It was 12.30pm on a Wednesday when it happened. I won’t forget it … ever. It wasn’t quite spring. Rainy and gloomy outside. I’m in my surgical gown waiting in the ward. I see a girl I recognise from a local shop, I go to say hello and then realise the abortion clinic probably isn’t the best place for a catch-up: “How you doing? Is it a boy or a girl you are not having?”
Most of the women there don’t look pregnant apart from one; I keep trying to catch her eye so I can smile at her. The nurse comes to collect me; they put me on a gurney and wheel me to the anaesthetist. Lying on my back shivering, I’m not sure if it’s cold or pure dread. The anaesthetist comes over and asks: “Ready?” Just one word. And I cry and cry and cry. Streams of tears, more shivering. The anaesthetist looks at the nurse confused. “What’s wrong with her?”
What’s wrong? This is not how it’s supposed to go down. I’m 17. I already have a blip on the radar … a bump in the road, if you excuse the pun. My life isn’t perfect, but idiotically at 17 I think it will be. The nurse says: “She’s just not sure if it’s the right thing to do.” I’m about to do the scariest thing I’ve ever done. The last thing I see is the nurse’s sympathetic eyes. Next thing I know I’m in recovery, from the first operation I’ve ever had. They call it a vacuum aspiration although there is nothing aspirational about it.
I wake up again, back on the ward. I feel no pain. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. He is sitting on the end of the bed. Crying. Ah, so there will be pain, just not the physical kind. “Why did you kill our baby?” He says those words to a young girl who is not much more than a baby herself. The same girl that he screamed at when she told him she was pregnant and said it wasn’t his problem. He was such a catch at the time, what with his job as a pizza-delivery boy.
When I get home, Mum makes me tea and gives me a hot-water bottle. I crawl into my bed. I had gone into that clinic a girl, but became a woman when I left. Not in the way I would have wanted, not by some beautiful moment of transcendental awareness, but in the most cold and brutal way. I had walked in there with the potential for life inside me, but one that would have almost certainly destroyed mine.
Up until that day I thought that if you wanted something enough it would just happen. I had been in love with this boy since I was 13 years old. He was charming, exotic … well, Spanish, popular, and I knew one day he would be mine. He was the best-looking guy in my satellite town. We started going out when I was 15, it was instant love. The emotional Armageddon of first love.
I found out I was pregnant in the toilet cubicle at work. My friend thought she was pregnant and bought some tests. I took one almost as a joke, never expecting it to be positive. I felt no joy in that moment. Two years in, our relationship was in dire straits. I had to tell my mum, knowing she would be angry and think I was an idiot, even though I was on the pill and I was just very unlucky or very fertile. I couldn’t tell Dad, if I wanted my boyfriend to get out of it alive.
I carried the burden of it all, from paying for my abortion, to driving myself there, to the sweat-drenched nightmares after. He carried on as usual, and with other women. I would dream about her … my child. I dreamed I had a girl: I would take her to the park and push her on a swing. Another dream had us sitting in the kitchen where I would plait her curly brown hair, just like his.
She would be 21 years old now, and I try to imagine what our life would be like. Her father went to prison six months after my termination. I certainly wouldn’t be an actor and stand-up comic. I imagine I’d be surviving on meagre benefits in a tower block, most likely stoned and angry at a world that robbed me of opportunity at the age of 17. Taking my little girl to visit her father in prison. What hope for that child? What a way to bring someone into the world.
I was lucky I had a choice, that’s why I feel so strongly about reproductive rights, because I wouldn’t be here now without them. It has become a strong theme in my stand-up. In 2011 I did an Edinburgh show in which I talked a little bit about this. My dad came along and I had to flag up that there might be a section of the show that would upset him. Afterwards he told me that I was excellent and very brave; I still don’t know if he meant doing stand-up or the operation itself.
I get furious at the suggestion that abortion is somehow this flippant decision, like deciding whether or not to buy a new pair of shoes. I hate it when people suggest that mothers are better people, more responsible, invested and loving than women without children. The decision to not have a child is just as hard and responsible, if you know you aren’t in a position to give that child what it needs.
Women in Ireland are still being denied that choice. It breaks my heart to think there are women like the 17-year-old me: women who are frightened and getting on a plane with no one to hold their hand because they have to go to another country; judged because if a woman books a last-minute trip to Britain, chances are people will guess why she is going; some of them pregnant as a result of rape or incest; some of them risking their own lives if they continue with a pregnancy; some just like me, making a choice, wanting autonomy over their own bodies. If they manage to get an illegal abortion in Ireland they could face up to 14 years in prison: 14 years for the temerity of choice.
I’m proud of the 17-year-old me. I know I made the right decision, even if it was hard. All women should have that choice: let there be no more unwanted children. If I do ever have a daughter, I will stand by her right to choose too, and I’ll hope to have all the necessary tools to support her, no matter what she does.
• Tiff Stevenson is on tour with the show Seven. She will be hosting a Stand Up for Choice gig on 28 March at London Irish Centre
A moment that changed me: having an abortion, aged 17 | Tiff Stevenson
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