The Obligation to Hedge
Merritt Tierce didn't get to choose an abortion when it was safe and legal. Pretty soon, no one else will, either.
Last December, writer Merritt Tierce published a remarkable personal story, “The Abortion I Didn’t Have” in the New York Times Book Review reflecting on being nineteen in late 1999 and unintentionally pregnant. Raised in an Evangelical Christian household, Tierce admits that her pregnancy was a complete surprise to her; she was smart and gifted, and she knew having unprotected sex with a friend could lead to pregnancy. But obtaining contraception would have meant planning to have sex with the friend she slept with—planning to sin. Easier to tell herself they would never do it again. The friend, similarly raised, had more serious intentions with her. They kept trying not to have sex, and failing. “We needed to believe we were good more than we needed to protect ourselves,” Tierce writes. It’s an interesting glimpse into how ideology prevents access to contraception that is otherwise readily available. “I never decided,” writes Tierce. “I never chose.”
For a young woman like Tierce, abortion was out of the question. But this was neither 1971 (prior to Roe Vs. Wade) nor, ahem, 2023, in which we can now reasonably predict a post-Roe future. Tierce was pregnant right smack in the middle of the years we may soon look back on with profound regret for what we lost. A time when, as Tierce describes elsewhere, most people’s abortion stories were non-compelling, five-minute procedures in the 1st trimester. Abortion was safe, legal, obtainable for young women like Tierce, too. It was also unthinkable. Stunned and broken by the choice she did make to carry her pregnancy to term, Tierce found herself married to the friend who’d gotten her pregnant and ensconced in young motherhood with a baby she didn’t want.
With the help of the children’s father, whom she divorced after a year, she raised her now adult son and his younger sister lovingly and responsibly. She makes clear, though: had other options been available to her and had she known better, she would have chosen differently. What’s more, she quite openly mourns the loss of the implied future she never got to experience, that of a gifted young woman with romantic notions of an intellectual life who had planned to attend Yale Divinity School.
Mothers aren’t supposed to tell those kinds of truths. Perhaps that’s why the article sprawls a little, at 7000 words. Like a tongue that keeps probing the space in the mouth where a tooth had once been, Tierce keeps circling back to her explanation: she does love her son, and of course she agonized before publishing a piece that could hurt him. But she resists the “false correlation” between documenting the trauma of an unplanned pregnancy and the fact of her smart, funny, handsome son being in the world. As much as she loves him, she had wanted and expected her life to be different.
Now that Tierce has some accomplishment under her belt—an award-winning novel, writer for the TV show “Orange is the New Black”—she says she is a much better parent to her two children. She found her way to different dreams, and she got to choose them.
What about that abortion—that once-upon-a-time safe, legal, affordable procedure that remained out of reach to Tierce due to ideology alone?
The confessions of a woman who regrets having to raise kids before experiencing personal fulfillment may sound like the perfect occasion to break out your tiny violin. Still, the author has clearly touched a nerve. Tierce’s honesty about the “over promoted narrative” that being someone’s mother is its own fulfillment went viral, garnering responses in the millions. And although Tierce wants to make very clear that she, herself, no longer feels ambivalent about motherhood, her experience taught her not to judge the many women who do. She feels an“obligation to hedge” on behalf of women who got suckered into believing that motherhood was supposed to be enough, women who can’t help but imagine what could have been had they chosen otherwise.
This is tricky territory: refusing motherhood is one thing; regretting it when you made the choice to become a mother is entirely different. Just so we’re clear, nowhere in her piece is Tierce asking for our sympathy. The author is a long-time abortion-rights activist who, after her son, had a daughter she planned for and two more abortions. She just wants women to know that she gets it—that she, too, mourns what might have been, and she mourns the ideology she was raised within that prevented her choosing.
But isn’t becoming a reluctant mother only half the story in a piece titled “the abortion I didn't have”? What about that abortion—that once-upon-a-time safe, legal, affordable procedure that remained out of reach to Tierce due to ideology alone? And what about that ideology, which has now spread like a cancer to the lives of women who were not raised like Tierce was raised, who do not believe what her people believed, and who would quite freely choose both abortion and Yale Divinity School over parenthood?
In her moving piece, Tierce rails about the ideology of Evangelical Christianity that entrapped her but not really against it. She mourns compellingly for her own missed opportunity, but she forgets to mourn for the era in which abortion was a choice for other women, even if wasn’t a choice for her.
That era will likely be over soon.
Still, I greatly appreciate her phrase, the “obligation to hedge” because I see it as part of the practice of indeterminacy. It means taking a moment to imagine another person’s experience beyond the fog of whatever form of ideology compels you. It means remembering that anyone’s certainty of perspective is necessarily incomplete. Just imagine if the “obligation to hedge” happened as a matter of course with all of us. At the very least, it should happen when exalted people in black robes gather to hand down decisions that affect the lives of those who may never have the choice Tierce did.