June 23, 2026
The Glorious Mess
Tomorrow is my birthday. It also marks four years since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, which meant women across America lost their federal right to abortion and reproductive healthcare. Further, it marks 24 years since the birthday when I was pregnant, but did not know it yet, a circumstance that could have derailed my life, but didn’t, because I was able to access the care I wanted and needed, and I was so naive at the time that it never even occurred to me not to take this access for granted, never mind the generations of activists who’d had to fight to make abortion legal in Canada. I had no idea what forces they’d had to push against, but now I do, because I’m a person in the world in 2026, who has seen what happened to abortion rights in America, and those forces today are as loud as they’ve ever been, in America and elsewhere.
At the same time that I know what the stakes are, however, I’ve also stopped yelling about my abortion on the internet all the time…mainly because I’ve learned that yelling on the internet is not very productive. And I’ve learned too that maybe we need to be more careful with our most tender stories, that women aren’t served by using our hearts as troll bait, and that it’s not actually as simple as me explaining what happened to me so that people understand. (I really thought it would be.) I got bored too of saying the same things over and over, repetition draining my words of meaning, turning me into a puppet, a prop, rather than the human creature that I am.
That I’m quieter about my abortion these days doesn’t mean the experience was any less important to me though, that it wasn’t one of the most defining experiences of my life so far, that it wasn’t the foundation for the beautiful existence I’ve built in the years since then, for the experience of motherhood when the time was right and I was ready. As I wrote in an essay in Today’s Parent almost ten years ago, “Abortion is part of the glorious mess, right there with the Instagram teacups, the sunshine on our kitchen table, the My Little Pony toys scattered on the floor.”
My kids have grown out of My Little Pony, but the rest is just the same.
