Ida Tin’s “Dear Men” Series: Part 11 of 29 – Being But Not Wanting To Be Pregnant
Dear Men, this is post 11 on Being But Not Wanting To Be Pregnant, part of a series on what it feels like to have a woman’s body.
I was 29 and I had sex with a man I had met four weeks earlier. To my big surprise, he came in me. I definitely should have used a condom and assuming, that he would pull out was really stupid. To this day, I don’t fully understand how that happened. But it did. And we agreed to marry and have the child. We made a date at the city hall. He was very, very poor. And I was just poor. I looked into immigration laws and realized I couldn’t afford to bring him with me to Denmark. How we would make a life in the US was a big unknown. And yeah, I also didn’t love him enough to go through anything to create a life with him. The morning of our planned wedding appointment, I woke up with a clear no. I told him and got a flight back to Denmark.
Many years later, I spent two years in a woman’s circle talking only about abortions from all imaginable angles. It was a wide and deep exploration, and it was healing and also painful. Not just to revisit my own story, but to feel deeply into this event that so, so many of us share. More than 50% of all pregnancies in the US are unplanned.
It made me understand how unable we are as society to help women make this incredibly hard decision, to think it through with them, to help her process it, mourn even when it’s a decision she makes herself. We, as societies, are absolutely crap at meeting and holding women in the process it is to find out you are unwanted pregnant, to feel the magic of growing a child, to decide to not go through with the pregnancy for a million reasons, to do the procedure, to live on after.
I know for a fact that the only one who has full information access is the woman herself. She, and only she, can and should make that decision. Held and supported by the dad if appropriate, by her web of caring humans, by the health care systems, and by society and in culture. She needs us.
-This post by Ida Tin is shared on LinkedIn and is republished here with her permission. The SheSight Team has not made any changes to the content.
