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Vanessa’s story

The pink lines come 10 seconds after she pees on the strip. It’s supposed to take at least 60 seconds.

The same thing happens on the second test. She doesn’t bother with a third.

Those two lines tell Vanessa the weird feeling in her stomach isn’t from a bad burrito. She is pregnant.

How is this possible?

Every night at 9, like clockwork, Vanessa takes a little blue pill to prevent this very thing from happening.

She’s been on birth control for five years now – since 8th grade, when she and her fiancé, Cameron, first got together. She’s never missed a cycle. Until now, when she realizes birth control isn’t always dependable.

What are we going to do?

At first, Cameron is excited. He’s loved Vanessa since he first saw her in the halls of their middle school near Manhattan. And he’s marrying her in three months anyway. He knows they’ll have kids. It’s all right with him if they start early.

Vanessa, on the other end of a long-distance phone call, brings him back to Earth.

He’s a full-ride football player at a university up north with three years left to finish his degree in criminal law. She’s a 20-year-old KU freshman with five years of pharmacy school in front of her and will remain deployable with the Army for the next year.

The two take four weeks to decide, going back and forth from abortion to school transfers and night classes.

It isn’t until the last Thursday in January that Vanessa goes to Kansas City’s Planned Parenthood to carry out their final decision — a decision influenced by her own childhood.

Vanessa’s mother deserted her husband and two children while Vanessa was still learning how to walk.

Initially planning to abort Vanessa, her mother carried her to term as a junior in high school at the father’s insistence. She married Vanessa’s father and had a second child, a boy, by him before she packed up her things and left. Motherhood overwhelmed her.

So Vanessa grew up under the awkward but well-meaning love of her devoted father.

When Vanessa wanted pigtails, he tried his hardest to make that part straight. But it never was, and her pigtails never matched up.

When she wanted to go clothes shopping for six hours at a time, her father waited patiently outside the dressing room, holding her purse.

When it came time for Vanessa to get her first bra, he went with her.

Vanessa grew up wondering what she had done to make her mom run away.

Once she was old enough to understand, Vanessa vowed to never put her children through that, that she would be a better mother than hers.

So at age 20, facing the prospect of having a child, forgoing school and working full time to support it, Vanessa remembers that vow and decides not to continue her pregnancy.

Cameron, who grew up watching his parents struggle to make ends meet, comes to the same conclusion. He wants to earn enough money to provide for his wife and children — something he can’t do as a college student.

* * *

Vanessa waits in the lobby of Planned Parenthood with her two best friends, wondering why Cameron isn’t there.

Yes, he’s got football practice. Yes, he can’t afford a plane ticket and still afford to feed himself the rest of the month. Yes, she told him it was OK.

But sitting there, amidst other scared faces, she notices how few men are there with their women.

Damn. Why isn’t he here? He doesn’t have to deal with the pain. Nothing’s growing inside of him. Why isn’t he here?

The aide calls her name and Vanessa leaves her friends behind in the lobby.

Lying on the table, Vanessa waits as the nurse hooks up the equipment for a vaginal ultrasound — the embryo inside her is too small to be seen otherwise.

Vanessa looks to the screen and sees a tiny, gray dot just a bit larger than the other moving blurs that surround it. That dot is the five-week-and one-day old embryo.

She’s relieved: It’s still early enough to take the abortion pill. She doesn’t know if she could have gone through with an actual procedure if she were further along, despite reaching the decision she knows is right for her, for Cameron and for their family.

The nurse gives her a bottle containing four pills in exchange for $650, which Vanessa charges to her Visa card.

Back in her dorm, she reads the back of the box:

Put all four pills in your mouth at the same time, two on each side, between your gum and cheek.

They taste disgusting.

Wait 30 minutes for the pills to dissolve.

Instead of dissolving, they feel more like Winterfresh gum that’s been chewed too long.

Drink a glass of water to swallow the remainder of the pills.

Finally.

Ten minutes later, Vanessa is on all fours, experiencing a cramping pain in her stomach she has never known.

Her three roommates, unaware of what’s happening, rush to her side.

“Vanessa! Vanessa! What’s wrong?”

“Are you OK?”

“Do you need anything?”

“No! Just leave me the fuck alone!”

They obey.

She can’t walk, let alone stand. For the next 30 minutes, she’s writhing on the floor, unable to think of anything but the searing pain in her abdomen.

The pain subsides. She starts to bleed.

She grabs one of the thick, extra large, front-to-back menstrual pads she hasn’t worn since she was 14 and afraid of tampons. The nurse had said the only way to be sure everything comes out is to avoid tampons.

She barely makes it back to her bed, she’s so tired. She sleeps soundly through the night.

In the morning, her pad is already soaked with blood, something she’ll have to get used to in the next four weeks.

But she feels fine — until she looks to her desk and sees the 4.5x6 inch black and white sonogram and the dot of the five-week-old embryo it shows.

In the aftermath, she drifts away from Cameron and cries daily.

She starts second-guessing herself and asking questions she’ll never know the answer to.

Would it have had its daddy’s smile? My almond-shaped eyes?

Would it have been a boy or a girl?

It takes her a few months, but she works through her depression, never once thinking to tell her father — she knows he wouldn’t approve. She never considers seeking a psychologist for help.

“I don’t think a psychologist will be able to help you with that,” she said. “It’s something you have to do on your own, something you kind of have to come to terms with.”

Vanessa returns to Planned Parenthood for a check-up on March 11 — the pill worked as it was supposed to.

The news comes just in time: Vanessa and Cameron are married in Lawrence a week later.

Vanessa says she doesn’t regret her decision, although before she got pregnant, she was against abortion.

“I was like ‘No one has the right to do that,’” she said. “‘If you’re woman enough to open your legs and do it, then you should be woman enough to take care of it.’”

But when she was confronted with her own unplanned pregnancy as a 20-year-old freshman, she gained a new perspective.

“You can’t judge. I judged before experiencing it. You can’t do that,” she said. “It’s not black and white. Everyone has their own reasons. Everyone has their own hopes for their children. Everyone has their own hopes for themselves. So you can’t draw a fine line. I used to think you could, but you can’t.”

Every night before bed, Vanessa walks downstairs to the kitchen and pours herself a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats for a bedtime snack.

Before the first spoonful, like clockwork, she takes a little blue pill and thinks about the mother she will wait to become.

Introduction | Tae's story | Katie's story | Erin's story | Vanessa's story

— Edited by Sarah Kelly