There it is,” the doctor said, without warning. I turned, the cold jelly sliding off my stomach, to face the screen he had swivelled towards me. There it is, he said, nonchalantly, like he was pointing at the Eiffel Tower as we walked along the Seine. There it is, like he’d found his car in a festival car park. There it is, as he showed me, apropos of nothing, the foetus I was about to abort.
In December last year, I was at home, stuck in a sour state of depression that no amount of brightly coloured vapes and episodes of Schitt’s Creek could remedy. After an intense seven weeks, post-abortion, the bleeding had finally stopped. But the persistent crying, self-hatred and grief followed me everywhere I went.
Ever since I was a teenager, I’d been under the impression that an abortion was like a really bad period. It hurt for a few days and then, after it was done, back to the pub for a night of gossip. But here I was, 29 years old, floored by a grief so intense it scared me. How could I be grieving something I didn’t know I wanted?
Unable to comprehend why I hadn’t just bounced back, I went on Reddit, desperately seeking reassurance. I found a thread where a young man said his partner was still depressed months after her abortion. Below were comments of sympathy, telling him that sometimes abortions take a long time to get over. I instantly panicked. How long is a long time? I don’t have a long time. I felt furious that instead of warning me what might happen, the only medical professional I’d met in this process had showed me what I was losing and simply said, “There it is.”
I am obviously pro-choice. I say obviously, not because I assume you know who I am but rather, I assume you know what’s right. But if you do know who I am, you’ll know my comedy has always been described as “sex-positive” and pro “women being able to do what the fuck we want with our bodies”. I am lucky I live in a place where abortions are accessible and I won’t get arrested for having one. Especially, as we’re so acutely aware of the fact that in the US, a growing number of states are making abortions illegal, while in the UK, there has been an increase in the number of women being prosecuted for having abortions after 24 weeks, as well as a rise in far-right MPs unashamedly vocalising their anti-choice opinions.
Because I feel so grateful to have safe abortion access, it is daunting to even express the complex feelings that came after mine. But … I want to try.
So, I really didn’t plan to get pregnant at this point in my life. A couple of months earlier I’d decided to come off the pill because I wanted to see if my anxiety levels improved on a natural cycle.
Newsflash: men don’t like wearing condoms. One night, because of my desire to please a stranger in the moment, I had agreed to forego it. A momentary decision that was followed by consequences that I had to deal with alone.
The day I found out I was pregnant there was a mild hysteria among my best friends. They took the day off work and flocked to my house. As they drunk wine, I kept making inappropriate jokes at my own expense while intermittently bursting into tears.
“What do you think you’re going to do?” asked Anna. I didn’t know. Confusion overwhelmed me. I’d always imagined I wouldn’t think twice about getting an abortion. I’m Grace Campbell, I like staying out until 5am, not paying my parking tickets on time and sneaking vapes into cinemas. I’ve never thought about having a child. I’ve been too busy behaving like one. But now, at 29, in what felt like my last gasp of young adulthood, the words, “I’ll have an abortion,” didn’t slip off my tongue.
The prospect of making such a finite decision freaked me out. I wished I had the grace of time. As ever, my friends became my committee. The mum of one of my best friends called me up to reassure me it would be fine if I had an abortion. She’d had an abortion at my age. “I don’t regret it. It wasn’t the right time for me,” she said. She sounded so sure. But I wasn’t sure and I wondered if perhaps this confusion was in part down to the stage I was at in my life. Everyone around me was having babies, whereas I had just a cruel reminder that I wasn’t anywhere near ready.
During my decision-making period, I had to go on a trapeze. I was making an ad for a car company and the idea of the ad was that I would say yes to everything offered to me. Including trapezing and, unbeknown to the producers, perhaps a baby. Right before I mounted the high diving board from which I was supposed to jump, the trainer took me to one side.
“Do you have a heart condition?” No. “Asthma?” only around cats. “Any chance you might be pregnant?” she asked. I panicked. I thought about the eight positive pregnancy tests I’d done, all lined up on my chest of drawers. I became paranoid. What would happen to me if I decided to say yes to having this baby and then went on this trapeze and sneezed? Would it fall out of me, mid-air?
I considered my options. Option one: have a baby with a man I barely know; see how big my boobs got in a full-term of pregnancy; not be able to go to Mexico with the girls next year; take a baby on tour with me.
Option two: have an abortion; take a couple of days off work and then it will be over.
The trapeze woman asked me again. “No,” I said, “I’m not pregnant.”
“Why do you want to terminate this pregnancy?” the doctor asked. My friend, Holly, who had come with me to the hospital, had warned me I would have to provide reasons. This is part of the UK’s abortion law, that two doctors need to agree that a woman’s reasons for an abortion are valid. So, on the way there, I had prepared an answer I was hoping would make the doctor laugh, because I thought, if I can make the doctor laugh, then my abortion will be OK.
“Well,” I said to him, “I am a comedian. And the man who got me pregnant is a musician and I just think that I should spare the world another nepo-baby.” He didn’t laugh.
Instead he gave me a pill. I insisted he let me do a toast, to a nepo-baby that could have one day been both the host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Holly apologised for my behaviour; an ongoing theme of our lives.
The doctor gave me instructions to take another pill the next day. He said I would have some cramps and that I would bleed for a few days and then everything would be over. What he didn’t warn me was that I might bleed for a lot longer than that. In fact, for weeks and weeks to come every time I would go to the toilet I’d see chunks of bloody tissue.
He also didn’t warn me I might feel depression like I’ve never experienced before. That I would have a hormonal crash that puts my historical comedown from Bestival 2014 to shame.
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The doctor showed me the foetus on the screen, gave me a pill, told me some basic facts, but he did not prepare me for what was about to come. That I wouldn’t be able to look in the mirror, or at pictures of myself, for months, because I would totally dissociate from my body in the hope that I would feel further away from my reality. That I would feel a pervasive sense of guilt, for letting go of something that was mine. And that then I would feel shame, shame that feeling guilty was in some way a dishonour to the women who fought for my right to be able to have this choice.
What that doctor might never know, but I hope he will now, was that showing me that blob on a screen would provide a photographic memory for a grief I didn’t know I could feel. A grief for something I never knew, but something I know I would have loved very much. And that every time that image would flash into my head for months to come, I’d burst into tears like a child who’d tripped and wanted their mum.
I’ve thought a lot about why that doctor showed me the screen that day. Was it because it wasn’t really a baby yet? Was it because he wanted me to be sure? Maybe he’d had people regret their decisions and he wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. Or was it just because he is a man who has never tried to empathise with what it feels like to be a woman in that situation?
I know that this is not everybody’s experience with abortion. I have good friends who really did bounce back quite fast. And I’ve got other friends who’ve had a few and found one much harder than the others. Abortions are not one-size-fits-all. They are a physical and emotional process. And your reaction to them will be affected by what is going on in your life; past present and future. And that is the nuance that we desperately need when talking about abortions.
I was nervous writing this. I’ve worried that in doing so I am letting women down. You only have to look at the upcoming American elections to see we are being confronted with loud, powerful men who are trying to occupy our basic right to choose. Women are being controlled and their every move watched, because of the male obsession with taking our autonomy away.
And so I wonder if we don’t want to tell other people how hard our abortions were, because thank fucking God we are still being allowed them. But then I think, that is why we are being denied the nuance.
In February, four months and a lot of iron supplements after my abortion, I did the only thing that I thought might make it better: talk about it on stage.
Abortions aren’t a natural source of comedy. They can be divisive, and in talking about them I knew I’d bring up feelings that other people in the audience have about them. My instinct was that most people would have some connection to it. So I just told the story, as it happened, and it was amazing how many people, of all generations, connected to it. There was a universal truth in what I was saying: abortions can be harder than we are told and too often women are left picking up the pieces of a man’s decision.
Last week, I was having a smear test and the nurse could tell I was on edge. I explained that since my abortion last year I’ve felt anxious in medical situations.
She stopped, gently put her hand on mine and said, “Are you OK?” a look of genuine compassion in her eyes. “Sometimes it’s harder than you expect,” she continued. For the first time in weeks, I started to cry. Not because I was sad again, but because I wished that she had been there that day when that doctor showed me the screen. To tell me that what was about to come wasn’t going to be straightforward but, crucially, it was normal and I wasn’t alone in that complex type of pain. And to also, maybe, slap him.
I am glad that I was able to have an abortion and now I know that I made the right decision. But the simplification of it before, during, and after, meant that I experienced a lot of my grief entirely alone.
Up until this moment, I have been nervous to talk about how it affected me on a physiological and psychological level, because I’ve been so afraid my words would be misunderstood or worse, I would come across as anti-choice. But, my abortion had a huge impact on me and I want to be able to say that without worrying that I have let women down. I wish that the world allowed women the nuance of wanting these rights, while also being allowed to talk about the pain that sometimes comes with it.
Grace Campbell Is on Heat is at the Edinburgh fringe this summer, followed by a European tour. For more details, go to disgracecampbell.com.
If you have been affected by any of these issues, please contact the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas.org)
Styling by Hope Lawrie; hair by Charley McEwen; makeup by Lou Artford; photographer’s Assistant Alex Poll