Shotgun

I:

The whole thing had been a grave error. To this day, I believe it was the biggest mistake of my life. Call it what you will, it was willful enough, and it only took once (with a fertile womb, I have been blessed).

At the time, Stefan and I were engaged. Still, my heart was only half in it. Although I remember the early days of dinners and white water rafting with a sort of nostalgia, I also remember the telltale absences, particularly in my gut.

I had been drawn to him with a firm heavy hand and the threat of desperation in his eyes. Whenever I broke up with him (for it happened often enough), he told me he had nothing to live for anymore, and he would turn to the bottle.

And so, naturally, three years later I married him.

II:

If I could go back I would do it differently: I would have absolutely run away.

But the funny thing about life is, you can’t go back. You can only go forward.

I found that out three years and five months ago when my pregnancy test came out positive. I couldn’t believe it. I had gotten my period in the airport of Niamey Niger scarcely a month prior. I had been about to fly back to Stefan after seven months of living on different continents. We were both confident we would be married right away. And yet there I was, sitting in the cool autumn sun on our ratty hostel balcony, scarcely having touched down in Croatia. I was unwed and pregnant and wanting nothing more than for this whole nightmare to disintegrate before my eyes.

III:

I had gone to see Stefan with the test in my hand and tears in my eyes. Secretly, I was still planning to break up with him. I never felt completely confident in our relationship, nor in our engagement, and coming back to see him after seven months resurrected all of my uncertainties. It’s easy to cling to a man 5,000 miles away, especially when you’re living in a war-torn country hot as hell with the threat of Islamic terrorism so real that you sleep with a knife under your pillow and jolt awake at the sound of a cricket.

But with the test in hand, and sitting only half a meter apart, I wanted nothing more to do with this man.

“Do not hate this child, and do not hate me,” he had said, his voice faltering as he reached to touch me. My tears were coming fast, and I wanted someone to blame. I did hate the child, and I did hate him. Quietly, I began to make my plans.

IV:

I remember those first few days of decision. Here in Croatia it was too late to go to the pharmacy and get their version of the RU-486 pill. I silently berated myself for not having done so right after having sex, just to be sure. My world felt like it was spinning out of control, like I was about to be flung to the far reaches of the universe, like everything was about to disintegrate and grow like a terrible cancer, all at the same time. I had wanted to cover my tracks, I had missed the opportunity and now I would have hell to pay.

Years later, I see this failure as providence. RU-486 takes whatever is growing and sucks the life right out of it. Even if it had just been four cells, those four cells had still been my son. And me taking that pill would have sucked all the life from him.

V:

With RU-486 out of the question, I realized I had one and only one option: to take the two-step abortion pill. I was apparently five or six weeks along, and I could take it legally in Croatia until 14 weeks, only I had to get an OBGYN to sign off on it. So, with a single-minded purpose and only a few words of Croatian under my belt, I googled, called, and set up an appointment. I would not tell Stefan. I would go and do what I needed to do, and later I would tell him it was a miscarriage. Then, I would slip out of his life forever. I took a breath: I was doing what I had to do, and that was that. Soon, this whole nightmare would be over and I would be doing what I did best: starting over somewhere new.

Still, I felt something nagging at the recesses of my conscience. I had been raised a red-blooded conservative in a staunch pro-life household. My parents voted down the line on every anti-abortion candidate, and as the middle of nine children, I’d lingered long hours over the Life magazines with double-spread in-utero pictures of developing babies, swimming unawares in their translucent sacks, sucking their thumbs as they orbited in perfect peace.

I knew what was inside me wasn’t just a clump of cells. I knew he had hands and feet and a beating heart. I knew his fingers were beginning to form. I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, the abortion pill would rip him from the protection of the uterine wall, starve him to death, and then flush him piece by piece out of me.

And yet, I pushed him away. Or rather, I pushed the thought of all of that away. I needed an out. I could not marry Stefan and I could not have his child alone. There was only one solution.

VI:

A few days before my appointment, my friend in America left me a long voicemail. I awoke to it. “I had to tell you something,” she said. “I had a dream about you last night.”

I lay there on my bed, listening, feeling my hope for a quick fix wrinkling up inside me like a prune.

When I met Maria two years earlier, she had told me of a miscarriage, after her ex-fiancee had raped her. Now, she told me about her dream the previous night. “There was a pregnant woman, and a devil was dancing between her and me, and I couldn’t get to her,” she said. Then she told me the other part. “And I had to tell you that…I lied to you. I didn’t have a miscarriage. I had an abortion. And my Mother begged me not to, but I was determined. I was seven weeks like you are now. It came out in pieces. Right afterwards, I felt ten years older. For a long time after, I felt dead.”

After the message was over, I felt my fate was sealed. I could not pretend away what I was about to do: the Devil had been dancing between Maria and I, but God had seen fit to reach out and save me and whatever was inside me. Only I didn’t feel saved, not one bit. I felt condemned.

That afternoon, I told Stefan about my appointment. I didn’t tell him that I had planned to get permission to have an abortion, just that I had scheduled our first OBGYN visit. His eyes shone and he reached for my hand. He knew this was a sign I was letting him in again, that I was accepting the fact I was pregnant. Perhaps I was, but I could not match the delight in Stefan’s eyes. I felt dead. Since Maria’s message, I had had no change of heart towards this life growing inside me - I only knew with a cold sobriety, that I could not kill it. God had been very clear on that.

So the next day I experienced my first ever vaginal ultrasound at the hands of a jovial 60-year-old Croatian OBGYN whose language I spoke about fifteen words of. Stefan stood by me, looking at our baby’s beating heart, holding my hand, clear excitement in his eyes.

I, on the other hand, felt nothing. My fate had already been sealed. I was not so much angry at God, as at myself and at Stefan. I would accept to have this baby, I would accept to give him life, but I was not going to be happy about it. The baby felt, still, even after seeing the ultrasound, like a pit in my stomach, a life sentence, rooting me to a man and a country I wanted desperately to leave.

“Amazing, that is our baby,” said Stefan afterward, holding up the black and white printout of the ultrasound. I remember there, right next to the famed Zadar sea organs where Stefan and I had watched so many sunsets, the way he looked at me, his eyes beseeching and his mouth almost wobbling. He was begging me to express warmth for our child. He was begging me to express warmth for him. And yet my heart felt so cold: Stefan, after all, had been the one to push me towards sex. In my mind, he had brought us to this point - the edge of a cliff, and now he was begging me to jump off with a smile. What more would he ask of me?

VII:

Week seven turned into eight, then into nine. I could not kill this child inside me, but perhaps I could encourage a miscarriage? I was still skirting with the idea of getting rid of it, without actually getting rid of it. I knew up until twelve weeks things were quite dicey, and many women lost babies for no reason whatsoever. I began to pray for a miscarriage - if it happened, it wouldn’t be my fault. I even one day went so far as to eat a whole sprig of ginger, which I had heard had abortive effects.

But God protected the child in my womb, and it grew and grew and grew. At our next appointment, we found out he was a boy. Again, I felt nothing.

When I was 11 weeks pregnant, I went home to America for Thanksgiving. I had yet to tell my parents I was pregnant, and I knew it would be news they would need to take sitting down. But maybe I would have a miscarriage before then, and I would just stay in the US, escaping from Stefan and his two older adopted kids forever: that was my fantasy. Even if I did stay pregnant, a large part of me decided I would not return to Croatia. I would give the child up for adoption here in the US, and then restart my life again. Days ticked by. Thanksgiving came and went. I remember my brother-in-law grilling me about Stefan, and finally saying “I don’t think you love him. Why are you still with him?” Tears immediately sprang to my eyes, but I couldn’t tell him the reason was right there between us, tucked inside my womb.

A few days later, Stefan wrote my mother and told her himself. She came into my room, more upset than I have seen her in my entire life. Later, when we told my dad, he really did have to sit down to take the news. I remember the first thing he asked me was “You wouldn’t have an abortion, would you?”

And I had shaken my head. Ginger roots notwithstanding, that was something I could not do. If God chose to cause a miscarriage, I would be grateful, but I knew I could not kill this baby myself.

VIII:

The next few days were fuzzy, in that quiet corner of my parent’s small Virginian college town. I felt dead inside, and yet livid. Stefan had gone behind my back to tell my mom, even though we had agreed I would tell her myself. I was taking too long, and he again had usurped control. Something told me he was a dangerous man. Something told me I would do far better without him.

And yet I was terrified and attached and ridden with guilt. His child was inside me. Could I really deny him the right to his son? Could I legally give our baby to another family without his father’s permission? No.

And if I asked for his permission and he refused it, what would I do? Raise the boy alone or give it to Stefan? Every single option seemed impossible, riddled with unseen mines and a world of heartache. Those early days, I cried myself to sleep most nights, asking God to either kill the baby or kill me.

IX:

Finally, in early December I went back to Croatia. I was not happy, but I felt I had to return. What other option was there, really? Raise the child alone? Start over in my parents’ hometown where I knew no one and had no job, no relevant skills and only a spare room in my parents’ home? I couldn’t fathom that. I could not fathom the aching loneliness of becoming a single parent, nor of relegating my child to knowing only his mother, even while his father desperately loved him and wanted to raise him.

I don’t remember much from that time: Christmas was a small blip on my grey calendar, stretching before me without cheer. Stefan’s hostel usually ran from April to October, when Covid wasn’t ruining everything. In the winter, he had nothing to do, or at least this winter he had nothing to do. He also owned a big vacation house split into seven apartments, but it had been out of commission for three years by then, and he kept insisting the water damage and necessary repairs were too much to handle, plus he had no money to repay three years of electric and gas bills. What a mess.

It was in late December, right after the non-glow of Christmas, that Stefan came to me with more bad news.

“Anna, I lied to you,” he said. He was visibly shaking, and he knelt before me on the floor in front of our bed (yes, by that time I was mostly sleeping in the same bed with him, although it felt terrible).

I lifted my head and looked at him. I was prepared to hear anything. In fact, listening to his pre-confession was like ice finally breaking out of a dam. Maybe this was what I needed to finally get some clarity on things. At that point, I still felt the terrible nagging feeling he was not right for me, that this was not right.

And then it all came out. His divorce, which had been in the courts for years by then, was still in process. We could not get married until it was finalized, and given the glacial speed of the Croatian legal system, it could be years more before we could wed.

And yet, I was not devastated. I remember him telling me “I thought I would lose you.” I remember the sorrow in his eyes. And I forgave him on the spot.

And yet, the reality of what he had done took longer to sink in. That meant that from the moment that we met, more than a year prior, he had been lying to me. I had even pressed him on it more than a month earlier, after hearing a rumor that he was still married. But he had insisted that the divorce was finalized. He had insisted ardently. It also meant that he had lured me back from Niger (and forced me to break my contract), on a false promise that we would wed immediately. It meant that he got me pregnant full well knowing I might not enjoy legal status for years to come.

But he had not premeditated any of that. Stefan is a man who operates chiefly on hope and optimism, and he does not often entertain the dark possibilities of his actions.

Still, it hurt. And it was a warning. A man who could lie to me so convincingly for so long about something so big, so monumental, what else could he do? I felt more than ever that I was in between a rock and a hard place - if I stayed with him, would I be setting me and my child up for unspeakable pain later down the road? Was I trusting my fate to a rickety stool with rotting feet? But if I fled, what would he do? What kind of battle would ensue for the child? Already, he had a fierce attachment to our son, and I knew he would not give him up without a fight.

Gingerly, I let my weight down on that rickety stool. Stefan had lied, yes, but he had also come clean. I decided to stay with him, for the time being, but even so, my trust was gone.

X:

By then I was almost five months pregnant. Many things happened in the next few months, but one thing remained the same: I wanted the baby to die inside me. I wanted to be free of this weight.

I felt that way until the end, up until the very day my water broke alone in Stefan’s big apartment house, where I was still scaling palm trees and scraping walls clean of water-damaged paint.

Soon after my water broke, I found myself at the Yugoslavian-era hospital, again alone (due to COVID), relegated to a bed with a strap around me and my contractions barely registering. Even then, my apathy remained.

It is a terribly dark thing to say now, to admit to, but it is the truth. Some would say they understand me. Others would judge. Jesus made it clear: whoever hates a brother, it is as if he had murdered him. So indeed, my dark thoughts toward my child were tantamount to murder.

XI:

Even during labor I felt nothing particular for the life inside me. When finally the doctors called for an emergency c-section after hours of painfully induced labor (anyone who’s been induced can attest to how those artificial contractions rip through you like a hurricane), I breathed a sigh of relief as the mask went over my face. Finally, it would be over. I did not think immediately of my son, only of the pain and finally being rid of it.

But hours later, when I was being heaved onto a bed in the middle of the night, my eyes fluttered open and the first words out of my mouth were, “My son. Where is my son?” It was instinct, and it set in hard. It wouldn’t be until the next morning at nine that they would finally bring him to me, like a Christmas present delivered by the stork, swaddled and clean and fast asleep.

With my stomach having just been sliced open, I was not strong enough to sit up, but they tucked him in next to me on the bed and I just looked at him. Even now, years later, tears come to my eyes as I think about that moment: my son, there, in front of me. I saw his tiny fingers curled up tight, his peaceful face, unperturbed by everything that had taken place those first tumultuous nine months of existence. He was so small, so absolutely defenseless, and he was mine.

Immediately, I thought of what an abortion would have entailed: I imagined scissors going after the back of Joshua’s neck - him wailing and fighting but having not even a chance in a thousand of fighting them off. How could it be? How could I have even contemplated such a monstrous act against a human so defenseless, so dependent, so trusting? I wouldn't wish that on the child of my worst enemy.

It hit me like a truck, the utter evil of what I had considered, and I held Joshua all the more close. Nothing would happen to him now - nothing. And if ever he were in danger I would without a thought fling myself in front of an oncoming train in order to protect him. Again and again, I thanked God he had not let me go through with my plan to 'get rid' of Joshua. During pregnancy, it had seemed like torture, but finally, I knew just what an evil he had saved us both from.

In the months that followed, I looked at Joshua this way many times: my fierce love for him was made all the more powerful by the destruction I had contemplated for him. No matter what had happened in my life, no matter what anyone else had done to me, he was an innocent, helpless child, and the only role I could ever assume would be to protect him and if necessary, give my life for his. Stefan felt the same.

My heart broke for all the babies who, unlike Joshua, did not survive. My heart breaks thinking of the final, helpless moments of their lives, of their desperate struggle against a torturous and deadly force so much larger than themselves. My heart breaks for all of those lives so cruelly and senselessly ended, even as dozens wait in line to adopt newborns (a hard choice as well, but a worthy one).

If you are a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, choose life. Choose it. I promise you, there is absolutely nothing in your entire life that you will do that will be of a higher good than this: nothing.

Like me, perhaps you want to pretend that whatever is inside you, is not really human. Perhaps you want to pretend that torturing it to death while it is still in the womb will not hurt it, nor you. But just because you cannot hear your baby’s screams, does not mean it is not suffering unspeakable torment. This is a hard truth, but it is important to grasp: if you get an abortion, you are murdering the most innocent of humans, and their blood will be upon your hands.

If you have had an abortion, I mourn for you. I mourn for the emptiness you have when you could have had fullness. I mourn for the blood red stain that is on your conscience, and the terrible stabbing that is in your soul. You might not feel this. You might be numb or you might feel wonderfully free. You might be happy and light, relieved the problem is 'taken care of.'

But remember, this is a lie, and one day it will be exposed. After that, you will feel pain and regret ten thousand times more than those who admitted their fault in the first place.

Still, there is healing and forgiveness for you too. Jesus did not come to die for the “pretty good,” the “alright,” and the “working on it.” He came to die for murderers, thieves, and adulterers. That is you, and that was me. Not one of us is too far gone. And he has a way of turning our worst mistakes into our greatest blessings if we'll trust him with them.

Tonight again, right after I tuck him in, I'll kiss Joshua on the cheek and say "I love you."

He'll say it back.