Saturday afternoon, I met a new friend at Blenz for lattes. It’s been one of those fast friendships. We met in class and instantly bonded over dark nail polish, The Wonder Years, a shared obsession of spicy fries from Sub City Donair, and our biology majors. We became close enough quick enough in these past few weeks that when K. slips into the seat across from me, cheeks rosy from the late September air, I can tell something’s bothering her.
“It’s my period,” she says.
What about it? I ask.
“It’s nonexistent,” she groans.
We talk briefly about why this might be and she confesses that she thinks she could be pregnant. Not likely, she reassures me, but still possible. I try and tell her to calm down, that the two tests she has taken that have come back negative are almost undoubtedly correct. And then I realize now is a good time to talk about it. My abortion. I do this sometimes. You might have overheard me. I’m not terribly shy about it. I don’t do this to make you uncomfortable. I do this to normalize the conversation.
“Well, when I was pregnant I knew right away,” I say, sipping soy milk— not because I’m allergic, but because I read how they treat pregnant dairy cows. (It’s not good.) I say it casually, in the same tone K. has been talking about her missed period.
But it’s different.
There’s a beat.
“Oh,” she murmurs, connecting the dots, putting together my words and the way I used the past tense and the fact that we maybe aren’t supposed to talk about abortions in public but possible pregnancies are okay. “Oh.” K. laughs, a little nervously. She glances around and I can practically hear her thinking: has anyone heard us? Are they judging us? “That must have been hard.”
“It wasn’t,” I say, not unkindly, slurping again at the pumpkin spiced latte (which I find out later does have dairy and, to be frank, that upset me more than K.’s reaction). “It was a quick process. I was sick all day, sure, but that was mostly from the medication. I don’t regret it.”
I can see the tension ease out of her shoulders. She asks me a couple more questions, each one offered up more eagerly and I answer in the same light tone. You see, I grew up in a home where I only found out my mother had an abortion because I overheard her whisper it to my grandmother in a shamed, tear-choked whisper. I grew up where the word “sex” was met with blushes. I grew up not admitting my own rape to my mother, but instead silently cleaning myself up and telling her the next day I was just tired and no, I wasn’t depressed.
There was no way for me to talk about abortion because no one was talking about it. But if I can be that person to someone, why shouldn’t I? I have another friend with HSV2. Not sure what that is? Herpes. You probably didn’t cringe when you read the scientific name, but I’ll bet you are now. She struggled for years with the diagnoses, thinking she would never have sex again and no one would love her. But now she boldly talks about it—not weaving it in unnecessarily, but within a certain context, she says it without fear. She does it for the same reason I talk about my abortion: she wants to normalize it.
K. got her period the next day. This isn’t always the case and sometimes abortion is the preferred answer. And a lot of people hide these things—be it unwanted pregnancies, STIs, gender dysphoria—because we don’t hear these conversations being had. We’re all eavesdroppers. We only talk about things we think are okay to talk about it, and we only think things are okay to talk about if we hear someone else say it first. So I’ll be that first person, if that’s what it takes, but let’s make a promise to each other: to let that awkward pause hang in the air for just that one beat, and then dive right in.