“The Abortion I Didn’t Have”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: The reality of motherhood is different for everyone, our next guest shared her own experience in a powerfully honest “New York Times” magazine article, “The Abortion I Didn’t Have,” It’s titled. Merritt Tierce was 19 years old when she became pregnant and she says it broke her. But also in many ways, gave her her life back. And she shares that with Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Merritt Tierce, thank you so much for talking with us.

MERRITT TIERCE, AUTHOR, “THE ABORTION I DIDN’T HAVE”: Thank you, Michel. Thanks for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

MARTIN: You know, your piece for the “New York Times” magazine is so remarkable. It’s about the fact that at 19, you finished college early. Obviously, you’re a great student. You were headed to Yale Divinity School. You got pregnant by a man that you liked, but had not any plans to marry. You came from a background in which it was understood that you would not have an abortion. That was not even to be considered. You married and had another child. Those are the facts, right? But the piece is about so much more. What made this the time to say this, to tell this story?

TIERCE: Those are the facts of my story, but the pieces about the feelings. And so, it took me a year to write the piece and then, I actually decided I couldn’t publish it because I was so afraid of hurting my son and my parents and my kid’s father and I just felt like it wasn’t worth the chance that I might hurt someone. And then, everything that has been playing out in the Supreme Court with respect to access to abortion and restrictions on abortion over the past year started happening, and I have a deep background in abortion rights activism, but that definitely catalyzed my reconsideration of whether or not this essay would be worth publishing. And I started talking to my kid’s dad and my children themselves and friends. Everyone said this is a perspective we don’t hear enough. And this is — these ideas need to be out there, because the conversation as it is, it’s so black and white and so polarized and people aren’t willing to sit in the complexity of it. And so, then I felt like maybe it was the right time and — that I could understand why I would publish it.

MARTIN: You write about — you know, you come from a religious background, which is a conservative religious background where marital sex is wrong, but knowing that premarital sex is supposedly wrong doesn’t keep you from having sex. But it does keep you from using birth control and having an abortion, right? So, those are the first sort of set of complexities that you kind of deal with in the piece. Can you just talk about that at all?

TIERCE: When I was 19 and having sex with my kid’s dad, we thought it was wrong and we weren’t really in a relationship. We were sort of dating, but we were very, very young. And — but we felt like it would be sinful to use contraception. And we needed to be — you know, we were really trapped by our faith. We needed to be good more than we needed to protect ourselves. But then I got pregnant. And then, there was no room within our world or our values for us to choose abortion. And then, there was a lot of family pressure to get married because of the shame that surrounds premarital sex in Christianity. And so, my life, you know, it really got away from me, which is, you know, a way of saying it just — suddenly, I wasn’t — I didn’t understand why own life. I was suddenly in a different universe. I thought that I would be an academic. I hadn’t thought about having children or getting married yet. So, it was really traumatic in that sense. And I think what I was trying to write about is that there’s so much pressure put on mothers to uphold the idea that having a child is the most important best thing that can ever happen in your life. And so, there’s no room within that to say, yes, I love my son, but this experience was so traumatic for me. And those two things, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. I just wasn’t ready to be a parent, which I knew at the time. That’s why I didn’t want to be a parent. But the way I have experienced that feeling now has been this just very deep — I don’t know what else to call it except grief. That I didn’t get to be the parent that I would have wanted to be to my children. And I love them so much that that is a very powerful feeling. But — that I think even, you know, parents who choose and plan their pregnancies and their children also have that feeling. And so, it really hurts me a lot to think about my kids when they were young and how it was so difficult for me that I just wasn’t very present.

MARTIN: You write, we insist as a child isn’t absolute good, then becoming a parent must always be, by retroactive inference, always and only an absolute good. I want to report from the other side of a decision many people make and say, yes, it can be true that you will love the child if you don’t have the abortion. It’s also true that whatever you thought would be so hard about having a that child would ever make you consider not having a child at that point in your life, maybe exactly as hard as you thought it would be. As undesirable, as challenging, as painful as you feared. What other remarkable things about your piece and your desire to tell the story is that there are always these two narratives in your head at every point, how you’re supposed to feel about being a mother versus how you really did feel about being a mother? It was almost like it was a voice in your head that you couldn’t still. Does that sound right?

TIERCE: Yes, it does. I mean, I have experienced this really profound split in myself because I do love my kids and I — because I love them, I wish that they could have had a different experience of life. I mean — and I have to say, you know, that my kids are doing really well because I had so much family support. I had — their dad is a really wonderful parent and I had the support of my parents who were amazing grandparents and their dad’s mom. And these four households really protected my kids and showed them a lot of love. And so, I think that is really critical and I don’t think that most people who end up in — who find themselves in my situation can count on that. But to go back to your question, I think, yes, there’s a lot of pressure to hold up the myth that having children is the most important experience in life, and a lot of it — you know, a lot of that burden is laid at the feet of women and mothers. And if you want to say anything that’s not that, really silenced and shut out. And so, the split is enforced in that way, I think, we just don’t welcome much conversation about how difficult it is to be a mother, how difficult it is to be — you know, to provide everything that a child needs and how much of a sacrifice we require from mothers. We insist the narratives stay only on how great it is to have kids and how great kids are. And I feel like that is really not serving women and it’s just dishonest. The public conversation has not made much room for us to speak about how hard it is and how you are kind of relentlessly forced into choosing between yourself and your children. And —

MARTIN: What — really at the core of what you were saying here because part of what you were saying with this piece is that you said this was the beginning of your contemplation of death. Not because you were talking about taking your own life, but because it was your — you understood that to go forward with the pregnancy meant the death of your dreams for yourself, and that is something that for some reason is not to be spoken. I mean, is that —

TIERCE: Yes. It’s not to be spoken because those are — that’s just supposed to be less important than having a child. It’s supposed to be less important, you know, than upholding the myth of the sanctity of life and how beautiful it is to have a family. The dreams of the individual woman that have to be either put on hold or just abandoned often when she has to navigate a pregnancy that comes, you know, at the wrong time or isn’t fully wanted, that’s not really allowed as part of the conversation.

MARTIN: Tell me more about why you hesitated to publish this piece? Are you — were you afraid your children would feel that you had wished you’d never had them?

TIERCE: Yes, I guess that’s the most raw way to put it. And I — you know, I mean, sI think even with all the contraceptive methods that are still available now, almost half of pregnancies are still unintended. So, my experience was not that unique. But if you have the baby, you’re supposed to pretend like you always meant to have the baby and you wouldn’t have it any other way. And yes, I didn’t want my children to have to consider the idea that they weren’t wanted. You know, if I could go back, I wouldn’t have an abortion, but I would definitely give my son a different mother, a different experience of the worst 10 years of his life. And I would give myself a different experience of parenting.

MARTIN: We’re speaking now at the anniversary — around the anniversary of Roe v. Wade once again. There’s a very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be struck down. That abortion will again be outlawed in many parts of the country. It’s already highly inaccessible in many parts of the country by design. What do you make of that? How do you receive that?

TIERCE: I think it’s more than Roe will be overturned and I think a lot of people will be really shocked by that in the U.S. But it’s been coming for a long time. It’s been coming for 50 years. And it’s already an unfolding tragedy in the states where abortion is restrictive like Texas. And I feel like for so long it’s been spoken of as a women’s issue and as an issue of bodily autonomy, which it is. But I think that that is really leaving out the part that’s about the family. Abortion is a parenting. And abortion is a family decision. And most people who have an abortion already have children. They already have at least one child. And so, there’s not some magical difference between people who have an abortion and people who choose to parent. It’s the same people at different places in their lives. And I think this is a huge myth that abortion is a selfish choice or that if you knew what it meant to love a child, you wouldn’t choose abortion when the people who choose abortion have children. They know exactly what it means. And that plays a big part in their decision. I had two abortions after my kids were born. And absolutely, I felt like I couldn’t give them — you know, that I would be able to give them less than I was able to give them if I had more children to care for and it wouldn’t be fair to any of the children involved in that situation or me or their dad or the extended family. Abortion is a family issue. And when people can control how many kids they have, their families are stronger and society is stronger. That’s just a fact.

MARTIN: What do you say though to people who argue that this is all secondary to the child’s life? I mean, this is what it comes down to for many people is that —

TIERCE: Yes. I think that —

MARTIN: — babies are being killed and therefore, that has to stop and that is the end of the story? What do you say to them, people who believe that?

TIERCE: That’s — I say that’s not good enough. I mean, it’s just not. And I think that when Governor Abbott signed the Texas law last spring, he did say — the dropped the (INAUDIBLE) rhetoric. And this time around said it was about, you know, the sanctity of life and it was about what we’re — that that sanctity is endowed by our creator, and he brought it back to this — you know, this kind of unassailable position that there’s just something inherently sacred about life. And I don’t know what to say to that. If once the child is here, there is no support. It’s like what are we saying? We’re saying, God wanted you to be here kid, but now, it’s all up to your mom and we’re not going to support her, we’re not going to give her any social support to deal with the challenges of actual life? That’s not good enough. If we can say it’s a fact that life is sacred, why do we feel like that stops at just allowing the life to exist? Why don’t we feel like that demands from us that we make sure everybody has the best chance they could possibly have in having a good life?

MARTIN: Your kids are of an age where, obviously, they can speak for themselves. It’s always tricky speaking for your kids no matter what age they are. But if you don’t mind my asking, how do your children feel about the piece, especially your son, your first born?

TIERCE: I have had some amazing conversations with them about it. And they both were really proud of me and both of them said some version of, mom, you know, regardless of all the things in here that we need to talk about or that we could talk about, just as a piece of writing, this is so beautiful and we’re glad it’s out there and that people will get to read it. And so, they had a very generous response to it. But then I think it has helped us have a more open conversation about their lives. And I think it has provided some clarity and it’s given me a reason to say, you know, if you have any memories or thoughts or feelings about when you were little, and, you know, I’m here to validate your experience. And I don’t want us to all live in myths about what things should have been like. I just want us to be able talk about what things were like and what things are like. So, the fact that I wrote this, I think, gave me a very specific way to say that to them at kind of the beginning of their adulthood and a very specific reason to say, this is why these issues are so deeply important to me because I want you to have a better experience of parenting, I want you to have — I want you to be able to pursue whatever dreams you have for yourself. Especially — and I want you to have the family that you want to have when you want to have that family, and this is why. And it’s a complicated thing to navigate, to say that, I didn’t have that and I love you so much. I want you to have that, when we’re talking about the facts of their existence. But, you know, they are both fully able to have that conversation and hold that complexity.

MARTIN: Merritt Tierce, thank you so much for talking to us.

TIERCE: Thank you so much, Michel.