Abortion Rights And My Baby Mama Drama

I have chosen to discuss an issue that I think has been branded so sensitive in the American discourse that it has become almost impossible for a Black man like myself to give it any thought let alone an honest discussion. The issue is about a woman’s right to an abortion.

I was only 19 years old when my girlfriend, Aishah, got pregnant. I am 42 now. It was unplanned. And yes, we understood full well that contraception alone was not a full proof against pregnancy. But as new adults at that stage of our lives we accepted the responsibility that came with it. At least at the time. Our parents got quite involved. She was just as old as I was and a more remarkable student than myself.

I was still working on my undergraduate degree and I was not in the place in life to become fully responsible for a child. Neither did she, I reckoned. I wanted Aishah to abort the baby. But, I would soon learn from my mother and her mother that that decision fully laid in Aishah’s hands, and it had absolutely nothing to do with my conundrum and fears.

But it did.

Aishah, they said, has a right to her body and she was the only one who could make that final decision.

She loved me dearly, for that I would recall, and at this juncture in my life, looking back, I think I loved her much equally, if not more. I cannot claim, however, that once she became pregnant it did not affect our relationship. Our love suffered even more when she decided to have the baby. I learned it was a difficult choice for her, though looking back again, I have to wonder whether the future difficulties in my life, her man, ever so surreptitiously crossed her mind.

She made a huge decision, a sacrifice really, taking a year off of school and having the baby. But once my first child was born, I became fully, a father.

My work week of 35 hours at a campus grocery store and an old bookstore quickly grew into a 55 hour week in order to support my college education and a new life. I scavenged for any hours I could add on, as well. The reality of fatherhood soon became a nightmare.

But I completed my degree, with distinction, and I started my own business once I fully became aware that the jobs I had been promised by America were nowhere to be found. Perhaps I am a bad job applicant? When my friends and I were labeled ‘lazy,’ by Bill Cosby and his entourage then, calling us loiterers around Harlem without a college education, it was still much easier to find a job to settle in quickly on Lennox Ave. and 125th St.

The higher you go, my grandmother would retort whenever I came home dejected, the tougher it becomes – to breathe. I took a painful look in the mirror at 24, and realized I was Black, and a Black man at that, and I was never going to get that job. I rose and fell, and finally, having been choked out of looking for something more befitting my intellect and education, I settled down with my old boyhood friends for whatever we could get.

Aishah soon completed her nursing program and found a hospital that paid her a sum much more than I could possibly earn. My own business suffered with the recession of 2008. The frustrations in doing business from home and the long hours that Aishah had to spend at work to make ends meet, became a source for an unhappy outgoing. Her trek to work and my insistence on staying close to my only way of making a living imposed untold hardships on our lives.

Long story short, we separated and she has moved on with my lovely daughter, who I am able to see every weekend. It is now painful for me to think I wanted such a lovely soul to be aborted in the first place. But I think I have moved on as well.

However, I have had to relive that moment again. Tanya, my partner, with whom I had planned to spend the rest of my life got pregnant. She planned to spend the rest of her life with me just as much as I do, though she sees it a little bit more differently. I will explain. In any case, Aishah may have left a little bit of a bad taste in any decision I might make concerning marriage. I love Tanya dearly.

When Tanya became pregnant, I very much wanted her to have the baby. She saw it differently. She decided to abort what could have been my first boy. At least that’s how I saw it. Her reasons?

The “I love you,” but I don’t think we are ready for a baby by Tanya stung me much deeper than Aishah’s decision to keep her baby when I was 19.

So why was I left out of both choices? Are women supposed to independently make decisions that do not independently affect their lives? When Aishah decided to keep her baby, she did it for her, not for me, nor for us. When Tanya decided to abort, she did it for her, not for me, nor for us. Both of which I have fully become angrily aware.

The idea that a woman must make the final decision, because it’s her body sounds sexy – I have defended that premise for long – but what about me?

After my daughter, with Aishah, grew into a toddler, my business suffered, perhaps because of the recession in 2008. I became extremely frustrated. Aishah and I separated, that too affected me in more ways than one. I was still required to pay child support though I still took on rent and bills meant for two working adults. I downsized immediately. That helped some but not much.

The fact that – because of Aishah’s decision to have our daughter in my sophomore year – I have had to work more than 55 hours a week while still completing the last three years of college ground me into emotional and psychological pieces. I was fatigued. Starting my own business did not make life any better.

In that conscious effort to make ends meet and several attempts to keep a family I loved, I made some mistakes. I have done time in prison for driving a friend’s car that had a gun in it. I needed to drive across town for a meeting with an investor. I lost my own care the year before. I never made that meeting. I finally had the meeting with a few old folks from high school who were already stuck in jail, for absolutely no law enforcement reason.

Are some of my mistakes in part my fault, as in impregnating Aishah, and having a baby I never planned for or budgeted for? Are some of my mistakes partly due to my dire need to support a new family? Yes! Most of all, the over-policing of Black men in America in the name of a war on drugs affected me most. There was no reason, on God’s earth, why my car was searched that day.

I believe I would have made different choices in life had Aishah factored into her decision, my concerns – difficult but real concerns either way. It’s painful to mix my only daughter with a word like abortion, but I find it more painful that we continue to have this conversation about women and abortion as if women exist outside of a community, a relationship, a family.

When Tanya decided to abort my baby too, I was distraught. On two occasions my concerns were never on the table. I wanted this child. I already had one, I love her dearly, and I want another, nonetheless.

Plus, Americas mass incarceration of Black men, like myself, has bestowed the biggest burden on me and the vast majority of the community I live in. I can’t really see my daughter as much, since by virtue of being labelled a ‘criminal’ now, the American system has found all kinds of ways to legally discriminate, in full regalia, against me – against anyone labelled a ‘criminal’. Not to wander into why non-violent people, like myself, have to suffer this sort of oppression, but the effects of America’s so-called law enforcement and the so-called war on drugs has taken again from our communities what it never allowed us in the first place – true liberty.

I have tried to come to terms with the trajectory that my life has taken since Tanya took off to have an abortion. Could it have been better? Absolutely. Two things – I think had my concerns been elevated to a considerable rung in the hierarchy of factors considered by Aishah, my life could have taken another trajectory. A better one perhaps?

I feel confident, that if American institutions had delivered on the promise of an egalitarian and meritocratic society irrespective of race, I would have become a formidable father for my daughter. I wouldn’t have lost Aishah to another man, and I certainly wouldn’t have tolerated some of the suffering that my first family endured.

Had I been factored into Tanya’s decisions, I would have perhaps acquired what resembles a family in the American sense of the concept. The Tanya decision also affected our relationship. Why wouldn’t she want to have a baby? Did she not love me as much as she claimed?

My grandmother, who hails from New Orleans, and who still holds on dearly to what remains of our African traditions in America, told me recently, “abortion is not African, but if a woman must absolutely go through it, she must go through it with all the family – the man, his family, the woman, and her family. It must not be just her, because in the end no person exists as an island. Your problems are my problems. That is the only way to ensure a more informed outcome.”

I see why, clearly!