When I was a teenager, I thought I´d made up my mind about the abortion issue. Why would anyone need an abortion, if they could use birth control? We were in the late 20thCentury, for chrissakes. From my limited 16-year-old perspective, everyone who wanted to prevent pregnancy could do it with foolproof ease.
Never mind that I was growing up in Mexico, a predominantly Catholic country where teen pregnancies soared after Pope John Paul II visited in 1990 and said to the adoring masses that contraception was against God.
My own childhood was unconstrained by religion. In my father’s Marxist-Leninist mind, religion was the opiate of the masses. My mother is a Quaker, the most feminist, pacifist and open version of Christianity around, and she never pushed me to adopt her religion. By profession, she was trained as a demographer, and helped design the national population census. Acutely aware of the overpopulation of our planet, my mother had 2.0 children and promptly had her tubes tied in order to have no more. We were a small family from the lower but highly educated middle class, in a country where some women still had babies by the dozen.
In accordance with my parents’ liberal and practical views, I got my first sex education class in elementary school in 4th grade. The sex educator brought in for the occasion gathered boys and girls into a circle and passed around pills, condoms, diaphragms, vials of spermicide and IUDs and made sure we each touched each contraption with our very own hands. Every time a student exclaimed “Ewwww!” or passed the object to their neighbor too fast, she frowned and made us start over.
Having touched all these modern forms of conception prevention at the tender age of 8 (I was young for a 4th grader), I felt fully equipped to prevent unwanted pregnancies and never have to sit in the crosshairs of the abortion question in my lifetime.
Fast forward 10 years. My excellent grades and bilingual education have landed me a scholarship to study the International Baccalaureate in a prestigious British boarding school. I am 18 years old, it is Winter Break of my senior year and I can´t afford to fly home to Mexico for the holidays. My plan is to survive with as little money as possible by couch surfing. I visit 5 friends in 5 weeks, one couch per week, and live out the bleak weather in their homes until school starts again.
I spend the coldest night of my life in Oxford, visiting an acquaintance who is a second year student of German and Music there. She is a privileged child of the London suburbs who feels sophisticated because she can get drunk and be sexually promiscuous. She has access to cheap housing because she is the caretaker of the Quaker Meeting House in Oxford and her compensation includes a free room.
This Oxford student, I will call her Agnes, met my grandmother through the Quaker church and thus she became my only contact in Britain before I moved there.
Agnes and I didn´t know each other well. She knew nothing about my barely extant sex life, nothing about the ways Catholic prudishness had entered me by osmosis, nothing of how shocking I found her outspokenness about sex.
So I am in Oxford staying with Agnes at the Quaker Meeting House, eating cheese on toast—the best that British cuisine has to offer—and trying to stay warm. Agnes decides we need to go out on the town, and I step into the freezing dark fog among the stony gothic architecture in my inadequate clothes. Nobody taught me to dress for British weather, so all I have is cotton socks in thin boots, a sweater under a wax jacket bought on sale at my school. All of us third world student ended up with those cheap, waterproof jackets, freezing our toes off because we knew nothing of down jackets or sheepskin boots.
It is the coldest night of my life. Even Agnes complains about the cold. We meet two male friends of hers in a pub and have a whisky to warm up. For a while we go bar hopping, using whisky to warm our bones that got chilled just on the walk from the last bar over. Then we go back to her place, where she serves wine in tea stained mugs. I am unable to take but a few sips.
I have never been drunk before, and I start nodding off, thinking I am sleepy when really I am so plastered I bend over and throw up all over my clothes. I black out. I don´t remember Agnes taking my clothes off and putting them in the washer. I have no idea what she did with me after taking my clothes off.
All I know is that the following morning I wake, naked under a sleeping bag in the center of the Quaker Meeting Room, feeling pain between my legs. I don´t remember what happened, except for vague snapshots of the taller one of Agnes's friends, the long haired music student, half English, half Arabic (I forgot his other nationality, maybe Saudi?, but I never forgot his name), the one with whom Agnes had not been flirting.
I figure sex must have happened between us. I don´t remember saying yes to that, but feeling so guilty for having gotten drunk, I blame myself for whatever happened and resolve to try to forget it. The word rape is not in my vocabulary and I certainly do not want to associate it with my person. The irony of being violated in the sanctum where Oxford Quakers hold their pacifist and feminist Sunday meetings is lost on me.
Hard as I try to forget the whole incident, I can't. Two weeks later, while couch surfing in Scotland, I wake up one morning and vomit. My head is swimming, I am dizzy, heavy, tired. My breasts are sore and I feel bloated, I was expecting my period, but I don´t need a pregnancy test to tell me what I already know. This is how every novel describes being pregnant. If an old, wise lady looked into my eyes right now, she’d notice the glazed look in my eyes and tell me I am with child.
How could I let this happen to me? How could I have been so stupid, so careless? It doesn´t even occur to me that I may not be responsible. I take all the blame, not thinking that Agnes, the sexual sophisticate, fed me to the wolf. She left me alone, naked under a sleeping bag with a college student several years my senior who raped me with total impunity and was gone in the morning, never to appear again during my stay in that godforsaken city.
It would be years until I learned that a woman who is intoxicated and passed out cannot for obvious reasons give consent to sex, and rape is any act of nonconsensual sex, punishable by law.
Thus it was that one month after turning 18 I was pregnant, alone and poor in a foreign country, far from my family (whose judgment in any case I did not think I could survive), with only the Scottish girl I was visiting for support.
I had to tell her. To her credit, she took me to nearby Glasgow on the train the next day, to one of those clinics where they explain your options. A friendly, kind woman sat across from us, announced the pregnancy test was positive and explained I had three options: keep it, abort it, or give it up for adoption.
I was six months away from finishing my International Baccalaureate, I still had ahead the school work that would add up to 90 % of my grades. The school had a grueling academic rhythm, in order to graduate I was going to have to work very hard, but at the moment all I wanted was to be swallowed by the Earth, to disappear, to slip into sweet oblivion.
Having a baby felt unthinkable. I was sure my parents would disown me and I would end up doing menial jobs for a pittance, alone in some hovel in Mexico City, with no professional skills or experience.
The prospect of carrying a child for 9 months and then giving it away felt like ripping my own heart out. I couldn´t stop thinking of a childhood friend, a girl unwanted by her mother, who never got over the feeling of rejection, even though her adoptive parents had wanted her very much. That girl was deep in the clutches of anorexia, bulimia and drug addiction, and I knew it was all because of that terrible, ever-present feeling of rejection. I knew I couldn´t carry a child and not love it, and because of my love, I wouldn´t bear to give my child away.
I also knew it would devastate me to look into the face of a child of mine and say: “You were made through rape. You were born of violence.”
You see, that was my whole country. Mexico, the children of La Chingada, born of the rape of the indigenous woman by the Spanish conquistador. Inside of me the Spaniard and the Indian had been fighting all my life.
One thing the woman from the clinic told me that I didn´t already know, was that abortion was legal in Britain, and covered by the National Health Service. I wouldn´t need to come up with a way to pay for it. She also explained that since I had just turned 18, I would not need any adult's consent to undergo the voluntary surgery.
I had to eat my words. What did I know about the circumstances that may lead a woman to choose abortion? I was now walking in her shoes. I promised myself I’d never judge again.
…there is more to this story. I will tell it another time.
Are you a survivor of sexual violence? What has your healing journey been like? Perhaps, like mine, it began long ago. Perhaps it is only starting. If you recognize yourself in any part of my story, know that we are not alone and there is much healing available. You can always contact me. I can help.