babies and all that shit

They put a rod in my arm, a blue rubber thing that was all full of hormones that would definitely, they assured me, stop me making babies. It was the most effective way, and the least distressing way for the woman. To be honest though, there wasn’t very much choice. The woman was showing me a leaflet about contraception, about all the different methods. There was the coil, or the IUD, which obviously had not worked in the past. There was the pill which I would, I knew, consistently forget to take, and the injection which I had heard caused osteoporosis and blood clots and other such awful things. I expressed these concerns to the family planning nurse and she told me that she wholeheartedly agreed. There was though, a new thing on the market, which had been around for about six years. It was the single most effective contraception there was, and there had never, she gushed, been a pregnancy on it in Scotland. I read the leaflets briefly, and took them away with me to think about. It had, of course, all the usual side effects; sore breasts, mood swings, acne and so on and also stated that once it is put inside your arm, it is sometimes difficult to remove. But that was all, I told Rikki, my boyfriend, pleased: “I’m not bothered about it being hard to remove, cos I don’t have to go back for three years. That’s a long way off having to take a pill at the same time every day”. My friend Michelle had had one in her arm for a year and a half and said it was fantastic. “You don’t get periods!” Well, I mean, that was that. My periods had lasted anything up to a week and a half with the coil and I had hated it, hated being heavy and bloody and sore, and quite often smelly. I wanted never to have periods again. That’s what Natalie at work said too, that the implant was amazing because you don’t get periods. “It makes you go slightly crazy sometimes though,” she said, “like, doing mad stuff occasionally, but Rikki will just have to deal with that”. So I phoned them up. The clinic, I mean. And I made an appointment to get it put in my arm. I was a little nervous when they gave me the anaesthetic, but that’s mainly because I really don’t like needles. I looked away though, and I looked away when they put the rod in. I had a bandage on for a day after it, and it grossed me out because underneath the stitches my skin had wrinkled and I worried that it wouldn’t go away, although it did, in the end. But of course, its kind of disgusting because you can feel the rod underneath the skin, and after two days I learnt that if I bashed it accidentally then that’s when I would go crazy for a day or two, but hell, just for my piece of mind it was going to be better. No more babies for me, I hoped.

















“Did you never wonder what you would have called her?” Baby Bridget, I had thought, baby Bethany, baby Britney, baby Bother, baby I did not fucking want you. Hell no! Of course I hadn’t fucking thought of a name for it. Why the hell would I. “Sometimes.” I gazed ‘wistfully’ into space as I said it. People don’t understand, you see, that I just didn’t want it. They don’t understand that I’m not upset, that I don’t care, and never did care about it. If they did understand that I didn’t give a shit, then they would never understand why. Its taboo, you see. Not wanting your own child. Killing your own child, for fucks sake. I’ll not deny it has messed me up, that I don’t forever contemplate the question of divine justice in a new light, from a fresh and terrified perspective. I mean, I fucking murdered my own goddamn child. Of course I do, its pretty much the worst thing I could have done. I’d never thought all that much about ‘God’ before, and hell and heaven and shit like that, but it’s inescapable after an act like this. I’m under no illusions about what I’ve done, and I wasn’t when I was doing it either. Some people say its not murder, because its not alive yet, because its still a foetus, and some people say the mother is the most important one, because it is her body. All that is bullshit. Of course it’s fucking alive, it’s a child, it exists so it is alive, and therefore when you kill it is murder. However, abortion should be legal because the baby is the mother until it comes out of her body. It’s not separate, but is part of her body and hers to do with as she will. However, this does not make it a commendable act to do, perhaps it is even an evil one, but it does make it her right, her decision. She will live and deal with the consequences. And that is exactly what I am doing. Your life changes after you realise that you have done something really bad.
When you realise that you have committed a Sin.
I mean, you hear about sin all the fucking time – it’s overdone all the time, constantly preached by the fucking Catholics, the proddies, whatever, by religion in general. Hell, I’m living in sin and I’ve slept with a woman (I’ve kissed about a hundred), I swear and I curse and I can be really mean to people. I’ve taken drugs and I’ve cheated, I lie and I’ve stolen, really, there hadn’t hardly been a sin I hadn’t committed. But I’ve done them all now, all Ten Commandments. Straight down to the tenth level of hell, the fiery abyss. That’s what I mean, what I’m trying to get across, that you only realise what sin really is once you have committed one. Those things I just said, I mean, they’re not really sins. Murder. Now that’s a sin. When you take someone’s life you can’t go back, even if I did want to, and a part of you dies with your victim, and is lost from your life anyway.