Amy Beth Sisson: THE WHITE-WALLED OFFICE • Cleaver Magazine

Creative Nonfiction by Amy Beth Sisson
THE WHITE-WALLED OFFICE

In my doctor’s office I stared at white walls decorated with diplomas. The room had two doors. I tried to decide if one was smaller than the other or if it looked that way through a trick of perspective. It is never good when a doctor calls you in during your twelfth week of pregnancy and suggests you bring your husband to the conversation. He was somber when he asked me to sit, fully dressed, in a room with a desk rather than on a padded exam table with a paper drape. Looking at my husband, he said that I had tested positive for toxoplasmosis, a parasite that could affect the health of the fetus. This was in 1988 when treatments for this condition were not available in the U.S. The doctor tried to impress on us that one in four or five babies born to mothers with my condition were blind or had an unformed brain. He recommended we consider termination. To calm myself, I looked up at the two doors again. I wanted to get out of my seat and see if the difference in size was an illusion. I felt my then-husband’s eyes on me and heard him say, “What is the process?” The doctor looked at my stricken face and suggested we go home to talk it over.

In my childhood kitchen, The New York Times lay spread out in front of my mother. She was drinking black coffee and smoking a Kent menthol. The top headline on that day, January 22, 1973, was the death of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Right under that was the slightly smaller headline, “High Court Rules Abortions Legal the First 3 Months.” Under that was an even smaller headline that stated it another way. “State Ban Ruled Out Until the Last 10 Weeks.” It was a 7-2 decision. She was delighted. I was thirteen. Even though I had never had sex and couldn’t really imagine it, I asked her if I were to fall pregnant and have an abortion, would she want to know? She said she wouldn’t. She said it was because she had adopted children, my older brothers, and that their mothers had not had an abortion. I hadn’t thought about what the answer to that question would mean to me when I blurted it out. I wished I hadn’t asked. Years later I found out she may have had another motivation.

On my phone screen on June 24, 2022, the headline read “Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade.” I imagined the tree planted in my mother’s memory shaking its branches in rage.

In the Courtroom of the Supreme Court in front of white pillars and red drapes, two female attorneys argued in favor of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. The two attorneys stood in front of nine men. The opposing male attorney opened with a joke: “Mr. Chief Justice and may it please the Court. It’s an old joke, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word.” This was on November 13, 1971. In the same room on December 6, 2021, during the oral arguments in the Dobbs case, Elizabeth Prelogar, U.S. Solicitor General, said, “If this court renounces the liberty interests recognized in Roe…it would be an unprecedented contraction of individual rights. … The court has never revoked a right that is so fundamental to so many Americans and so central to their ability to participate fully and equally in society.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, “Why don’t the safe-haven laws take care of that problem? … There is, without question, an infringement on bodily autonomy, you know, which we have in other contexts, like vaccines. However, it doesn’t seem to me to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden.” The court held that a constitutional right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Citing liberty as the basis of the decision is an insult. This reasoning could be used to overturn the right to buy contraception, the right to same sex marriage and many other rights I have taken for granted. I wonder, what if, instead of individual rights, our legal criteria looked at ways to enable the care and flourishing of all?

For all our talk about choice, sometimes we forget that choice and bodily autonomy is at the core of this issue. The flip side of the right to abortion is the right to carry the pregnancy. As a lawyer for the ACLU, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had hoped for a different test case for abortion rights than Roe. She wanted to litigate the case of Susan Struck, a nurse in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. When Struck became pregnant, she was given a choice to abort or be discharged.

In a college classroom four years after Roe, we discussed Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defense of abortion in our assigned reading for a seminar on women and philosophy. Jarvis described an unwanted fetus as a parasite: an organism that lives by consuming the mother’s energy. That image terrified me. We also discussed Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy. She argued for a utopian future where artificial wombs would free us from “the tyranny of reproduction.” Although my pregnancies were complicated, I didn’t experience them as tyranny but as strange and privately beautiful. I don’t want to minimize the impact of carrying children on my and all women’s economic and physical well-being.

In my professor’s office during my senior year of college, my mentor, discussing the possibility of grad school, asked if I wanted a family. “No,” I said. I couldn’t ever see myself being pregnant. I saw the image of a parasite draining my vital energy through a tube. I never questioned if she asked her male students about their family planning.

In my body something changed when I reached my late twenties. The stereotype of the biological clock was real for me. I talked my then-husband, who had two children from a previous marriage, into having a third. I welcomed the growing “parasite” into my body only to find that the fetus was at risk because of the toxoplasmosis parasite also living inside me. Even before I was pregnant, I had a theory of parenting. I’m not sure where it came from. I believed that having a child was like hang gliding. You jumped and held on for the ride. You were there for the joys and the storms. I wondered, what if I had a baby who, after birth, got encephalitis that caused brain damage, as did the daughter of a friend? Her mother loved her fiercely. By the time I was twelve weeks pregnant, I had already taken flight off the edge.

Back in the examination room I took off my pants and underwear and slid on the paper gown, opening in the front, over my T-shirt. Before the examination, the doctor explained that while there were no medications available in the U.S. to help protect the fetus from the parasite, some of his patients had moved to France to get a treatment that was available there. That wasn’t a realistic option for me. The doctor tried to impress upon me the seriousness of the risks. I could try again, he urged. You are twenty-nine but young enough that you could get pregnant again. The doctor had no way of knowing how ambivalent my then-husband was about having another child. He already had his two sons from a prior marriage, and I worried he might not consent to trying again if I ended this pregnancy. The buzz of the fluorescent lights distracted me. Bad medical news is literally hard to hear.

In my childhood kitchen the day that Roe was decided, my mother didn’t tell me that she had numerous miscarriages and a stillbirth. I learned this much later. It’s hard to imagine now what a stigma it was for a woman not to be able to carry a pregnancy. My own genetic testing showed I was a Tay-Sachs carrier, something passed on from parents to children and which increases the risk of miscarriage and seriously ill babies. That is a possible explanation for her pregnancy troubles. My ex wasn’t a Tay-Sachs carrier, so that wasn’t a risk for my pregnancy. If it were, I might have had to make a choice about carrying a pregnancy knowing I’d have a twenty-five percent chance of having a baby who would die in early childhood or to undergo amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling to see if the fetus was affected and to consider terminating. Now, in many states, that choice is gone.

In my childhood living room I introduced my tenth-grade classmate to my family. Later she told me that she didn’t think we looked related. My parents, my older sister and I all share a strong family resemblance, brown or green eyes and dark curly or kinky hair but my brothers have light straight hair and blue eyes. They were adopted in the 1950s during the “Baby Scoop Era” when unwed mothers were pressured and sometimes forced into giving up their babies. Adoption is not always the happy story that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Coney Barrett wants you to think it is: of a baby dropped off to a nurse at a hospital or police officer at a police station and a new happy family formed. There is a long history of coercion in the adoption industry. Just the fact of the word industry is a clue that something is wrong. It starts with a rupture. Women can’t suddenly shut down the maternal bonding that emerges during the 9 months of pregnancy. And, in closed adoptions, the children who are “given up” often wonder why their mother gave them away and why they seem so different from their parents and siblings.

In the waiting room at Planned Parenthood, age seventeen, while I waited for an appointment to get birth control a health instructor talked to us about our bodies. We learned about menstrual cycles, self-care for cramps, and how to do a breast self-exam. Along with this health-giving information, I got a pap smear and a diaphragm.

In the ultrasound room I lay on a table looking at a screen. In grayscale, a tiny head with a tiny spine spiraled around a blobby body. It waved its four appendages from the dark ghostly room inside my body. Wah wuh, wah wuh, wah wuh, the Doppler amplified the beating heart. The ultrasound tech and I stared at the screen. The ultrasound looked completely normal. I later thought of that image when the O.B. recommended termination. Maybe because of that beating developing heart, or maybe the force of evolution’s drive to reproduce, I felt a connection to that growing blob.

In my child’s nursery I called my mother to ask if she wanted to come meet the baby. My relationship with my mother was distant and fraught, but in the phone conversation, I told her about the birth and about the doctors’ concerns about the scan. Apparently, she didn’t share my theory of parenting and declined to come. She said, “I’d rather not hold her until the test comes back and I know she is okay.”

In the doctor’s office I sat in the room with two men. My then-husband tried to get me to understand what twenty-five percent means. Risk is hard to wrap our minds around. At that point in the pregnancy there was more chance that the baby would have birth defects than that I would miscarry. What would you take a one-in-four chance on? Flood insurance is usually required if there is a one-in-four chance that the property will flood during a thirty-year period. One in four women are expected to have an abortion during their lifetime. But I didn’t view my pregnancy risk as the same kind of calculation. If I continued the pregnancy, I would have an excellent chance of having a child I longed for. And given the father’s ambivalence, a smaller chance of another pregnancy if I terminated. I believed that he would love this baby once he held her in his arms. And he very much did. Maybe my decision would have been different if it were the age of the Internet, and I could have seen the scary photos of infected newborns or if I already had another child to care for. I admit to being unsympathetic to my ex who did have two children to consider.

My resistance to termination pushed the doctor to do more research. The next week he called to tell us that he found a group in California studying the effect of the timing of the infection on the risk level. He sent them my blood. From this they were able to tell the timing of the infection. They said I was exposed very early which meant a far lower risk than twenty-five percent. Based on that, my then-husband backed off from asking me to consider ending the pregnancy. I am forever grateful that the government wasn’t involved in any of those discussions. That the state didn’t shut down our conversation or take away my right to decide.

In my study today I think about how the bonding moment I experienced when seeing that eerie gray ultrasound image of developing life inside my body can be used to emotionally manipulate and coerce. A pre-Dobbs Kentucky law requires doctors to give a detailed description of the images, including “the presence of external members and internal organs” and to make the fetal heartbeat audible if possible. This law has been superseded by Kentucky’s abortion ban. In states where abortions are still legal, clinics run by the anti-choice movement offer free ultrasounds to people considering abortion. They do this to create the same emotional state I experienced when seeing my own gray blob. These clinics play on fear of regret for an abortion. Not one of my friends who has had an abortion has any regrets, but I know that isn’t universal. Regret strikes me as a very individual phenomenon.

In a church sanctuary dappled with red and blue from the sun through stained glass, the congregation asks for forgiveness for sin, “by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. This Protestant prayer, with its expansive concept of sin, reflects two kinds of regret. A person’s sense of regret is tied in with their worldview. If, like me, they do not see the first-trimester fetus as a human life, there might be no regret for terminating a pregnancy. Or there could be regret for something undone; some vague future sadness for not having become a parent. Both of these kinds of regrets feel distant and filled with unknowables. Expressing regrets for having a child is taboo; we don’t hear about them.

In the delivery room the doctors insisted on inducing me even though I wasn’t after my expected delivery date. My third-trimester fundal height wasn’t increasing as expected. The doctors were concerned that the fetus was infected with toxoplasmosis. They said the baby needed to be born as quickly as possible in case it needed help. Induction made the birth more difficult, but I was able to have a vaginal delivery. The day after my daughter was born, a flock of residents followed a doctor into my room. They wanted my consent to perform an ultrasound of my baby’s brain. I said no. My then-husband said yes. He won this argument. This decision wasn’t just mine to make. She was his daughter as well. The scan was ambiguous, so they sent it off to be read by experts.

In an O.R. in Georgia twenty-eight-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman lay dead. Doctors had failed to promptly provide a D&C after she suffered sepsis from an incomplete abortion. Her abdomen was cut open. Blue drapes covered the rest of her body and her face. There was the smell of decaying flesh because her bowel had died inside her before they performed the too-late surgery to try to save her life. The delay in giving her life-saving care was the result of the doctors’ fear that they would be arrested under the Georgia abortion ban if they performed a D&C. Her August 19, 2022, death might have been the first Dobbs–related fatality. Because the decisions that should be made by women and their medical team are now made by legislatures, women are dying. My mother with her many miscarriages may never have survived to have my sister and me had she lived now in a state with a post-Dobbs ban.

In my bed at three a.m. I wake up from a recurring dream where I’ve found a hidden room in my house. It’s furnished with a rose-velvet upholstered wingback and is filled with so many thriving ferns and trees that it has become an interior forest. This sanctuary of care is new to me even though I’ve lived in the house for many years. It is a room full of life.

I hate that the term pro-life has been co-opted by people who curtail a woman’s ability to choose a full, vibrant, and healthy life, whether that choice includes motherhood or not. I hate that it’s been co-opted by a movement that has revealed itself to be driven by cruelty. And I hate that I’m landing on what I hate instead of what I love.

We all have vulnerable bodies: pregnant, trans, immigrant, human; we all need care. Imagination is not enough for us to build a flourishing world, but we can’t have a better future without imagining what it could be. So, in my insomnia, I return to my dream room, a haven filled with chiaroscuro, voices singing, stories, and kindness.

Amy Beth Sisson (any pronouns) is a 2025 winner of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia’s Joyful Abundance: Emerging Artist Commissioning Award, the Lambda Literary J. Michael and the Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50. She is Fence Magazine’s online visual poetry editor. Visit her website.