"When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become."
"I had only been dating my partner a few months when I got pregnant, mostly long-distance at that, so I had only caught glimpses of the behavior that would later become all-too-familiar: the demanding voicemails, the incessant texts, the accusations followed by silence, then the extravagant flowers, and long, poetic apologies that sounded just sincere enough to make me believe I could rewrite the ending to this story."
"But when I saw the second line on the pregnancy test strip, faint but visible, a voice inside me said: No. You cannot have this baby. You cannot bring a child into the same chaos you had to survive. I was 25, in graduate school, unsure if I ever wanted to be a mother at all. But this was different. Not ambivalence; a warning."
An FBI lethality assessment given after leaving a partner scored him 8/10 and would have been 10 if the pregnancy had continued. Five years earlier, a medication abortion ended that pregnancy. Early warning signs felt like a faint unease rooted in childhood experiences of a volatile household. Dating revealed controlling and inconsistent behaviors: demanding voicemails, incessant texts, accusations, silence, and performative apologies. Physical escalation — being shaken awake and an object thrown — occurred later. A visceral, internal certainty at the pregnancy test led to the decision not to continue the pregnancy to protect potential offspring from the chaos.
Read at HuffPost
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