My latest terrifying episode involved trying to negotiate a pregnancy test purchased for 20 rupees from a Mumbai pharmacy while squatting in an Indian train bathroom in General Class. As I waited for a line to appear on the stick and tried to ignore the stench of piss and shit wafting up from the train tracks, I contemplated the practicalities of an abortion on the Subcontinent. The test was negative. I was so overcome with relief that I lost my balance and toppled sideways into a large puddle of stale urine.
But what if it had been positive? And what if the pregnancy scare were a result of a wasted night in the Octagon instead of dirty backpacker sex? I have always been 99.9% sure I’d get an abortion if I were unfortunate enough to end up “with child” anytime before, you know, the onset of menopause. But even to the pedophobic like myself, there’s always that 0.01% of nagging doubt. And for the less child-averse (or the confirmed Belieber – Biebs is apparently an ardent pro-lifer), probably a lot more doubt than that.
So in the best traditions of student journalism, I decided to take on the persona of your average Dunedin student who has just found out she’s pregnant and has to make a decision. To fully adopt the fresher feel, I put on a short floaty skirt, a slightly cropped knitted jumper, and a pair of leather ankle boots in a slightly olive-y grey. Then I created a back-story to tell everyone I talked to. I would be Lauren: First-year marketing student, ex-Dio prefect, and five weeks’ pregnant to “Matt”, a guy I slept with a couple of times after town, but haven’t talked to for a month after I saw him pashing some slut from UniCol at Monkey.
False identity assumed, I set about finding out what information the uncomfortably knocked-up are getting, how accurate it is, and what the realities of getting an abortion in New Zealand are.
First Stop: Family Planning
The first question pregnant-me had was whether I could legally get an abortion. According to Family Planning, in New Zealand any woman of any age can have an abortion if two consultants agree that the pregnancy would seriously harm your mental or physical health, or that your baby would have a serious disability. In practice, if you want one and you’re less than 20 weeks’ pregnant, you’ll almost certainly be able to get one.There are two different procedures used up to 20 weeks. In an Early Medical Abortion, you take two pills, which cause you to expel the pregnancy. The more common surgical abortion (or as I prefer, the Electrolux Method) requires local or general anaesthetic. A tube is inserted into the uterus and basically vacuums out the pregnancy. The most common side-effect is bleeding for up to three weeks afterwards. If the procedure is done under local anaesthetic, it can be a bit crampy and uncomfortable, but not painful. Pregnant-me started to feel like abortion might not be nearly so scary as that MART101 presentation I had to do on Monday.
Stop Number Two: Pregnancy Counselling Services
Armed with a few facts, I moved on to the making-a-decision stage, but I needed to talk things over with someone first. Lauren’s National-voting parents probably wouldn’t be too keen on finding out that their Arana princess had managed to get herself knocked up after only a couple of months at Otago. So instead of ringing Mummy and Daddy, I Googled “pregnancy counselling”, and ended up calling Pregnancy Counselling Services – a “non-profit, non-religious and non-political organisation” which provides “free counselling and other support to anyone involved in a worrying pregnancy”. Pregnant-me felt that my pregnancy was definitely “worrying”, especially given that it all started when Matt gave me a sip of his Vodka Red Bull on the Monkey d-floor. So I gave PCS a call.Someone called Mary answered. She sounded half-asleep and under-caffeinated.
“Hello, this is Mary at Pregnancy Counselling Services, how can I help you?”
“Um, hi. This is Madd-, um I mean Lauren. I, er, just did a pregnancy test and it seems that I’m, um, fairly pregnant.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twen-, um I mean eighteen.”
I told Mary my sob story, although I don’t think she really appreciated the gravity of the Monkey Bar connection. She asked if I had told “Matt”. I said no, and explained about the UniCol slut. She seemed unimpressed, and asked me what I wanted to do about “the situation”. I wanted to yell that obviously I wasn’t sure or else I wouldn’t be calling, but instead said with what I hoped was an authentic crackle in my voice, “Oh God. I just – I just don’t know.”
Suddenly, narcoleptic Mary shook herself out of her Friday morning stupor. I swear I felt her sit up straight through the phone. She trilled, Julie Andrews-style, “Well! Have we got some options for you!” I felt like a prospective Les Mills member being accosted by a Membership Consultant.
The first option was KEEP THE BABY. The second option was ADOPT. These two options were offered in a sunshine-lollipops-and-rainbows-in-the-sky voice. The third option, which was presented in a Vincent Price morgue-voice, was have-a-termination-but-oh-God-why-would-you-want-to-do-a-thing-like-that. Mary certainly had a remarkable range.
The first option, I explained, was probably not going to happen. Shrewdly, Mary moved us on to adoption. Her sales pitch was slicker than an Ab Circle Pro infomercial. After a good ten minutes of listening to descriptions of barren families receiving the child of their dreams I meekly suggested that I was really leaning towards an abortion. She asked if I knew EXACTLY what happened during an abortion. I said, “Electrolux?” She sighed.
According to Mary, during a surgical abortion (the kind I would probably end up getting), the baby’s body is “ripped to pieces”. She warned of infection, of blood clots, of future miscarriages. I said I understood the risks, but I knew Matt-from-Monkey would want me to get an abortion. She boomed, “IT’S YOUR CHOICE!!!” in a tone that suggested that, actually, it was very much Mary’s choice. I hung up in disgust.
Pregnancy Counselling Services’ self-promotion is flagrantly dishonest. Non-profit? Probably, can’t imagine Mary’s remuneration package being too healthy. But non-religious and non-political? Oh, please. PCS is about as non-religious and non-political as Mitt Romney. Particularly repulsive was its presentation of itself as impartial and official; actually it is about as pro-life as, well, Mitt Romney. The website only offers the subtlest clues to the organisation’s real agenda – and picking up on subtle clues is hardly going to be your average fresher’s forté.
Youthline: The last vestige of sanity?
By this point, pregnant-me was becoming more and more confused; I felt like I needed counselling just to recover from my last session of “counselling” with Machiavellian Mary. A problem with information on abortion in New Zealand was becoming apparent: The government info-sheets were a bit dry and thin, but the information from the (closet) pro-lifers was shamelessly emotional. I needed some info that wasn’t filtered through government political correctness or religious extremism. I called Youthline.My Youthline counsellor was Steph, who sounded distinctly like she hailed from the depths of Caversham. Thankfully, that wasn’t the only thing differentiating her from Mary. Steph was funny, friendly and totally seemed to understand how gutted Lauren was when she saw Matt hooking up with the bitch from Unicol. Actually, pregnant-me got the impression she’d probably accept Vodka Red Bulls from fellow freshers too.
Steph explained that having a baby would permanently change my life – which obviously I knew already, but was a refreshing change from the adoption-is-easier-than-Tourism attitude of Mary. She also emphasised that the procedure is free, and that most women feel relieved afterwards. Pregnant-me hung up feeling much better about everything. Even real, non-pregnant me found the chat kind of fulfilling somehow. Finally, someone understood! (Though admittedly what they understood was just a cobweb of lies and shameless cliché.)
Abortion, Free and Easy
After the Youthline call, I abandoned marketing Lauren. Not only had she exhausted her usefulness, I felt I had used the phrases “Monkey Bar” and “Red Bull Vodka” more times in a day than I would like to in a year. But the hastily-conceived character offered me a valuable insight into the process a pregnant woman girl fresher might go through.Abortion in New Zealand is common, and not the politically charged issue it is in the USA. We are lucky that most of the information available reflects this pragmatic perspective. Unfortunately, however, there’s still a thread of crazy that runs through the pregnancy counselling services available, made all the more insidious by the fact that it promotes itself as impartial.
You’d hope that most women would be able to see through the pro-life rhetoric. Then again, you’d also hope that Otago’s female population would realise that a person wearing a short floaty skirt, knitted jumper and ankle boots looks not like Alexa Chung so much as a freshly-shorn ewe with cold legs, and God knows that collective moment of reckoning hasn’t happened yet. Ultimately though, I found the whole experiment in method acting quite comforting. Abortion, and good advice thereon, is freely available to those who need it, which is how it should be. Especially when “those who need it” are Lauren-types who pull at the vile pit of depravity that is the Monkey Bar.
Author’s note: Upon completion of this article I immediately headed to Countdown and purchased several packs of Durex Sensation condoms.
