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It’s upsetting when someone tells you that you couldn’t possibly feel the way you feel. Or that what you felt — relief — is not a “natural” emotion. In the morning he apologized and said he hadn’t articulated himself well. We went to brunch and took a walk. But some part of me still suspected that enough alcohol had brought out the sort of prejudices smart liberals know to be embarrassed by when sober.
Before my abortion I never would have imagined that seemingly antiquated ideas about gender — that women need to be taken care of, that women always have binding ties to motherhood, that female body processes are somehow alien or scary — would ever surface in the New Yorker-toting media men I was dating, even if just for a moment, even if just when drunk. None of these men had faced abortion in any but the most abstract terms. Then they did, more than once, and it was more than a bit depressing to realize that a fair number of liberal men still possess confining notions about women, and while they would argue wholeheartedly for reproductive rights in the political abstract, they might personally judge me in bed at night.
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