Evangelical Therapy, Part 13 - The Worst Thing a Woman Can Do

A serialized memoir about my former life as an Evangelical.

My pregnancy test was positive.

I had stepped outside God’s will and gone down the path of darkness and now this was the result. What had happened to me—pregnancy—was the consequence of my sinful actions. It had started with the divorce and now this. I knew it as well as I knew anything about the world, like what colors the chairs were in my living room, what I’d eaten for breakfast. I’d disobeyed the tenets of the church, everything I’d been taught from birth, and now I was paying the price.

And the one person I knew I could count on to be kind and supportive in this instance was my sister, who no longer considered herself a Christian.

“What am I going to do?” I asked her as I sat on my bed, the pregnancy test in hand. A pulse beat in my throat as another wave of nausea came over me.

My sister looked at me for a long minute. “You’re going to get an abortion.”

I was stunned into silence. An abortion. Evangelicals had made a statement in 1973 condemning abortion “for personal convenience” and up until this point, I’d been one of them. Drew and I had talked about it many times. Soon after Owen and I started seeing each other we’d had a discussion about it as well. He was more liberal than I was at that point, and I remember angrily, adamantly decrying the horrors of murdering an unborn child, which is precisely how I thought of it then.

I had nurtured my three girls carefully from the moment I was pregnant with each, waiting anxiously for those first wonderful and surprising flutters of a live being moving inside me, and later, marveling at a foot or a knee, visibly pressing against my round belly, the kicks that woke me from a sound sleep. After birth I felt lonely and empty at first, missing that presence of another being, always there inside me.

It’s impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Pregnancy isn’t just feeling heavy and achy or finding it hard to reach your feet to put on your shoes. It’s not like “carrying a bowling ball strapped to your tummy.” It’s a small heart beating next to yours, safe and protected, this baby that begins as a part of your own body.

 Motherhood had been an overwhelming, all-consuming experience for me, and I’d poured everything I had into giving my girls what they needed. I hadn’t always succeeded, as no parent does (this is more evident to me now that my daughters are adults, and we’ve talked about their childhoods), but I had given it my all. Abortion seemed like an abomination, the worst thing a woman could do.

And now I was faced with either that or carrying a pregnancy to term while every mocking, judgmental eye in my community stared at me and likely saw this as a confirmation that Drew had been right, that I had simply gone off the rails in some terrible way, and that our divorce had been just the start for his crazy, out-of-control wife who had left her god-fearing husband for a life of sin. And maybe worse, because years of conditioning don’t disappear in a few short months, I was afraid of that myself.

I felt terrified of what my parents would think as well. Separating myself from their approval when I got my divorce had been difficult enough. “Doing the right thing,” pleasing them, was my main basis for self-esteem and a feeling of connection, and I couldn’t imagine how they would react now. My mom’s disapproval alone felt like abandonment to me.

My throat tightened as I tried to absorb what was happening. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad about any of this, okay?”

It all seemed too vastly shameful and terrible to tell anyone.

“Con, of course,” my sister promised. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”

++

I fell dead asleep that night the way I always did in early pregnancy, the moment my head hit the pillow, but when I woke up at five, I had decided two things. First, I couldn’t go through with selling the house. I had already accepted the offer and I had no idea if I could change my mind, but packing up and moving seemed like much more than I could do.

Drew and I had had one awkward, genuine moment before the divorce in which he’d showed me how to take care of the swimming pool and mow our big lawn. Like two people saying good-bye to each other, and a whole phase of our lives, he’d been decent to me for those few minutes, and because of that I thought he might offer some advice. So that afternoon I called him and asked him if he thought I could get out of selling it.

At five p.m. he rushed over, came in without knocking, and headed straight upstairs as if he were back in his rightful place. He sat down on the bed beside me and took my hand. I pulled it away, but he had already jumped to the conclusion that I was feeling remorseful about the divorce.

“I just need more time to think. About the house,” I said. I knew Drew, as a well-known-about-town lawyer, was more likely to make headway with the real estate agent than I was—everything in my life had taught me that people listened to men more readily than to women—and he agreed to make the call.

I don’t know what he said, but he got me out of the contract, and I tried to put the house issue on the back burner of my mind while I thought about my other problem. The second thing I’d decided in the night was that I was going to make an appointment with my primary care physician, Dr. Sadowski.

Two days later, I sat on the crinkly paper-covered table in his examining room, a package of graham crackers in my purse (my go-to to combat morning sickness) and poured out my story.

“The thing is, I don’t want to stop taking my anxiety meds,” I told him, trying not to cry. “I’ve just started feeling better and I’m afraid if I stop, I’ll go back to feeling terrible all over again. Could the pills I’m taking cause birth defects?”

“We don’t know that much, to tell the truth, but it’s not ideal.” He handed me a box of tissues. “Potentially, there could be complications after birth with breathing issues or developmental difficulties, later on.”

“I don’t know what to do. Everyone already thinks I’m horrible—” I started, knowing I was saying more than was appropriate to my family doctor, but I couldn’t seem to stop. “At my church, I mean. And my daughters are having a hard time adjusting to the custody arrangement. I’m worried about them.” My youngest had started having stomach aches while at Drew’s place, and instead of doing anything to help her feel more comfortable, he had taken to sleeping with the phone under his pillow at night so none of them could call me when they were there. His behavior continued to fill me with rage and despair.

“And my middle daughter told me the other day that her teacher at Nampa Christian said the reason the other kids won’t play with her anymore is because I’m divorced." I looked at him. “It’s too much. I can’t do this. I can’t be pregnant, too.”

Neither one of us used the word abortion, and he seemed a bit unmoored, like all of this was outside his comfort zone. But to his credit he didn’t ask me any questions or make any comment at all. Instead, he got out his prescription pad and wrote down the name and phone number of a clinic.

“There’s nowhere to go in Nampa,” he said. “But this office in Boise will help you.”

++

The next day, even though it seemed unbearable, I called the number he’d given me.

The woman who answered was nice but brisk. “Date of your last period?”

When I told her she said, “You have to be at least six weeks. Let’s schedule for about two weeks from now.”

“I have to wait?” I asked. The only thing that had kept me going the past couple days had been thinking—if I’m going to do this, it has to be right away. After my first daughter’s birth, someone had given me a copy of A Child is Born, and I couldn’t stop imagining those detailed photos of the developing embryo, the photographs burned into my mind. Two millimeters long, it was now, I told myself. The size of a poppyseed. By six weeks, it would be the size of a lentil.

Because of my religious conditioning, it would be years before I could allow myself to consider that there were many viewpoints about when an embryo or a fetus becomes a person. I began to see that there was disagreement and mystery about this question, and that the answer wasn’t as black and white as what I’d heard at my church or from politicians who relied on Evangelical support to maintain power.

But in the meantime, I was struggling, and two weeks felt like an eternity.

And of course, I still had to tell Owen.

++

He seemed to have mixed feelings, but I intuited that in some part of himself he felt pleased to know his sperm was healthy after all. Still, in this weird cosmic twist, he’d found out in one fell swoop that he could theoretically (and practically) have become a father after all, but wasn’t going to, at least not with me, because an abortion felt like the only thing I could manage to do.

“I swear, several doctors told me I could never have children,” he kept repeating, as if that would make it true, and I could tell he also felt bad.

“Do you want to have kids?” We’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks and didn’t know that much about each other. “Is that what you were hoping to do? Ever?”

He lifted upturned hands in his Owen-like way. “It could be kind of cool, maybe?” He sounded doubtful.

“So you mean no,” I said. Anger simmered inside me, but I was too afraid to let it out. I had trusted him. I had taken him at his word! My own responsibility in the matter felt crushing, and it was easier to blame him. Still, I began grilling myself about why I had even slept with him, why I hadn’t said no when he asked me to go upstairs, why I had continued to hang out with him at all. It was clear to me now that although there was some basic attraction between us, I had mostly just wanted to like him, so I could believe our relationship was a reason to stop being married to Drew. Plus, I was afraid to be alone and couldn’t imagine what the future would hold for a divorced woman in my small Evangelical community in which I now felt like a pariah.

“You don’t want kids and yet you never got tested? To see if you were fertile? To keep something like this from happening?”

He had an innocent air about him as if he’d never had to be responsible for anything in his life except hauling himself out of bed in the morning. I knew that wasn’t true—he’d been through some difficult things in his life, including his bout with cancer, but right then, all I could think about was my distress. He wasn’t the one who would have to go through an abortion or would ever know anything about what it felt like to be pregnant. It wasn’t his body or actions that would be criticized and judged by everyone we knew.

“No, I didn’t get tested,” he said.

 It hadn’t occurred to him to think about doing that.

And of course, many men don’t feel responsible for pregnancies and abortions, or the high physical and emotional costs of them for women, even though as, Gabrielle Blair so aptly described in her viral tweet thread in 2018, a woman doesn’t get pregnant “on her own” or “on accident” without a man who has ejaculated irresponsibly into her body. And, she notes, that if men of any political party were genuinely concerned about the high rate of abortions in the US, they could do a great deal to lower that number by taking responsibility for their own bodies.

Instead, many seem focused on telling women what to do, as if we haven’t given much thought to birth control ourselves and are fine with using abortion as a back-up. I’m here to attest that no woman wants to get an abortion, a painful medical procedure, and I find it hard to imagine any woman blithely relying on abortion as “birth control.”

It’s taken me longer than normal to write this essay, in part because it’s been excruciating to revisit these events. But I want this reality to be known: Evangelical women get abortions, too, when the (often unpleasant) birth control they try desperately to use fails, or when they are already broken of mind and spirit and know they don’t have it in them to go through the stressful and risky experience of pregnancy (in the US, in 2023, around 700 women died from the complications of pregnancy or childbirth), or when they don’t have the emotional or financial resources to take good care of another child (or a first child). Women get abortions because of their own health issues or because of medical conditions affecting the fetus. Women get abortions for many reasons, and it’s never, ever fun or what they wanted. Sometimes women get abortions because they have no other way to save their lives.

“What do you think I should do?” I asked Owen.

 He seemed a trifle regretful, but then shrugged. “I guess it’s up to you?”

Yes, it was up to me, and now Owen was a bystander because none of this would affect his body in any significant way.

++

The two weeks until my appointment passed slowly, an agony of waiting, fear about the procedure, trying to figure out how to arrange it so no one in my family (besides my sister) would know.

I went to an appointment with Rebecca, my therapist, and noted her look of concern.

“Sometimes you just have to ride the boat down the river, let the current carry you along, and know eventually you’ll get through it,” she said, then proceeded to give me some practical advice about my new life as a single woman.

Men will say anything to get into your pants, she said.

I was thirty-four years old, had been married for thirteen years, was now divorced, and no one had ever said this to me before. I listened as though someone were revealing the secret of life.

She talked to me about STDs too, which I hadn’t known much about—she had to start with the basics as if I were twelve or thirteen.

And as we talked about the abortion I was waiting for, she told me that many couples who go through a pregnancy termination tend to break up. I could almost see her looking into my future as she tried to arm me with the information I’d need for whatever man came next.

When the day finally arrived, I drove myself to the clinic in Boise while my daughters were at school.

The doctor said it would be a little pinch, a mild crampy feeling, as he inserted metal dilating rods into my cervix.

I’d not been offered any pain medication, and the pain I experienced was not anything that could be described as “mild.”

“You’re very thin. Who did this to you, honey? How did this happen?” the nurse asked as I lay on the table.

Let me explain, I thought, as the waves of pain gripped me. Let me explain and explain and explain. I was very barely and newly divorced, a trauma that I had been judged for by members of my church, people who came over to my house and told me I was doing a terrible thing. I’d been expelled from their circle of grace. I had three young daughters to care for, now going through stress and traumas of their own. I had to figure out a way to get a full-time job. I had to sell the house I was living in and find a less expensive home. I had been clinically depressed for three years prior to this because of the distress of my marriage and was only starting to regain mental equilibrium. I was taking medication for anxiety.

Why did I get married at such a young age in the first place to a man who wasn’t kind, who was emotionally withholding and cruel? Why did I not have any preparation for a job? Why had my father—a Harvard educated physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project—chosen to spend his career at a small Nazarene college in Idaho when he could have taught anywhere in the US? Why did he not encourage his smart daughters to get the kind of education he’d chosen for himself? Why had my mother not completed her education, held a job or even learned to drive a car? Who did this to you?

“My boyfriend said he’d had cancer and was sterile,” I said to her, when I could get words out. A tear trickled down the side of my face.

“Oh, my word. Men will say anything – anything – to get into your pants.”

I hope this isn’t true anymore, but maybe it was then, and apparently, everyone knew it except me. I didn’t have the energy to explain to her that it had been carelessness rather than manipulation on Owen’s part, but as I lay there, I wondered if it mattered, since for me, the end result was the same.

++       

I was told to come back four hours later for the procedure, after the dilating rods had done their work, but when I tried to sit up, I fainted, too unsteady on my feet to leave the office.

An hour later, I finally did, but the cramping grew steadily more severe. I had a class or somewhere I was supposed to be, and I remember sitting on the toilet, crouched over, trying to think what in the world to do.

My sister came with me to the afternoon appointment, and once the dilating rods were removed, it wasn’t quite so painful, but the sound of the vacuum aspiration machine made me ill.

Finally it was over, and my sister helped me out to her car.

I’m sorry, baby, I said in my head over and over as we drove back to Nampa, still cramping, and feeling both sad and relieved. I’m sorry, I thought as we walked through Albertsons looking for a magazine and some ice cream, a small act of kindness for ourselves at the end of this difficult day.

Later, without meaning to, I turned that baby into a character in a novel, trying to bring him to life in a different way. For some reason I always pictured him as a little boy with blond curls, and in my novel, at one point, he runs along a riverbank, no shoes or shirt, wearing a small pair of raggedy overalls, lost and alone. He’s a minor character who never gets a chance to speak for himself, yet he’s the lynchpin on which all the important action turns. Conditioned guilt can last a very long time.

Over the next few weeks and months, though, I spent time reminding myself that just because a situation is hard or even traumatic doesn’t mean it wasn’t the best choice. Notice I say “best,” because it’s become evident to me that life is full of complicated situations in which there is no easy answer, no simple way to say yes or no, no pros and cons list where the numbers clearly add up. Sometimes you must go with your gut, knowing you’re doing the best you can with the situation at hand, hoping to be a healthy mom to the daughters you already have, those three beautiful girls who need you, and let that boat float on down the river.

++

As the days went by, I began regaining my emotional equilibrium. I called up the real estate agent myself and asked if the buyers for my house might still be interested. As it turned out, they were happy I’d changed my mind, and the deal was back on, this time for good.

In a rush, I managed to get the house packed, find a new smaller house in a new neighborhood, and we moved in.

But another complication arose. My sister was having difficulty with her husband “Rick,”—she had remarried after her own divorce a few years prior to that. She didn’t seem to want to talk about what had happened, but I understood some sort of abuse had taken place, and she asked to move in with me for a while till she could figure out what to do. I said, yes, of course, and she and her small son slept on a mattress in our new living room, a temporary situation at best.

We proceeded on as well as we could, huddled together in my house to support and protect each other, with no real plan of how this might resolve in in the future. A few weeks later, I was in the kitchen one evening sorting through papers at the small desk tucked in beside our refrigerator when the phone rang.  

I lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“I know what you did,” Drew said into the phone, and I knew by the breathy, overwrought tone in his voice exactly what he meant.

It didn’t occur to me to feign ignorance, or say, “it’s none of your business.” Instead, I crumbled, feeling the weight of knowing that I had transgressed in the worst way a woman can in Evangelical world. I gotten a divorce—had sex with a man who wasn’t my husband—and then got an abortion. I had rejected my proper role of both wife and mother, at least mother to the embryo that had recently formed inside me. I had taken back control of my body, but my brain was not yet convinced that others had no right to judge me. “I just didn’t know what else to do,” I said, my throat closing up. “You know I think abortion is wrong.”

“Connie—what? Are you telling me the truth? You actually did this? I can’t believe it.”

Something inside my chest shook as I gripped the phone. It took me a minute to understand that he had intentionally tricked me into revealing what had happened, but I was so overcome with guilt in that moment, I felt like I deserved it.

“So that’s why you didn’t want to move,” he went on. “Was that the day you did it? When I came over to help you? Seriously, what’s happened to you? What kind of person are you?”

I didn’t know. And it took me a long time to figure out that as he railed against the abortion, shaming me for my actions, that the real problem was that I had slipped out of his control. And even though we were no longer married, and he had no right to tell me what to do, he was determined to haul me back to my proper subservient spot.

“How did you know?” I asked.

He hesitated, then came out with it. “From Rick.”

++

“You told Rick?” I said furiously to my sister, still teary after I hung up the phone. I motioned to her to come into my bedroom where we could talk.

 “People always tell their husbands things,” she said. “But I’m so sorry.” I could tell she was panicked. “I wish I hadn’t. And it’s worse than you know.”

 Apparently, in the weeks after my abortion, Rick, a man with the wide stance and broad shoulders of the Marlboro man (also, in theory, a good Nazarene, a long-time church goer and businessman in our community), had, in an escalating pattern of abuse, pepper-sprayed her, then choked her and pushed her down the stairs.

My head spun with this horrifying new information, knowing now what she and I had been hiding from in my little house. Further, she told me, she was trying to keep what he’d done to her a secret because he’d threatened that if she told my parents the truth about his abusive treatment, he would tell them about my abortion. He was threatening to “out” me to my parents and by extension to our whole church, and now Drew was in on it, too, an attempt by both of them to keep us “in line,” and under control.

As I write this, it all sounds unbelievable and over-dramatic—these men were using my abortion as a form of blackmail? They were going to report me “to the authorities”? In retrospect, these control tactics in which women were being punished for trying to protect themselves, for having made a decision about their own bodies, seem frighteningly cult-like.

After discussion with my sister, I finally decided I would do the only thing that seemed an option: I would tell my parents about the abortion myself, as a way to get out from under this and free Val to tell the truth about Rick’s treatment of her as well.

“I need to talk to you,” I said nervously to my parents on the phone the next morning, and in the evening, when my dad was done with work, they drove to my house. I was in bed, crying again (I cried a lot during that period of my life), as I admitted to them what happened and what I had done.

And then in a moment I wasn’t expecting that began a shift that would ripple out to affect the rest of my life in important ways, my parents reacted kindly and were supportive.

“We love you,” my dad said, taking my hand.

“You did the right thing,” my mom declared, her own eyes teary with what seemed to be relief. “We thought you were going to tell us something worse.”

Perhaps their attitude came in part from the fact that they didn’t want to go through a public display of their youngest daughter’s failings, one who up until this point had been a good girl, their high-achieving daughter, who’d rarely caused them any difficulties. It was probably hard for them to reconcile the picture of me they’d held in their minds for so long with this new person, who’d begun thinking for herself, and whose decisions were the fumbling ones of a person who’s newly in the world with little preparation.

But in their speech and actions, they were loving and accepting.

And in the space of this acceptance, I began to realize that in choosing the abortion, I had chosen life and health for myself. Much to its detriment, evangelical Christianity does little to teach women to care for themselves—it teaches them to think of themselves only in relation to others, how they can serve, how they can put others first, an unfortunate and sometimes devastating distortion of the idea of compassion and where it must start. Despite this, I had managed to love myself enough to choose what I needed.

And it was a revelation to me that I had been wrong about imagining my parents’ love was based on my good behavior.

But I fear for what is happening to other women like me, women in Idaho and other states in the US, where their access to healthcare and rights is diminishing. In 2024, because of Idaho’s draconian laws, women’s physicians may no longer perform abortions, regardless of other serious health situations, unless the pregnant woman will otherwise certainly die. Providers who risk performing an abortion, along with people who transport minors out of state to get an abortion without a parent’s permission, may be charged with a crime and face two to five years of jail time. Providers can also be sued by family members of a pregnant woman for performing an abortion.

How many abusive or controlling husbands (or other people in a woman’s family, community, or church) will be enabled by these laws? What sounds like dystopian levels of control and punishment of women and their bodies is not out there somewhere, waiting to happen; or back in the distant past, it’s happening now. OB/GYNs have left Idaho by the dozens, afraid of being convicted as a felon for helping their patients. In November 2023, a woman was charged with kidnapping for taking her son’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend to Oregon to get the healthcare she couldn’t get in Idaho.

Glynnis MacNicol said in her article last week in the New York Times, “there is nothing more terrifying to a patriarchal society than a woman who feels free.”

I was fortunate to be the recipient of what should be the normal help and support of my parents and sister, but it was true—the more choices I made for myself, the more frantic the men in my life became (and others, including Evangelical women) to try to control me.

And over the next few years, it began to seem clear that the only way to be safe or to escape punishment for being a woman was to somehow leave Evangelicalism and Idaho completely. At times, I wondered if my daughters and I would make it out alive.