It is 1993, and she wants this baby so much, they have been trying and trying; there’s a heartbeat, she can hear it, but there isn’t a brain. Her body won’t let it go, and the doctor says I am very sorry, but I will have to remove it myself.
It is 2015, and she has to sneak in on a Tuesday because her youth group is protesting the clinic on Saturday, and she needs a couple of days to recover or they’ll wonder why she isn’t there. She’ll weep in the recovery room and call the nurse a murderer.
It is 1965, and she has to convince a hospital review board that she’s suicidal, clutching letters from two separate psychiatrists, all for the privilege of spending two nights in a psych ward and having all her bits shaved for no clear reason, but it works, it’s humiliating but it works, and she knows she’s one of the lucky ones for finding a way.
It is 1150, and Hildegard von Bingen, the Sybil of the Rhine, is settling into life as the abbess of a monastery built in her honor. She is preparing to write the medical tomes Physica and Causae et Curae, in which, among many other remedies, she will list her most tried-and-true abortifacients. Officially, the Church considers the practice a sin, but it is not murder until the quickening, that moment four or five months along when the soul enters the body, and so a nun providing this care to her community is not remarkable, but merely practical.
The Romans have their silphium and the Chinese have achyranthes root. The Shoshone have stoneseed, the Lakota have sagewort, the Hawaiians have elixirs of hau, noni, ‘awa, and young kī leaves. The Victorians have their tansy tea and savin, their ergot of rye, their black draught and mallow and motherwort. Millennials have got mifepristone and misoprostol, and the climate generation has gestational blocks and yellow pills droned straight to the bathroom chute.
It is 1750—seventeen fucking fifty—and Mary is consulting a dog-eared copy of The American Instructor, the greatly popular household textbook. It is not an arithmetic lesson that occupies her today—though math will come in useful—but an entry in the medical section at the back.
Mary is reading instructions on how to cure that most common of complaints among unmarry’d Women: the SUPPRESSION of the COURSES. Mary’s courses are suppressed, all right, have been for weeks, and as a widow of certain means and a disinclination to marry again, it isn’t the first time she’s had to consult this home remedy. To cure her Misfortune, she’s got to purge with Belly-ach Root and then drink Pennyroyal Water with Spirits of Harts-horn twice a day for nine days, then take three days rest, then go on again for nine more days. It’s a pain, but better than the alternative.
...
It is 1350 BCE, and she is urinating on bags of wheat and barley seeds, waiting to see how quickly they will sprout. It works more often than you’d think.
She just wants to know, so she can plan, either way. And—
It is 1021, and she is watching the shah’s physician pour sulfur over her urine, looking for the worms he believes will spring from the mix. It doesn’t work any better than you’d think.
She just wants to know, so she can plan, either way. And—
It is 1658, and she is waiting at the home of the local piss prophet. He holds the matula up to the light, peering through the glass to assess the color of the liquid within.
She just wants to know, so she can plan either way. And—
It is 1998, and Lee Berger just identified the fungus causing a decades’ long decline in Australian frog species. It was carried on the skin of our old friend Xenopus laevis, exported by the tens of thousands for urine-injection-pregnancy tests, and now it is threatening extinction to thirty percent of the world’s amphibians.
It’s unfortunate as hell for the frogs, but all of those people just wanted to know, so they could plan either way. Because—
—because she is still ten thousand dollars in debt from her last time giving birth.
—because if she stops taking her medication, she will die.
—because the thought makes him vomit, makes him faint, he wouldn’t survive it.
—because if they don’t finish school, they’ll be raising this baby in their parent’s basement.
—because she simply doesn’t want to, she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t need to be on her deathbed or underage or running from a monster, her doctor said she couldn’t get her tubes tied unless she had three children already, but where’s the logic in giving birth to three children for the permission to have none?
It is 2084 and she is crying, “Our grandmothers fought so hard for this.”
It is 2206 and she is crying, “Our grandmothers fought so hard for this.”
It is 1878 and Madame Restell is bleeding to death in her bathtub rather than submit to another trial. It is 1821 and Asenath Smith is fleeing town in disgrace. It is 1972 and seven of the women of Jane have just been arrested in a raid. It is 2086 and Grace’s medical record has been officially upgraded to that most precarious of categories: potential to become pregnant.
It is 2022 and it isn’t over.
It is 2022 and it is never over.
