At the very beginning of this year’s summer break, I found out I was pregnant. I will spare you all the explicit details of how it happened (when a man loves another man very much etc. etc.), but it happened.
I do not know how to describe what happened next. I will do my best, and I ask that you all be patient with me.
We should start with the moment of panic. I already have spent two weeks obsessing over the disaster I know is coming. I joke with my friends about all of us attending the appointment, clown car style, or about getting so drunk I circumvent the need for medical attention altogether. Every morning, I am desperate to wake up covered in blood. It doesn’t happen.
I take the test exactly 14 days after conception, already certain that the worst has happened. I sit on facetime with my partner as we wait for the results and I do my best to avoid looking at the test in front of me for the full 5 minutes.
In summer, time is something to be waded through. I stay in St. Andrews year-round because my parent’s house is not safe for me, and in the months between May and September my life ends. Most of my friends return home to their families and school friends and I am left behind. Life is never as dire as I think it is, of course. I have wonderful friends I met through working for the Uni last year. I visit my best friend in Manchester. I go to gigs with my brother.
But between these peaks there are troughs that feel inescapable. I work a job that exhausts and hurts me and come back home to an empty bedroom. I am not built for even relative isolation, and I start most days waiting for them to end. My father used to tell me a story as a child, supposedly about one of his jobs while temping. He would tell me that once, while working in a factory, he dropped his watch in an enormous vat of soup and was forced to swim through the soup to fish it out. It is not an elegant metaphor, but for me, summers feel like the soup vat. I am swimming against the current of an industrial mixer, making little headway.
The five minutes of pointedly not looking at the two lines that I know will be there are an entire summer in an instant. The moment passes and I look.
I am pregnant. My partner is in Pakistan. I am alone.
I want to say that my body betrayed me. But I do not think it did. My body has never done as I wished, never been athletic, never been thin. It has also, recently, started breaking down. I have started walking with a cane. I refuse to view these as betrayals, because I refuse to submit to the lie that I am separate from my body, that it is an animal I must wrestle into submission. I am not something to be subjugated, even by myself. The first few days of knowing I am pregnant will strain these ideals.
Out loud, I will refer to what is growing inside me as a cluster of cells. I tell my friends I am pregnant and getting an abortion as if they are the same act. On an intellectual level, they are. There is no universe in which I choose to carry this pregnancy to term. I am not financially stable, I do not have a permanent home, I am still a student, I am 22 and I do not want to be pregnant. Abortion is the gift that will allow me to take care of myself.
But for that first few days, I cannot stop crying. There is a horrible, animal voice in my head. What it is saying sickens me, the idea of speaking out loud what it feels, what I feel, makes me feel physically nauseous. I hate it, but there is a part of me that can only think I don’t want to hurt my baby. It is hard to write even now. I know it is not a baby; I am completely uninterested in anyone trying to argue otherwise. It had barely even made the transition from blastocyst to embryo. The trouble was, that this was a pregnancy I wanted… in about 7-10 years. I want to spend the rest of my life with my partner, and I want to have children with him. We talk endlessly about parenting choices; we agree on nursery themes (cartoon wizard) and disagree on whether we’d buy alcohol for a teenager going to a party. My partner is the kindest, funniest and most devoted person I’ve ever met, and I cannot wait to build a family and a community with him.
But the future has to stay, well, in the future. I know this, but some part of my body does not. It is agonising. I spend every moment on the verge of tears, alone and desperate to think of anything else. It feels like I am fighting myself constantly, and it hurts. The part of myself that is desperate to protect the child-that-is-not-a-child horrifies me and saddens me in equal measure because it is not alien or unimaginable.
I am vanishingly rarely dysphoric, but this feeling broke me. It was such a cliché of ‘maternal feelings’ and I felt another wave of betrayal, that my body was forcing me not only into being a parent but being a mother. Of all the ways in which I am not ready to be pregnant, the most unexpected was that I do not yet know how to be a pregnant man.
I have been out as transgender for over a decade now and that journey has been long and complicated. I think I have found a place of peace, that I have figured it all out. I am a man who looks identical to a woman and this makes me happy. Feminine gender presentation is always more fun to me, and I like the way I look. I know most people do not recognise me as a man, but I also genuinely do not care what they think. But this does not mean that change cannot shake me. I know how to live my transgender life right now. But what is made clear to me is that I do not know how to be transgender in the future. I do not know how I am supposed to build a family in a world built to enforce cissexist norms.
I spend days trying to grieve something I do not know how to grieve, something I have never seen anyone grieve before. I have no model, no routine, no ritual. I get through the worst days, the ones where I go to work so that I may have 6 hours where I am not allowed to cry. Therapy helps, and so does time. Eventually I stop crying. But the grief is not over. What I need is an abortion party.
Pro-choice discussions about abortion are, generally, defending the right to have one. These are undeniably vital discussions, especially during a rise in global fascism. But there’s another abortion conversation I think we need to have: how to have one. Talking about getting an abortion honestly, for me, feels frightening. I don’t want what I have written to be co-opted into a far-right argument that abortion actually is murder, or that people who want to be pregnant are brainwashed into getting abortions. But at the same time, I didn’t know how much grief I would feel until I got pregnant. And as much as my friends want to be supportive, there’s no clear picture of what ‘supportive’ can mean. But this absence of routine allows for creativity, for me to take the empty space and decide what should go in its place.
I am a man who loves two things – drinking and being a sort of low-grade evil. Luckily, I have friends with similar interests. We’d already joked about an abortion party – it was simply a case of putting a plan in action. The purpose of the night was simple, get drunk and celebrate abortion, particularly the fact that access to abortion means I can continue being a feckless and chaotic student, rather than suddenly nosediving into parental responsibility.
In some ways it wasn’t my ideal abortion party – numbers weren’t what they would have been during term time, and I didn’t have the time or energy to go heavy with the theming at all. But it was still a very important experience. My friend Kaare showed up in drag (featuring a truly unnerving silicon breast plate) and we drank enough to make Tik Toks (always a good sign).
Beyond revelry and fake tits, the party also provided me the opportunity of a point of no return that was more immediate and less emotionally charged than the abortion itself – drinking alcohol. That first drink was a private space, an hour before anyone else arrived, sat with a canned piña colada. In that moment, I was finally able to understand that choosing an abortion now was a part of what would make me a happy and safe parent later in life. Abortion was what would allow me to build a stable career, to learn and grow and change without the pressure of perfection. I did not have to know how to be transgender and pregnant yet. More than anything, abortion would give me back time. Time to become the person I needed to be, and time to become the person my future children would need. I was finally able to let go of the grief I had felt and to understand that the best thing I could do for any children I may have in the future was to get absolutely pissed.
Life has shifted very radically in modern history, and I do not think our cultural rituals have kept up. We need communities and gatherings and celebrations to be human, and as our cultures centre religious life less and less, we lose spaces for these moments. Sundays are no longer a day for the entire town or village to gather in church, but instead the day where the buses are annoying. My partner was raised Muslim and tells me it’s strange that Ramadan is just a month now. We cannot cross out half the events in our calendars and not try to replace them.
The biggest recent additions to the celebratory calendar have been the baby shower and the gender reveal – I do not think it is a coincidence that these are both pro-natalist events. More and more people are choosing not to have children, or to have them later in life, but there are no new holidays for us unwed whores. I believe this task of building new structures for new lives is an inherently queer one, a natural extension of the restorative chaos that queer communities can be.
My contribution to this new calendar is the abortion party – not only to build a world where abortion can be publicly celebrated, but also one where we can also hold space for pregnancy (and sometimes abortion itself) as a trauma. Your abortion party can look however you need it to be, drunk and wild or sober and cosy. But I implore you – if you need an abortion, you need an abortion party. Surround yourself with the people who love you and take what you need from them.
In the end, I didn’t end up going to pick up the medication for my abortion. Maybe I just got lucky, or maybe I did actually drink heavily enough at the party, but I had a miscarriage at a Nine Inch Nails concert – truly the most (industrial) metal thing that could have happened. But I did need my abortion party, and I’m very grateful I got one.
By Marsh (he/him)