Reproductive Rights: The Woman Who Held My Hand

Kristin Duncombe

I am a Paris-based therapist who spent my childhood summers in the Twin Cities; my mother is from Saint Paul. As we continue to face the heart-breaking realities of violence directed against women’s bodily autonomy — I am devastated about what happened in Minnesota this week — my mind travels to a mental snapshot from 1989.

I am sitting at the counter of a diner in Springfield, Massachusetts, staring at my sandwich: whole wheat toast, soggy from mayonnaise, a massive dollop of tuna salad, spilling out of the bread and onto the old cracked plate. How many meals had been served on that very plate, to how many young women like me?

I am nineteen years old. I am eight weeks pregnant.

I am waiting for my appointment at the clinic around the corner, where a clump of cells will be taken out of my body so I do not have to be pregnant anymore. Relief. Thank you, God. But also, oh God, to take it out of me, something will have to reach into my insides.

Terror.

Queasy — with hormones, with fear — I sink my teeth into that soggy bread. The tuna has celery chopped up into it and I feel bereft. Celery in my tuna reminds me of childhood, and now I am pregnant, and I can’t understand how these two truths coexist. Was I once a child?

At the clinic, a woman named Stephanie comes to the door of the waiting room and calls my number. No names at this clinic; it is all anonymous. Stephanie is tall with big curly hair pulled back in golden clips. She takes me by the elbow, firmly, kindly, and steers me down the hall, through the door to the left. She hands me a paper robe that she says will protect my privacy, and turns her back while I undress.

“Ready,” I say, but my voice sounds far away, so I say it again. “Ready.”

“I will not leave you,” she says. “I will talk you through every single step.”

Get on the table. Feet in the stirrups. Slide down. Further. Further, honey. Open your legs. Wider. This is the doctor. You’ll feel a pinch. Hold my hand. Squeeze as hard as you need. You’re okay. I’m here. The doctor is inserting the speculum. You might feel some pressure. Now she is inserting the cannula. You will feel more pressure and some tugging. It’s okay. You are okay. Squeeze my hand. I am here. I am with you.

The constitutional right to abortion in the United States was removed by the Supreme Court in June 2022. The consequence? According to Planned Parenthood, one in three women in the United States no longer have access to abortions, and can only obtain one if they travel to states where access is protected. As politicians inspired and endorsed by Donald Trump gain power in more states, reproductive freedoms are becoming more restricted and increasingly unavailable to women.

My heart aches for all the women of this time who will find themselves in the position I did at age 19. Discovering I was pregnant was terrifying. Had I had to also struggle to find reproductive care, I don’t know what I would have done. It was my first pregnancy, but not the first time the repercussions of a sexual relationship with a man had a devastating consequence on me — one that the guy involved took zero responsibility for.

I had lost my virginity a year earlier to my first serious boyfriend, a senior at Amherst College who was — unbeknownst to me — a serial cheater. By the time our “monogamous” relationship came crashing down, he had delivered to my unsuspecting body three STD’s, plus pubic lice, and left me to deal with it on my own.

A year later, a “nice guy” we’ll call Todd, also from Amherst College, who had witnessed what my ex-boyfriend had put me through, apologized on behalf of all men. “You didn’t deserve that,” he said, as we sloshed beer from those red plastic cups that make it to every college keg party. “No one deserves that. Guys get away with too much shit.”

Finally, a guy who got it! I wanted to feel loved. He said all the right things, so I didn’t ask myself why I was getting into bed with someone I wasn’t attracted to, with his Mickey Mouse ears and thin smile. The sex was rushed and fumbling and premature, but I pretended it had been great for me, too.

Fast forward four weeks, when I told him a pregnancy test was positive. I didn’t burden him with the anguish; I simply told him when I had booked an appointment for the termination.

“Bummer,” he said, as though he would be too late for a dinner reservation. “That’s two days after I fly home for the summer.”

Not: “Would you like me to be there?”

Not: “Are you scared?”

Not: “Is there anything I can do to help you, even if I am not going to offer to be physically present with you?”

Just, “Bummer.”

And then off he went, unfettered, unbothered by the consequences of the night we spent together. I had to face that alone.

As the men in power in the United States strip women of their bodily autonomy, I can’t help but wonder how many of them have relied on a Stephanie to help their mother, girlfriend, wife, sister, or daughter through an abortion because they didn’t show up themselves.

Women are taught (or forced?) to take responsibility, even for things they fundamentally did not create — such as the loss of their reproductive rights — while men are allowed to shirk responsibility, even though they continue to hold most of the power and cause the pregnancies.

If this sounds like an anti-man diatribe, let me say: I love men. What I detest is patriarchy, and the destructive gendered socialization it propagates. I am now the mother of both a daughter and a son. I have seen how boys are pressured to repudiate their own needs for compassion, tenderness, and empathy, and are instead made to “man up,” hiding behind stoicism, strength and unshakeable confidence.

Girls face different pressures — including a need to please, be nice, and accommodate others. The consequence is that so many boys are taught to disown, because of a stunted capacity for compassion, tenderness, and empathy.

These are gross generalizations, certainly; not all men are stunted and not all stunted men are stunted all the time. Yet we all know women (and children) who have been abandoned by men — materially, emotionally, or both.

Although it is so predictable an argument as to be cliché, I am compelled to say it again: The people driving these craven anti-autonomy laws are largely men; why aren’t they also passing laws that legislate male responsibility?

Is that possible?

Yes.

Let’s start with how we frame the lack of reproductive freedom these days as a “woman’s issue.” What if the man would be legally required to quit his job and take care of any child he creates? What if he were required to provide a minimum amount of income to cover his pregnant partner’s pre- and post-natal care, as well as the costs associated with having a baby?

If men don’t consider those ideas feasible, then maybe they could at least commit to responsibility — manhood — in socializing boys so that, as young men, they would make more of an effort to not get women pregnant. They could learn to abstain or wear condoms correctly 100 percent of the time, or get vasectomies and demand the expansion of options for male contraception.

Because there are so few men, relative to their actual numbers, who even think about these matters and fight for equality is why women experience life as patriarchal. Not making an effort to change the system — leaving the primary burden and responsibility for pregnancy on women — gives a sense of sometimes violent entitlement to men.

As long as it is primarily men who continue to deny women their bodily autonomy, even those men who feel egalitarian in their approach to parenthood are not doing enough to show up for women.

A month after my abortion, a letter arrived from Todd. He was in Hawaii, surfing, but wanted to know: Did you have “the procedure?” How did it go?

Did he really care how it went for me, or did he just need confirmation that he would not discover, eight months later, that he is a father?

I considered lying: Skipped “the procedure” and am almost twelve weeks now!

Would his parents contact me? Would they offer me money to not ruin the selfishness of their son’s life?

I open a copy of The New Yorker that I have been carrying around for weeks. It includes a column by a woman reflecting on the recent Pro-Choice March in Washington, and her own abortion 20 years prior, in the late 1960s. I had read the piece so many times that I knew it by heart. I lifted whole phrases from it, telling her story to Todd as though it was mine, turning my drama into something broad, political, important.

Recounting this now, I don’t remember most of what that plagiarized letter said, except for the one phrase that always stayed with me: “a sea of helplessness.” The author made her decision to abort because of a sea of helplessness.

Or was it hopelessness?

I was a 19 year-old girl,  alone on a sea of helplessness and hopelessness; the one who impregnated me was not there.  It was Stephanie, an unknown woman, who showed up to hold my hand and tell me everything I needed to know in that moment, other than the answer to two important questions:

How did Todd justify his absence? What was missing in his emotional education that enabled him to go surfing while Stephanie held my hand?

Which leads me to two questions that keep rolling over in my mind now: How can it be that a young woman in America today is even less likely than I was to have an emotionally competent man supporting her in a moment of crisis? And what might we do about that?