I found out I was pregnant a week before taking a trip to Hawaii. When I looked down at the pale blue line I was overcome by something best described as calm distress. I wasn't ready to bring a child into this world. I had been dating a guy for only a couple months at the time and even though he said all the right things I had this urgent desire to become un-pregnant. It was my body and it was my choice.

Luckily for me I have some amazing and supportive friends who helped me figure out what my options were. What I learned: there are two ways to abort. Surgical and medical. Surgical meant you can't swim, and I wasn't planning on cancelling my trip to Hawaii just because I got pregnant. I ultimately went with medical abortion which involved getting an injection in my arm to terminate the pregnancy. The usual method is to take some pills, insert them up your vagina, and miscarry the contents of your womb, but I was stating my trip in a camper van and I didn't want to deal with a lot of blood without easy access to a bathroom so I held off on taking the pills.

The first week of my trip was a breeze but on the first day of week two I started to feel intense cramps and I realized I was miscarrying!! By this point we were staying on a farm on the Big Island which had a bathroom which was helpful because I bled for a couple days.

On the last day of bleeding I found something hard in my underwear. I inspected it and it looked like a tiny kidney bean covered in blood. It was then that I realized I had passed the embryo. I was shocked and a little disturbed. Since I caught the pregnancy early I expected that I would just bleed out an accumulation of cells. No one warned me about the embryo. I didn't look at it for too long before wrapping it in toilet paper and flushing it down the toilet. I didn’t know what else to do.

At the farm there were chickens and we had a fridge full of eggs to use as we pleased. That same morning that I found the embryo, I pulled out a frying pan and cracked an egg. To my absolute shock and horror, the egg was fertilized! I screamed as though I was dying and the farm owner and my friend ran into the kitchen. I shrieked "The egg was fertilized!!!"

The little red kidney bean came back into mind and stayed there for some time. I’m still not sure exactly what the Universe was trying to tell me but I don’t believe it was a coincidence that I had that experience with the egg the morning my abortion completed.

In early 2016, I found out I was pregnant. My partner and I agreed to terminate the pregnancy and within a week of our conversation, I had an appointment. Every step of the way I was surprised by how seamless the procedures were and how not freaked out I was. I'd thought I'd be rife with conflicting emotions. I'd mentally prepared for a hard day… turns out, unnecessarily.

All I felt (apart from the cramps and bleeding) was relief. I had to take a cut to my paycheck that week and had to pay for the procedure, but it was a heck of a lot easier and cheaper than having a baby! If I’d kept it, I’d be a mother now, trying to rush through my Master’s degree on a part-time student salary with a partner whose job takes them out of town every couple of weeks for weeks at a time. No, thank you.

Instead, I spent the day on my couch, passively miscarrying and "up and at'em" the following day.

Months later, I found out I was pregnant again. Time for abortion #2.

My second abortion sent my body through a loop. My body did a full "NOPE" on the Misoprostol (the pills that make your uterus contract and miscarry the embryo) and at my follow-up ultrasound, I saw the little lumpy bugger still hanging out in my uterus. So, I had to do another round of Misoprostol (not fun). Through the two rounds, my emotional brain kept taunting me with thoughts about how I kept getting pregnant for a reason, and the guilt associated with such ruminations: I should have known better; I'm old enough; etc. I had to keep convincing myself it was the right decision.

After the second cycle of Misoprostol, I met the mini-liver-shaped lump on the toilet one day. It was weird to see it there, chilling in my undies. I washed it off and inspected it. There was no humanness to it. Despite its amorphous appearance, I felt weird disposing of it - I wanted to honour what my body had made. So, I buried it in the soil of my apple tree with the promise to be the best mother I can be when the time is right.

I am grateful for being able to defer motherhood. I recognize the privilege in my experience. If I lived elsewhere or didn’t have the money, I’d be a mother (based on pregnancy #1). I don’t know what I would have done...

Thankfully, I safely accessed a couple of abortions and they were not the scary big deal I had been mislead to believe all abortions were.