Earlier this year I posted the above photo on Instagram for my best friend Katy’s birthday, with this caption:

This hot B had a birthday last week, but since she was in the middle of buying and selling houses and spending quality time with her family (which was NOT part of the original agreement when I benevolently gave my permission that she could get married), we haven’t been able to celebrate it yet. So instead, I’m just sitting here, looking at old photos of the two of us while I listen to Shania Twain, which sounds way creepier when I write that out…??

Love you, Katy - you’re still the one I run to, the only one that I belong to, you’re still the one I want for life (even though you’re married to someone else, which again, I was FINE with!!!).

What I had wanted to write was, “I was going to take Katy to Mexico and get her pregnant on her birthday, just like she did for me when this photo was taken…” …which I still think is a legitimately funny line, but I figured that maybe that wasn't the best way to publicly “out” that particular story. I also wasn’t wholly ready to talk about all that yet.

But today I am, because people who have uteruses are currently facing the biggest threat we’ve seen in the last 30 years to the rights won by Roe Vs. Wade, and I’m tired of staying quiet or ashamed about a choice I had every right to make for myself and my future.

In 2007, my oldest friends Kimmy and Katy took me to Puerto Vallarta for my 28th. It was my first real “girls trip”, and my first actual vacation to Mexico (I had been there a few times already, but for Habit-for-Humanity-like volunteer trips). Even though they had found an amazing deal, I was so broke that there was no way I could have gone if Kimmy hadn’t paid for my flight and share of the room. I was working full-time as a behavioral therapist at a clinic for kids on the spectrum, but was making so little money that there were countless times I had to call in sick because I couldn’t afford the gas it would take to get me to work and back that day. Part-time, supplementary jobs weren’t really an option, because I already had a hard enough time just holding down one job, much less the energy and emotional health to balance two jobs. My on-again/off-again boyfriend Hansel had died only a couple years prior, and I was still massively struggling under the heavy weight of it; not a single day went by that year when I didn’t still cry about it.

One of our new friends sporting a woodland creatures speedo

But when you’re about to go on a girl’s trip to Mexico, all of your struggles at home are suspended. Thus, Katy and I giddily left the frozen tundra of a Minnesota February and met up with Kim at the airport in Denver. When we finally landed in Mexico, the three of us were greeted in Puerto Vallarta by perfect weather and ocean views. Not 24 hours later, we were all fast friends with a hilarious crew of handsome dudes from Toronto who arrived at the pool in speedos that had been arts-and-crafted to look like woodland animals. One of the guys, Jason Blue Eyes, was pretty much the hottest man I had ever seen up close. He was also quiet and reserved in a group of VERY outgoing dudes, though, so I didn’t pay much attention to him until we started flirting at a club later that night. I made some kind of smart remark; he pulled me into a gentle, teasing headlock; and the next thing I knew, we were back in his hotel room, where I had the first and only one night stand of my entire life.

On my birthday.

Whilst on a beautiful tropical vacation.

With one of the hottest guys I had ever met in my entire life.

“Pretty sure I just got pregnant,” I announced to Katy and Kim, afterwards. Katy laughed, then looked at me. “Are you serious?” I slid into my bed and waved her off, signaling that I was just joking, but it was one of the clearest psychic moments of my life: A repeated truth with every step from Jason’s room back to my own. “You’re pregnant, you’re pregnant, you’re pregnant,” the voice repeated, as my sandaled feet slapped against the shiny white tile. I kept trying to argue with it, deny that it was even possible, but it was the same voice that had told me my high school boyfriend was going to break up with me when I arrived home that one summer night back in high school; and it was the same voice that declared Nate was going to marry Heather when I stood in the doorway and watched Juj announce that Nate and Heather would be program directors together that summer. And now here it was again, rising up like a whisper at random moments throughout the rest of the trip: “You’re pregnant, you’re pregnant, you’re pregnant.”

Our girls trip in Mexico came to a close: We wrote goodbye notes to the guys from Toronto, thanking them for showing us such a fun time; then we boarded our flights for home. Kim flew back to Chicago, and after a canceled flight and a night in a Denver airport hotel, Katy and I eventually made it back to Minnesota, where a winter storm had brought mountains of snow and record-breaking, freezing temps. I’ll never forget that night as long as I live: Katy rushing us through the night-time traffic, anxious to get home and be alone on her couch in her nice two-bedroom Eagan apartment…me pulling away from her apartment building in my freezing, beat-up car with the poorly taped-up, smashed-in back window to drive back to the also-freezing unfinished basement in North Minneapolis where I lived, dreading the return to my sad, dark, broke life.

The nights turned sleepless as I stared up at the wood beams of that unfinished basement ceiling, my hands tucked under my body so I wouldn’t be tempted to place one on my lower abdomen as I prayed and prayed and prayed for that voice to be wrong, for my period to come. Any little thing would have me jumping up and racing to the bathroom, hoping to be giddy with relief at what I might find. I had never been great at tracking my cycle, because that felt like a thing that only women who wanted to be in their own bodies did, but I had come to recognize a few markers that it was on its way. The absence of those signals was starting to make my stomach clench with panic.

Then one Sunday, while shooting an episode of Chasing Windmills in a downtown sushi restaurant, my friend Jen and I tried a saki martini while we waited for our next scene to set up. When I began to feel sick later that evening, after the shoot, I tried to convince myself that it was the martini . But by the afternoon the next day, that terrible, ever-constant, low-grade nausea still hadn’t gone away, and I knew that the morning sickness had begun. I drove to a local drugstore after I got off work and finally purchased a pregnancy test.

When the pink lines showed up, I threw the stick across the room as if it were on fire. Then I sat and sobbed into my hands for what felt like hours. I texted Katy. I’m pregnant, I told her. I’m coming over.

“You have the worst fucking luck of anyone I know,” Katy declared, as she slid into the passenger side of my car. I laughed in agreement, and then I started to cry again. Everything in my life at the time felt like it came with some terrible consequence. I mean, who goes on a tropical vacation for their birthday, has the only one night stand of their entire life with a gorgeous stranger, and gets PREGNANT from it???

Apparently, I do.

We drove to a local bar & grill and discussed what I was going to do. This is usually the part where you would expect me to go into the long, agonizing struggle it took to finally decide to get an abortion, but the truth is, I knew I was going to terminate the pregnancy the second I knew I was truly pregnant. I firmly believe that the only reason anyone with a uterus needs when it comes to having an abortion is “I was pregnant and I didn’t want to be,”; but for the sake of this sharing moment, I will tell you that my reasons were this: I was poor and severely depressed. I could not adequately take care of a child at that time in my life. I was also unwilling to put myself through even more inescapable trauma by carrying it to term and then putting it up for adoption; with my mental and emotional health already being what it was, I knew deep down that I likely wouldn’t survive something like that.

So I made the necessary appointments; ate saltine crackers at all hours of the day; gave friends and family veiled reasons about why I was so sick; and sold coworkers and bosses a half lie about why I needed to take more days off work. Katy came with me to Planned Parenthood, where everyone was so nice and lovely it made my insides ache. Then I laid on the green couch in that dark basement and suffered through two of the most physically painful days of my life. Because I was anemic, there were also complications, which I never told anyone about. I just went through all of it with the same numb, tunnel-vision focus that had gotten me through similar terrible situations. I wouldn’t allow myself to cry about it, because I was afraid that if I did, I would just melt into the ground and never get back up; I wouldn’t let myself think about any of it, either, telling myself that I just had to face what was right in front of me and then I could think about it later if I still wanted to.

Because, while I knew that my decision was the right one for me, I did and still wish that I would’ve been able to have made a different one. I wish I had been more financially secure and emotionally stable. I wish that I hadn’t been too ashamed to turn to my parents for help. I wish that I had known how to track down Jason Blue Eyes from Toronto so that the whole miserable experience could have somehow turned into an ultimately adorable, real-life “Knocked Up” scenario. I wish I could seen the results of that pregnancy test and felt joy and excitement instead of horror and then numbness. I wish that, instead of it feeling like just another one of the horrible things that had transpired during that decade of my life, that it had been a miracle, a blessing, a gift.

And I know that some will be mad at me for being honest about that, because we all know how forced-pregnancy advocates love to take any hint of “yeah, so this was kind of hard” and use those admissions as an argument for why people with uteruses can’t be trusted to make the right decisions for themselves and their own bodies. But I want to be clear as a bell: I do not regret the fact that I did and was able to have an abortion. It was and still is the best decision I could have made for myself at that particular time in my life.

This was the night in Mexico when we learned that just because a hot waiter offers us shots, that does not mean that those shots are free!!!

And I know this is such a wild concept to so many people, but even though my body contains the necessary structures with which to birth a child, I still have every right to plan my own life and decide what’s best for my future. I get to make mistakes and go wild on a girl’s trip and have sex with a hot stranger and then have an abortion when I decide I’m actually not ready to be a parent, and all of that is fully within my right as an autonomous adult and is literally no one’s business but my own. And that is all because I am a viable human being RIGHT NOW, and NOT an Earthen vessel, and therefore MY living, breathing ACTUAL life is worth way more than the merely-perceived life potential of a fetus.

And I literally can’t even believe that we’re still arguing over this fact, fifty years later, on Capitol Hill and in the Supreme Court.

You don’t have to agree with any of my decisions, but no one is ever going to make me regret my abortion or shun the woman I was then. I kept this a secret from so many people in my life for so long, because I didn’t want to hurt my family, and I didn’t want to take the chance of others judging me or looking at me differently. I’ve kept a lot of secrets because of those two things, actually, but now I won’t anymore. You can reject me all you want, but I’m never going to reject any part of myself or my life ever again.

A few months ago, I made a point to enlarge and frame that very top photo of Katy and me and hang it in a prominent spot in my home. I did that because I’ve gotten enough distance from that time to realize that the Amber in that photo is me, but she’s also an entirely different person. The things she was already going through when that photo was taken…I probably couldn’t go through them again. So I’m proud of her and the decision she made, because she knew how much it was going to hurt, but she did it anyway. She knew she needed to do it if she was going to have any chance at an actual life…not just an existence of mere survival, but a life. She gave me a chance at life. And I’ll never stop thanking her for that.

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