When my mother was pregnant with me, her doctor told her to have an abortion.

“You already have two healthy kids and a husband,” he’d said.

I don’t think he added, “You don’t want to orphan your four- and six-year old, or widow your mate.” But he didn’t have to.

My New Zealand-born mother was a staunch Catholic, took the long way home from school so as not to be confronted by Protestant kids waiting in bushes to beat her up. When I was girl, she’d sat at my bedside, held my hands together, told me to close my eyes, then recited a blessing before tucking me in, “snug as a bug in a rug.” As a teenager, I’d return at curfew and find her sitting in her lime green armchair next to the front door, the floral lampshade shining like a halo as she waited for me to come home. “I’m just praying for you,” she’d say, before pulling the metal chain and putting herself to bed. She did not want to sit at the back of the church with the other divorcees, so stayed married for longer than she should have, then spent twenty years working as a pastoral administrator, attending mass every day, sometimes twice. Her best friend was a priest.

Although she knew she could die from having me, she risked a lucky game of Russian roulette and won, did not believe in abortion for herself. She told me I was her “lucky mistake,” as if the “lucky” part cancelled out the “mistake,” and said she’d felt Christ within her when I was living inside her, that this was why she named me Christina. She had no regrets, she told me when I was older, and I felt blessed to have her as my savior, my champion.

While attending my Catholic high school in Honolulu, we debated abortion and, having seen photos of fetuses and all of the arguments Right-to-Lifers made about murder, I believed it was wrong. I was resolutely on their side, never thinking about the other—never having been confronted with that terrible choice. I was unaware that the photos were from later-term abortions of manipulated fetuses, still unviable on their own, specifically meant to insight horror from my teenage mind.

Instead, I consciously spent all my sexual energy trying not to become a teen mom because I’d watched a friend go through it, ‘disappearing’ at sixteen for months to give birth, even though everyone knew and everyone judged her—not the father, whose identity went mostly unknown. This made the message absolutely clear: pregnancy was always the fault of the woman, and I did not want to be that woman, ever. In the girl’s bathroom, just before she left, she’d told me, “my parents promised to make it better later, but this is not my choice.” The look in her eyes was wild and sad, like a caged animal about to be put down for taking up too much space.

Back then, I saw how my mother’s religion saved me, even though as an adult, given the same predicament, I would have chosen the birds in hand over some righteous ideal. In fact, I have made that choice.

When I was engaged to marry my husband, who already had two kids from a previous marriage, I became pregnant for the first and only time. We had no financial hardship, no extenuating circumstance to give us an excuse the outside world might deem acceptable, and no religion precluding us from bringing a child of our own into the world. I’d left Catholicism in my early twenties after learning the gospels in the Bible were chosen three hundred years after the death of Jesus by a bunch of men who edited out all the female writers. But I still felt ingrained shame for not wanting a child of my own, for agreeing with my husband that the stress of a third kid ten years younger than the first would put those existing kids and our relationship at risk.

When I was honest with myself, I knew I did not not want an ‘opihi stuck to me for the first years of its life, feeding off my body and requiring my full attention. I did not want to be left at home while our two kids, already bright with laughter or brimming with tears, grew up with my focus diverted into yet another new thing for them. They were already having a tough time with changes they never chose: their house suddenly emptied of their mom’s stuff, how they’d see her after school but no longer every night, how they now had two households and two sets of rules, plus a new step-something struggling to find her parenting place and doing a poor-to-middling job most of the time. Blending a family was one step too far, and I did not feel confident I could accomplish the feat with any degree of success.

And I’d never wanted to become a bio mom, not really. My body had betrayed me for a few years, but I’d not wanted my father’s blind anger to infuse itself from me into another being, my blood translated into another, passed down epigenetically—something I’d intuited during childhood—my fear, omni-present. My father’s father had killed a man, and there was no way to escape the physiology of that act inside my atoms. I did not want anyone else to live through pain with me as the cause, did not trust the monster I knew lived inside me. I had spent my entire life, it seemed, trying to heal my injuries, both physical and psychological, that remained with me no matter my aging: the terror of Dad’s leather belt, his pointer finger jabbing my chest, how he could silence me with a sigh, shame me with a look, how cruel his words could be.

I am not making excuses for my decision, but simply providing context. Even my mother agreed that no one should be forced to go to full term, become a mother against her will, whose body is never the same, whose ligaments turn to jelly, whose pelvic floor sometimes fails, whose vulva is stitched or stomach is sliced, whose breasts can ruin into fire hoses. Abortion was not for her, but she was not going to say it could not be for anyone because she, more than anyone, knew the burden of what comes after—a lifetime commitment of knowing her child was in the world and the worry that never left her, no matter how big her kids grew. No one should have to give a reason for why becoming a mother, just because she’s pregnant, is simply a ‘no.’

I went to my gynecologist, who confirmed I was pregnant, and she called me into her office where she sat beaming behind her big walnut desk, afternoon sunlight piercing through Venetian blinds.

“Congratulations!” She said, stack of pamphlets at the ready, fanned out in her hands like a treasure. “We’ve got lots to discuss.”

“Actually,” I said, “I don’t want to keep it. I want an abortion.”

“Oh,” she said, raising her eyes and furrowing her brow, the flyers disintegrating into a sloppy pile.

“So…” I stammered, looking down at my hands. “What’s next.”

“I don’t do abortions,” she said, suddenly sitting board-straight.

I looked up at her inquisitively.

“You’ll have to go to Planned Parenthood,” scribbled a number on a pad, ripped it off and handed it to me with disgust, then shooed me out of her office.

At the clinic, there were stackable chairs lined up against the wall and a glass window behind which the receptionist sat. I filled out the forms, sat next to my husband who held my hand. Silent, scared tears ran down my face blurring the linoleum floors. It was pretty early, I thought, regretting not getting the Morning After pill. Surely the procedure couldn’t be too bad.

Mine was a tough decision, and though I mourn the baby I could have had, wonder what s/he would have looked like, talked like, what ideas and what personality, I took some pills and spent two days cramped in a dark room I needed, my face wet with tears that wouldn’t stop coming. I felt emptied out, pitted. This will stay with me probably forever.

The choice I made all those years ago is something I sometimes regret, feeling sad for the opportunity missed. But at least I got to choose it. My friend in high school did not. Her parents forced her to give birth then to give the child up for adoption. I saw her a while back in a retail store sitting on a stool behind the counter. The place was tiny, almost claustrophobic, though the merchandise was cute with summer dresses and bikinis, stickers and mugs painted with rainbows, “Sunshine” and “Aloha” scrawled in black letters below. We exchanged pleasantries but did not mention her child, did not discuss whether she had any contact with him/her, nor delve into the details of being a mom to a child she did not raise. There was an air of sadness about her, a sense of something missing she would never get back.

“How long have you worked here?” I asked, eyeing a pair of golden earrings.

“I own this place,” she said, smirking.

“Wow, really?”

“Yup, my parents fronted me the money, and now this”—she turned her hand up to the sky motioning to the merchandise—“is all mine.”

It made me think about the deal they’d made, the promise to make it better because she’d done what they’d required and how her life had been marked by this choice that was not hers.

“I’ve got two kids of my own now,” she said struggling for brightness.

“That’s great,” I said. “Good for you.”

“And I hardly ever think of—you know.”

The regret she felt was palpable, along with the shame that I knew something she likely did not openly share. Was this store compensation enough for what she’d been through, what she’d have to go through for the rest of her life?

“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t imagine what it’s like.”

“It’s fine,” she said, waving her hand as if to swat away the past. “Whatever,” though her eyes welled up with tears.

She tried to focus the conversation back on me, how I’d faired since graduation, but the thought of her being forced unsettled me. What if I’d never gotten the choice, had been required to go through with my pregnancy, given birth to a child I did not want? What if I’d had to live the rest of my life with someone wondering about me, knowing they weren’t wanted, finding out perhaps in some twisted mishap, that I could have cared for them but did not? Love is complicated, yes, but it too, is a decision.

And most women who are forced to have babies are not as lucky as me or my friend, are single mothers whose financial prospects dim exponentially when they keep the child, making the question of abortion not so much a moral one but one that puts women’s health, wellbeing, and their ability to prosper at risk. Poor women who can’t afford sometimes-fatal, illegal abortions are stuck with impregnation and all that follows, unable to boot strap themselves out of lives straddled with something the males responsible can simply walk away from.

About a year later, I walked past my friend’s store and the windows that once displayed mugs and gold-plated shell earrings had been replaced with a floor-to-ceiling photo of someone surfing, the crystal blue ocean glimmering: a promise of a perfect day that has always existed just across the street from that very concrete shopping center. And in the years since I know each time I pass the place where her store once was, that I’ll probably never see her again, which always makes me think of my mom, who passed in 2017. I am in awe of her—how she left everything and everyone she knew to come to this country and make a life for herself, how she believed in things like right and wrong, good and bad. And when I die, I know I will see her again, even though Catholicism says I’ll spend eternity in purgatory, go to hell, or some such thing. I know because god is not a bunch of hypocritical white men making rules about women’s bodies while passing laws allowing concealed weapons so kids keep getting murdered in schools and limiting health care for actual, existing humans who’ve already been born. The god I know is in the earth and the trees, in the sound of my kids’ laughter, infused in the salt of their tears, in the ether of their dreams, in how much I ache for them to be happy and free to find themselves in this terrible terrible time in our nation’s history.

Because god is love. It’s just that simple.