“You’ve Never Had An Abortion Have You?”

Finally, I couldn’t bear the awkward silence anymore, the clatter of our forks and the rising hum of other diners. I asked him why my question had been so shocking to him—after all, we were talking about embryos and he was pro-choice anyway. He replied that, for him, the decision wasn’t political—it was personal. Then—almost parenthetically—he said, “I mean, you’ve never had an abortion, have you?”

When I recall the moment now, it plays like the big jump scare in a scary movie. You know the one: The wife turns over in bed to find her husband transformed into a vampire, a zombie, a pod person, Satan. These movies mine our unconscious fears that our loved ones might betray us, fall out of love, abandon us. But what of smaller revelations, subjects perhaps so taboo we don’t even name them as such? We may feel comfortable articulating an official stance, a political position to each other. But what about the murk of feelings and judgements that lie underneath? Judgements so deeply held that somehow never come up—until they do. 

The sword in the bed, as Schnitzler would term it.

You’ve never had an abortion, have you? His question hovered in the air, the cacophony of the busy restaurant seeming to rise and rise as he waited for my reply.

“I’m not answering that,” I said. 

“Why not?”

Didn’t he see? In that context the question felt loaded, impossible. This wasn’t pillow talk, it wasn’t a sharing of stories, a swapping of confidences as we pored over our romantic histories together. This was something else entirely.

I can’t remember what I said in lieu of answering. I think I trotted out percentages of the number of women who’ve had abortions. But then I stopped talking because I didn’t want to give him any evidence, one way or the other. I asked for the check. It was time to leave.

You’ve never had an abortion, have you? The framing of the question, the syntax of the sentence tells you the answer he expects. And it tells you the answer he hadn’t been able to fathom until this moment, which revealed everything about the implicit judgment he would make. (Not to mention the uneasy slippage he’d made from embryo to fetus to baby.)

Maybe you’re thinking: Hadn’t this ever come up before? We’d been together at least four years at this point. We’d both entered the relationship feeling battered by recent breakups. The slings and molten arrows of failure and betrayal drove us into each other’s arms with a romantic fervor. “Not this time!” we seemed to be saying, hoisting impossible expectations on each other and our connection. The romantic haze of those first several months made me feel like a teenager, feelings so big they seemed to overwhelm me and certainly overwhelming any pragmatic concerns or any distant ring of warning bells. They drowned out everything else. Nothing felt harder when we were brought down to earth by the same trials that test every relationship: distance, merging lives, lifestyle compatibilities, money. So maybe we wanted to avoid any landmines, any ambushes, or maybe neither of us could manage and more romantic illusions shattered. Isn’t that what Schnitzler’s sword metaphor suggests? We thought we were one but we are in fact violently two.