“I’m going to look back at this period of my life as a nightmare. This time when everything just unraveled.”  The misoprostol made her double over with cramps and sway with nausea; the worker brought her a heating pad and took her to a private room with comfortable armchairs and a thick diary where other women had written about their experiences in the clinic. “It took me awhile to come to this decision, but it’s what’s best,” read one entry. “To anyone who reads this, stay strong,” read another, and Emily had paged through them for a little while before lying on the floor and pulling her knees to her chest.  “I’m going to look back at this period of my life as a nightmare,” she said in the car, when the clinic was 120 miles behind her, 121, 122. “This time when everything just unraveled.”  She stopped at a gas station and bought a soda and a scratch-off lottery ticket, where the goal was to get three moose or three bucks in a row. She scratched off one moose. A second moose.  When she’d been alone in the private room, between the misoprostol and the surgery, when she was curled up on the floor and the clinic worker had already helped her throw up once, her phone rang and it was her husband calling from jail. He had good news, he said. He finally had a hearing date, set for just four days away, and his lawyer had offered another thing to hope for: He might be sentenced to just probation. He might not serve any time at all.  Emily pressed her head against the floor and took a deep breath. “I hope they do that for you, I really do. Whatever is the best situation you could get,” she’d told him.  He suggested that maybe she shouldn’t have the abortion after all.  She closed her eyes and rolled her head back and forth on the carpet. “Baby, I’m having it right now,” she said. “Right now, I’m going through it. I can’t stop it, it’s too late.” He hung up and didn’t call back.  Emily now scratched off the third square on her moose-moose lottery ticket. A buck. She finished scratching off the other squares.  “Oh well,” she said. “I lost.”  She put on a podcast, and the host was discussing a study, about crime rates and youth arrests, and how they happened more in poor and single-parent households.
In an era of dwindling abortion facilities, a story of a long drive and a lot of time to think.