. He’d been acting according to this from the beginning, except I’d say in the past week mostly he’d had more concern and unease than he had unbiased words of wisdom for me. Today was a little different. He admitted that if it were him, the prospect would be exciting for him, and he’d probably do it. He said that it seemed like a safe, less intimidating way for a person to get gratification out of exhibitionism and exploiting one’s sexuality. I perked up a bit. I felt less embarrassed, less exploited, already. More excited, the way I secretly would feel when thinking about it and ignoring all of the stressful facts surrounding the actual shoot. (Ugg, why do they have to call it a shoot?)

Of course, he admitted this all to me after I finally showed reluctance. I left things this morning by saying that I’d see what happened, that I felt mainly concerned about not having someone planning to be there for me yet, that I just didn’t quite know what to do. I said I’d call my friend R, whose car I was already planning to borrow, to take me there.

On our way home, I told Kyle that if I didn’t do the job, we’d have to take sexy photos of each other to look at when I left for two months. He said it sounded great.

I got home and put off calling R for a while. I futzed about on the computer, checking my email and even a social networking site oft-neglected. After responding to everyone I could, I called her. She said it sounded like a good trade for moving. It took me a while to say that it would possibly be 8 hours, but finally I told her and she said she just might go on a bike ride while she waited. Perfect. Yes. I told Kyle, and his face was straight and sober as he nodded. Whenever I bring it up, his face becomes very unsmiling, his eyes meeting mine. But after what he said at breakfast, I don’t feel judged by him (sure, he’d told me not to feel judged, but it’s hard when your friend is acting so concerned and serious about it!).

I also emailed Carlson this morning. I told him that I needed to not use sex toys, and that I needed $200 advance payment. In response, he said he didn’t care about the sex toys, and that I should text a couple of women who’d modeled for him before about his trustworthiness. As of this writing, I’ve not gotten a return text from the first woman, but I may try the second one before bed.