21 Days

by Emmy Favilla

I was sitting on the toilet at a subpar comedy club that relied heavily on Groupon sales and European tourists. An adjacent hallway displayed framed photos signed by seasoned comedians who now sell out headlining shows, who aired their own comedy specials, who starred on Saturday Night Live and saw their dreams crystalize. The floor’s dirty, chipped tiles shifted in and out of focus as I thought: Am I actually going to create a child with a person who only sometimes manages to make his $400 rent on time? 

It was the second week of September and my period was five days late. 

I could count how many times my boyfriend Jack and I had been intimate that year on both hands, and I was pretty certain I was infertile. I was taking the pregnancy test to be safe, since I’m never more than two or three days off. I peed on a stick in the single-stall bathroom of that midtown comedy club after a strong tequila soda and before Jack’s set. 

I was still perched on the seat lined with layers of cheap toilet paper when the positive result came into view. It felt like my body was being drained of blood, my feet two small anvils propping up lifeless limbs. 

I did the math. Two and a half weeks earlier, my office had hosted an end-of-summer happy hour. Supersized jugs of every liquor imaginable and a DIY cocktail station make for nothing short of a near-deadly combination under normal circumstances, but even more so when the average age of your coworkers is 23 and you’re confident you can keep up at 31. We were allowed plus-ones, so Jack joined; the revelry culminated in a karaoke party at one of our favorite East Village dive bars. 

Fueled by copious amounts of alcohol and the buzz of a long weekend ahead, Jack and I had unremarkable sex in a dim bathroom. I leaned against the bumpy, dark-painted wall in an act supremely out of character for us. Our passion for intimacy had declined sharply over the year we’d been together; our propensity for arguments was on an upswing. The chances of our being horny and happy at the same time? We seized the opportunity provided to us by a miracle on Avenue A before a Lauryn Hill duet and a foggy subway ride home—Jack to the New Jersey place he shared with three others, me to the Queens apartment in my parents’ building where I lived by myself. 

Five years earlier, I had left a man I was in love with for most of my twenties (“the worst thing that ever happened to our family,” according to my dad, reigning king of drama); he wanted a future with children and I didn’t. The very first night Jack and I hung out—by no means a proper date, just an acted-upon invitation to catch his set after we’d met on the street weeks earlier—he told me over cocktails paid for with drink tickets at the comedy club bar that he wanted a lot of children, someday. This time, I didn’t consider it a deal breaker because I knew the relationship didn’t have legs, despite the three years we would wind up being together. (The adoption of dogs prolonged our coupledom far past its expiration date.) 

An hour after the drugstore-test result, Jack and I sat in a pizzeria across from the club, in our respective states of shock. “I don’t even have a car!” he said in exasperation. Our belief that we were not equipped to be parents at this juncture aligned, but we still ran through all the possibilities for proceeding in a stupor. 

Our mothers, coincidentally, were both day care providers; mine lived in the apartment below me, his was a 90-minute drive away. Support wouldn’t be difficult if we needed it. The rent I paid was criminally cheap; I could easily make ends meet with a child in tow. Jack, not so much. He could pick up more hours bartending or barbacking, but the money-making evening shifts would conflict with his standup. Back-and-forths were punctuated by long swathes of silence. We agreed to come to a final decision the next day, when there was no alcohol in our systems. 

I was astounded to find I was rearranging pieces of myself so they would fit into someone else’s future, if just for a few fleeting moments. It was jarring. Was I drunk? Was it the by-product of my empathy for a person who, unlike myself, had strong convictions to one day have children? Was there a motherly part of me that innately wanted to set aside my own plans to make someone else happy?

My tears surprised me when I told my mom the news, two days later. “You know what to do,” she said, matter-of-factly and dry-eyed. She’s always supported the decisions I’ve made, never the type to prod about grandchildren.
I did know what to do, and decidedly how to do it. I’d already made an appointment that morning at a private clinic recommended by a close friend. The procedure would be in three days.

Ultimately Jack agreed a termination was the right choice, but the night before my appointment I woke to him sobbing next to me in bed. Despite the tight five-day window, he’d managed to tell several of his friends in the industry about the pregnancy and asked for their input—assuming if he culled enough thoughts, he’d be able to determine whether successfully pursuing his comedy career and providing adequate care for a child would be feasible. 

I was shocked he was letting people I barely knew into our business, thinking they could provide him with an answer sufficiently coercive to sway our decision. Any rumination with outsiders was one-dimensional, ignoring the reality that not only did I not want a child, but if we did have one, I would undoubtedly be the sole provider. That my aspirations, my resources, my happiness would be subject to the most profound effects. That I’d have to put much more on pause—all for a life he wanted eventually, but perhaps was only considering seriously now.

The next morning, we took the subway into midtown together, quiet, tired. I handed a check for $1,000—all my own money—to the receptionist in a small, private clinic where partners were allowed to be present for the procedure. I thought Jack should be there. I wanted him to be there. The blinders of love had not yet dissolved despite my disappointment in the way he was navigating his emotions ahead of my own welfare. He was still my person, someone whose support and vulnerability over the past week had been a constant.

Dressed in a paper gown, I chatted with the nurse about celebrities I’d met at the media company where I worked (most recently, John Stamos, who’d invited me to touch his impossibly soft Tom Ford jacket) and how we’d felt, respectively, about Ray J’s short-lived romance with Whitney Houston. Several minutes later, she told me that at 21 days, I was almost too early for my own abortion. The fetus was so small: a tiny, barely-there dot amid a sea of black and grey streaks on the sonogram screen. 

I held Jack’s hand and closed my eyes as the procedure was completed. It felt marginally more uncomfortable than the colposcopies I’d had over the years, the familiar sensation of pressure, but not pain, deep within my body. I was told I could stay in the room for as long as I needed; lightheaded, I stuck around for another ten or fifteen minutes, until the orbs of light above me coalesced into a cohesive ceiling. A wave of relief flooded over me. I felt warm in my wholeness, as if energized by the heart of the sun, eager to get back on track. We met the exceptionally pleasant, slow-talking doctor in her office across the hallway, where she advised I get an IUD. She handed me a pamphlet on aftercare as Jack texted his manager, his leg bouncing anxiously. He was concerned he’d be late for his afternoon shift barbacking. 

That next week, before an after-work happy hour, I called my mother to tell her I was still feeling uneasy about everything, and I cried. There would be moments during the days when the voice asking What if I change my mind and this was my one chance? flitted through my mind. More often, feelings of freedom, the comfort of knowing that, whatever happened with me and Jack, I wouldn’t be beholden to keeping him in my life because of shared parental responsibility, took up the most mental space. And I felt shame at my own inability to prevent a pregnancy, to have easily been able to avoid this obstacle course of emotions by taking one simple precaution. Because no one hopes to one day have an abortion. You do what you must to keep moving.

“It’s just the pregnancy hormones,” my mom said. “You’ll feel better about it in a few weeks.”  

I talked with other women, with my best friends. One told me about the abortion she had when she and her now-husband were newly dating. I asked another if she would have a child with her current boyfriend if she became pregnant accidentally. “Absolutely not,” she assured me.  

I remember in high-def the conversation I had with three coworkers, sipping a vodka soda at the sprawling, century-old Irish pub down the block from our office. These women were all slightly older than me, two child-free by choice, one the mother of a young daughter. I admired all of them for different reasons: their successful careers, their confidence, the way they unabashedly pursued happiness through travel, creative projects, humor. Their company felt effortless and I felt unquestionably safe, an air of intimacy bolstered by dim lighting and worn wooden tables. Oversharing before I’d accrued even the slightest buzz, I told them about my recent abortion. Leaning in, hands around their cocktails, two of them said they’d had one too. One mentioned she’d once interned at an abortion clinic. 

People have abortions at all life stages and ages, whether or not they want kids and whether or not they already have any. I know this. Still, it somehow made me feel a little less alone, sitting with these women who showed me a future beyond this solitary decision and who, by their example of achievements and happiness, promised that I'd be just fine. I wondered if maybe this is what Jack was searching for when he told his friends about my impending abortion. Maybe he was looking for community rather than the extraction of a satisfactory answer. Maybe that kind of community doesn’t exist for men around abortions. 

One thing no one tells you is that even as a pro-choice, feminist, Chill Woman™, you will think about the fetus you aborted. This does not mean you will think it was the wrong decision—in fact, you might grow to realize even more how very right that decision was, after a dog bite and resulting trip to the ER on Christmas Day puts an end to your struggling romance—but you will think about it. You will think about how it was removed from your body and disposed of with other hazardous waste. At 21 days, it was a cluster of cells. Its nose had not even formed yet. You will wonder for a split second if that means you’re casting judgment on later-term abortions, but you don’t think you are. 

Sometimes weeks and months will go by without thinking about it at all, and then sometimes you will think about it every day, apropos of nothing. You will think about the what-ifs and the what-if-nots, the way you think about any life-altering decision you’ve ever made, like deciding to go to NYU and live at home, like taking a job as a copy editor instead of as a fashion assistant, like moving to London for a year when all your friends were getting married. You will think about whether you would have even carried to term at all; whether you would have miscarried a month later in the bathroom of a comedy club waiting for Jack’s set, the framed comedians’ smiles seemingly mocking you. But then you think about how you could have a 1-year-old at this time, a 2-year-old, a 3-year-old, and wow, your life would be so different right now. You’d probably be so tired, and probably happy, but maybe not as happy as you imagine. Who’s to say. 

You will think about how you likely would never have bought property, because you most definitely would still be living in the house where your mother runs her day care. How much more difficult it would have been to extricate yourself from the relationship with Jack that exhausted you, that regularly allowed you to be the worst versions of yourself. How you maybe would have never written a book, because it was difficult enough getting up at 6 a.m. every weekend for eight months to write and edit for ten hours straight; imagine trying to do that with a newborn. How you would have never adopted a dog and another cat, and enjoyed your quiet life on your terms, planning vacations and sleeping in and taking lazy walks depositing crumbled bits of old bread on the curb for neighborhood birds, sometimes barely having any human interaction on weekends spent working on projects at home and feeling like you were truly thriving. How you would never have met the love of your life two and a half years later. Or maybe you would have done all these things—just at a slightly different pace, in a slightly different way, with significantly less sleep. 

After the abortion, I went home, curled up on my couch with a fleece blanket and my cat at my feet, and binge-watched Dating Naked (the best terrible reality show of my generation). Twenty hours and three ibuprofen later, my pad lightly spotted with blood, I met up with a high school friend who’d recently broken up with his boyfriend. He’d invited me to the climate march happening in Manhattan. 

On a sunny, early-autumn afternoon, we walked from the Lower East Side all the way up to midtown, catching up on what we’d missed since we’d last seen each other. I told him about my almost pregnancy and he rattled off his own reasons for not wanting children, at the very least not now. At the very least, not during a time when it was necessary to orchestrate the largest climate march in history. 

Now a mismanaged pandemic has ravaged our country and many parts of the world, while an alarming number of adults continue to question the validity of science. America is literally on fire. Black Americans in cities small and large put their safety at risk by merely existing. A Supreme Court justice who opened countless doors for women over the past several decades is being replaced by one who could very well close those doors just as quickly. One could easily argue that a more hostile environment in which to raise a child has not endured in recent history. 

The what-ifs, of course, will always materialize—no matter who you are, where you are, what decisions you make. I hope the option to make a choice in a crisis always will too. There is comfort in both.

Published November 8th, 2020