Getting An Abortion Helped Me Survive My Abusive Partner

The author with a splint on her left pinky finger, attempting to socialize a few weeks after her ex broke it. Photo Courtesy Of Sarah Hanson

The FBI uses something called a “lethality assessment” to predict the likelihood of future violence in intimate relationships. 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.

Advertisement

At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become. Besides, I was well-trained in ignoring red flags. I grew up in a chaotic household, walked carefully through the hallways of my father’s anger, his mood a thermostat nobody could regulate. As kids, my brothers and I blistered in the heat of his rages, we shivered in the absences of his affection, we breathed as softly as possible in between.

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.

The rest of it — being shaken awake in the middle of the night to resume an argument, the plate of pancakes thrown so hard against the wall the syrup stain s