Multiple Choice for Expecting Parents

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I was 20 years old. The space shuttle had just blown up, killing all its passengers on national TV, and I'd been bleeding for almost a month. I didn't feel well.

I got my mother to take me to a clinic in town. While she paged through old magazines in the waiting room, I went through the gamut of tests. The doctor told me that I'd tested positive for pregnancy. I started to cry.

"I don't know if you're happy, or sad," he said, almost as if he expected a reply.

I had a year and a half of college left. I'd just returned from a semester in Avignon, where I'd fallen in love with a Greek student. Dealing with birth control in a foreign country seemed daunting. With Mediterranean machismo, Dimitris had warned me about his particularly potent seed; he'd already impregnated his Greek girlfriend twice. But I was living my life like an art house movie, taking risks in Europe that I would have taken nowhere else. I was a fool. I wasn't ready to be a mother, and I couldn't imagine Dimitris as a parent, either.

Late at night, I sat on the porch steps, smoking cigarettes and imagining what that baby would look like. I hated the idea of abortion, but the other options were even more terrifying. If I ever got pregnant again, I decided, married or not, I would give birth.

My mother made an appointment for me with an obstetrician. He told me that if I lost much more blood, I would need a transfusion. He recommended a D&C. He never suggested the possibility of saving the life inside me, and thus the decision was taken out of my hands. He wouldn't verify that I was actually pregnant; the tests were inconclusive. Even so, the procedure went down on my medical records as a "partial abortion."

Thirteen years later, I'm lying on a table with my feet in stirrups and an IV dripping into my vein. It's winter and darkness has already fallen outside. Three days before, in this same room, five eggs were extracted from my ovaries with a needle. They were placed in a petri dish with my husband's sperm. Four have been successfully fertilized. The doctor is about to implant the eggs in my womb.

Somewhere between my semester in France and marriage in Japan at the age of 27, an infection wreaked havoc on my reproductive system. After a series of tests, I found out that my fallopian tubes were blocked, and in vitro fertilization was my only hope of getting pregnant. So here I am, on my back, legs splayed.

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