We need to include reproductive autonomy in the future we imagine for young South Asians.

I had an abortion a decade and a half ago, when I was in my very early twenties. I realized I was pregnant about five months into a Master’s program that wasn’t going very well, while in a relationship that was not good for me. I chose to abort my pregnancy for a number of reasons - I wasn’t ready, I wanted to finish school and get a steady job first, my Muslim family would react extremely poorly, I did not want to bring a child into the world with my then partner. Most importantly, though - if I had carried my pregnancy to term, I would have forfeited a piece of my autonomy that I would never get back.

I had always been a high achieving student - skipped two grades in school, won a stupid number of awards, earned a BA with distinction, that sort of thing. The pressure to achieve was not just the typical daughter-of-immigrants pressure, though. Academic achievement was my ticket to survival. My family life growing up was difficult. My mother suffered from a serious mental illness that led to violent outbursts and episodes of mania. My father was a source of some stability, but the violence he lived through as a survivor of Partition had left him with deep scars. My parents didn’t have great models for healing themselves or loving their children. We are good now, but as a kid it was very hard to live with verbal, physical and psychological abuse and extreme forms of control and policing. I worked incredibly hard at school so that I would have a way out. After fear of my parents’ judgement, getting into a good school and becoming financially independent were my main motivators for staying away from boys and sex.

I lived with the typical restrictions that Pakistani Muslim immigrants place on their daughters. Interrogations before and after spending time with friends my parents were already familiar with; restrictions on what kinds of after school jobs I could get; an absolute prohibition on speaking to or spending time with boys. I don’t think they realized they were doing it at the time, but they constantly undermined my autonomy, policing what I wore, discouraging me from working outside of our family business, refusing to teach me to drive, and using financial pressure to try to keep me from attending university in a city at the other end of the province.

I knew early on that I needed to get out. What was happening in my home was not healthy. I worked hard and gave up a lot of my youth to graduate high school early so I could escape. In idle moments, walking home from school or waiting for customers to come into our shop, I would imagine a life away from my parents. But even in my fantasies, intimacy and family life were fraught. I only knew love and family as coercive and risky, so I imagined a future where I would have to do things I didn’t want to do and face alienation from loved ones. That was all I could imagine, and so it was exactly what happened.

I took a gap year between my undergraduate and Master’s programs. When I graduated from university, I felt lost and empty. Most of my friends were either still in school or had moved on to other cities. I had no idea what I really wanted from life, beyond knowing that moving home wasn’t an option. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was also in the very early stages of an autoimmune disease that includes depression, fatigue, and brain fog in addition to episodes of severe pain. I was isolated and deeply lonely. I longed for something to change me, bring me some joy and happiness.

I had known James* socially for a few years. He was the friend of a friend and we had chatted at a few parties. He and his roommate had an end of term party before Christmas during my gap year and James and I chatted longer than usual. In the new year we started spending more time together, and a few dates quickly turned into a relationship. When James and I had decided to try being in a committed relationship I unconsciously surrendered the intense focus on work and school that had protected me for so long, I think in hopes that I could surrender my ambitions in exchange for a sense of belonging and love.

James’s family were Christian Afro-Caribbean immigrants.Unlike me, he had grown up almost exclusively around white kids. I’m not sure if our differences in views around sex came from my growing up in a culture and religion that expressly forbid sex outside of marriage, or if it was just run-of-the-mill gendered socialization. Whatever the roots, James was much less conflicted about sex. Having grown up in a family that punished me for expressing desires contrary to my parent’s expectations, I didn’t know how to draw boundaries or advocate for myself. So sex between me and James happened at a pace and on terms that I was not ready for or okay with.

I wonder how many Muslim girls go through what I went through. When you are raised to think of marriage as the highest goal for a woman’s life, to think of marriage as permanent, and to think of compatibility in terms of things like good families (aka caste), earning potential, and whether or not a person can charm your parents, how do you learn what it takes to build a healthy relationship? I wasn’t prepared for the casual relationship that James had in mind, and he wasn’t prepared for the long term commitment that was all I could imagine at the time.

As a teen I had started taking hormonal birth control to help with acne. A few years before James and I started dating I stopped because of side effects that I now know to be linked with my autoimmune disease (I also now know that hormonal birth control could lead to a stroke for me - one of many reasons I understand abortion to be a vital component of reproductive healthcare). I tried using a spermicidal foam but that led to a lot of UTIs. We were now several months in and James didn’t want to use condoms any more. We were both regular with STI screenings - we even went in together - but I was pretty scared that I would get pregnant. I was even more afraid of losing him and being alone. But of course, having sex you don’t want to have is a great way to feel unsafe, unloved, and alone in a relationship, so as time went on I shrunk more and more inside myself. I was desperate for James’s love and everything I was doing in our relationship made it harder for me to be loved or love myself.

It took pregnancy for my protective instincts to kick back in. I was struggling in school, struggling in my relationship, and alienated from my friends and family. Looking back, I am incredibly proud of the clarity and strength I had in those few weeks. After a tense and sad winter holiday visiting my family, James and I spent new years and the first few days of January together. At some point during that trip I got pregnant. It was a little unexpected because I had just had my period the week before, but at that time in my life I had a lot of irregularity in my menstrual cycle, so who knows what was actually going on. As the end of January approached I could feel that something was different in my body. I had some premenstrual symptoms but something felt stuck. When the days I expected my period came and went, I picked up a test from the drugstore and, later that day, learned I was pregnant.

I was chatting with a friend on Google chat before I took the test and while I waited. She asked me what I thought I wanted to do. There was no doubt in my mind that I would have an abortion. I was one semester into my Master’s, with plans of going on to do a PhD. Even before that ambition, I had always planned to be a year or two into a career, with some financial security before I had a kid. Struggling through grad school, in an unhappy and un-halal relationship, without an income was not where I wanted to be when I brought a baby into the world. My friend was supportive. She mentioned that I might have feelings of regret in the future, and those future feelings would not necessarily mean I had made the wrong decision. I didn’t tell James until he called and asked a day or two later. It didn’t occur to me that I needed to, as he had always shut down when I tried to talk to him about my fears around our unprotected sex.

When I told James I thought I might be pregnant, his response was something along the lines of “Ok, keep me posted.” After I confirmed, he called me and dumped all his emotions on me. We spent what felt like an hour on the phone and I said very little. He said it was up to me to decide what to do, but he really, really didn’t want to be responsible for a child at this point in his life (he was in his mid-twenties, finishing up his undergraduate degree, and working part time for a government agency). When I tried to share with him my views and feelings on the situation, he abruptly said “I can’t listen to what you want to do. I can’t. I’ve told you what I want from my perspective and I’ll do whatever you want to do, but I can’t listen to you talk about what you want to do.”

I learned I was pregnant on a Friday. The following Monday, after some internet research, I went in to the student health centre to seek abortion counseling. I was surprised at how awkward and clumsy the student health nurse was about the whole thing. I told her I had taken a pregnancy test that came back positive, that I wasn’t sure but I believed I was pregnant, and that I wanted to pursue an abortion. She became flustered and went to get a doctor, who happened to be the head of the clinic. The doctor was impatient (at the time I thought he might have been passing judgement, but I later learned that this doctor is very pro-choice and just generally gruff), which I pushed through to get the information I needed.

Because I was at school out of province and on a student health insurance plan, my first line of care had to be the student health centre. If I had been studying in my official province of residence or had I switched my public health insurance over to the province where I was studying, I would have made an appointment directly with an abortion provider rather than go to student health. The only thing I got that was of much use at this student health clinic was a pamphlet with some information on what abortion is and where to access it. The pamphlet was a bit out of date so I had to make a few calls, but eventually I reached the Morgentaler Clinic (a network of abortion clinics in eastern Canada created by Canadian abortion activist Dr. Henry Morgentaler). Because of my health insurance situation, I had to travel back to my province of residence to have my abortion at a clinic there.

I went into the clinic first thing in the morning on the day of my procedure. I don’t remember if there were anti-choice protesters outside of the clinic - I often saw them in the city I was living in for grad school, and although they were legally required to stand across the street, it always struck me that I would not want an anti-choice protester to get a good look at my face as I walked in the clinic. I was allowed to bring a support person so James came with me. We were both asked to provide identification at the entrance. We sat in the waiting room with a few other people. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like most of the people were there on their own. Although I was frustrated by a lot of his behaviour up until then, I was grateful to have James there, to know that I wasn’t alone or uncared for at that moment. I was also surprised that in a city with a relatively small population of people of colour, about a third of the people in the waiting room were racialized.

After what felt like a long wait, I was called in to speak with a social worker. I remember thinking my social worker was kind of a babe. She had a blonde bob with blunt bangs at a time when that wasn’t really the style, and wore black boots and a maroon shirt. She looked like the people I would see hanging out at the women’s resource centre or the queer student union on campus. I don’t remember everything we talked about but two things stand out. She asked me if anyone was coercing me into having the abortion, and she asked me how I was feeling about having the procedure that day. Despite feeling that in different circumstances I might feel pressured by James’s reaction, I knew this was what I wanted. I told her I was nervous about the procedure, that even though I was confident in my decision, I was a little sad about it too. She communicated my anxiety to the medical team and they gave me a dose of lorazepam to help calm my nerves.

The Morgentaler clinic’s website provides a clear and thorough explanation of the procedure for a surgical abortion. In the clinic that day, the procedure unfolded just as they said it would. A nurse performed an ultrasound and inserted an IV for sedation. I was semi-conscious pretty quickly. The doctor and another nurse came in, performed an exam, and then performed the abortion. I remember crying out at one point when there was a little pain - the nurse apologized for it later, which made me think that might be unusual. I was very disoriented after the procedure and a nurse helped me to the recovery room where I was seated in a reclining chair and given a big heat compress. I fell asleep as others came in and out of the recovery room. I heard someone crying in the recovery room and later learned that it was me - I had a bit of a hard time recovering from the sedation. The nurses were kind and checked on me until I was clear-headed again. They gave me a light snack and helped me get myself back together when I was feeling steady again.

The week following the procedure was tiring. I didn’t want to tell many people about the procedure - I was worried about judgement from friends and knew my parents would react poorly if I told them. Physically I didn’t have too much trouble. I had heavy bleeding like a period for about a week after and knew this was reasonable to expect. After taking some time to heal I was able to go to the Morgentaler Clinic in the city where I was studying for a checkup and to have an IUD put in. I would recommend having a regular family doctor monitor an IUD if you go that route, as I ended up having mine in a little longer than recommended. When I told James about the IUD he said “if you had told me before you had it put in I wouldn’t have let you do it. IUDs are bad for you.” I remember feeling very annoyed that this person had so little idea that he was not entitled to hold opinions and make decisions about what was best for my body, especially after all the consequences I had so recently had to deal with.

My memories and feelings about my abortion experience come and go at different times. As my friend suggested, there are times when I think about what things would be like if I had carried my pregnancy to term. I grieve for the child I didn’t get to have. My current partner and I have been trying to conceive using her eggs and donor sperm. Our child will have a completely different genetic makeup from the child I would have had, and it’s a little sad to think of the face of the child I could have had. Ultimately, these little moments of sadness pass, and I would not change the decision I made at that time. Having that abortion was necessary for my own future, for me to take care of myself and eventually recover from the childhood and relationship that were both characterized by so little autonomy over my body and my life. Truly, the only regrets I have are that I stayed in the relationship as long as I did after recognizing how much I compromised myself, and that I did not make James go get me a cheeseburger once I could eat again after my abortion.