Lena Dunham’s Abortion
Remember when Lena Dunham said
She wished she’d had an abortion?
I bet she super duper wishes that now!!
Arby’s Fries
The first time I had an abortion I was nineteen
My college boyfriend and I fucked twice the day my period ended without a condom
Because someone said you can’t get pregnant right after your period
There were people with signs outside the Planned Parenthood when I walked in
It was cold, January in Cincinnati, my mom had driven down from Reynoldsburg
Where she still lived with her asshole boyfriend, Mark,
The one who beat her up
Anyway, she came down and went w me and the next year
My boyfriend Evan – the one who’d knocked me up - and I moved her out of the apartment in Reynoldsburg
And into an apartment in downtown Columbus
Where, at age forty,
My mother changed careers, gave up bartending,
went to court reporting school
a year after that I went with her down to South Carolina
so she could fuck Mark one more time
why are assholes always such good fucks?
I would ask her and myself thirty-one years later
No one ever has an answer
I was twenty-six and married when I had my second abortion
My husband was nineteen and we lived in a shitty apartment
Near Twelve Mile
Across the street from the mall where I worked at a Victoria’s Secret;
My husband worked at a plastics factory on Thirteen mile
Or maybe it was Twelve,
I can’t remember
It was so long ago
All I remember is I had the abortion and the next day at work I got Arby’s fries on my lunch hour
At the mall
Nine months later I got pregnant again
But because my dad had died in the interim and left me some $$$
I didn’t have an abortion this time
This time I had my daughter
But I don’t think it would matter either way
Or if I had
Fate is fate
I never regret shit
Certainly not either abortion
I told a lady at the Ann Arbor Art Fair this a few years ago
She was standing outside a Pro Life tent with a sign that read:
Women regret abortions
“I never regretted either of mine,” I said
I kept walking
I was in my late forties by this time
No longer viable for pregnancies, aborted or otherwise
But my daughter was
My daughter was in her early twenties
I thought it only fair she be afforded the same opportunities I had
The worst one was a man with a sign after a football game
UM vs somebody
We were walking back from the stadium in Ann Arbor
And a man with a photograph of what I presume was a fetus (even blown up it was grainy, black and white; I averted my eyes)
Was blocking everyone’s way
As we tried to cross the street
If there are two things I never want to see:
One is a photograph of an aborted fetus
The second is any video PETA ever made
Isn’t it funny,
It’s usually ppl on opposite ends of the political spectrum:
The PETA ppl and the Pro Lifers
I don’t want to see anyone’s videos
Or listen to anybody else’s idea of morality
I just want to eat my Arby’s French fries on my lunch hour;
I just want my daughter to have the same American choices
Her mother had, in 1995, a year before she was born.
