My Cat’s Abortion Made Me Pro-Choice
I was an unwanted pregnancy. That isn’t unusual considering over 3 million unplanned pregnancies occur each year. What was unusual was the frequency at which my religious, unwed mother would over-explain how premarital sex is a sin and my conception was not a part of “God’s perfect will.”
I vividly remember her kneeling before me as she tried to explain her single mother status.
“Mommy, where’s my daddy? Do I have one,” I asked.
“Yes honey, you do, but he isn’t here because mommy made a terrible mistake and sinned. God only wants married people to have children, and mommy disobeyed God by having you.”
“Why? Why did you sin and make God sad?”
Cue more tears as my mom was slut-shamed by her three-year-old child. Even after my mother married a wonderful man and had a few legitimate children, she was adamant in making sure we all knew premarital sex was the biggest sin one could commit. We were raised to be righteous children of God.
Part of righteous living was suffering the consequences of your sins, including not having abortions. I remember my pastor preaching fiery sermons about evil women who would get abortions, punishing their unborn babies for the sins they had committed. How you describe a child as both a sin for being born out of wedlock and the miracle blessing of God in the same sermon is beyond me, but I haven’t reached the level of enlightenment as some of my fellow Baptist church members.
By the time I entered college, I was a raging pro-lifer. I had every argument prepared: It is sin, my tax dollars shouldn’t pay for murder. The Illuminati use the fetuses to keep celebrities young. Thankfully, I attended a small liberal arts college, and being surrounded by heathens 24/7 softened my hard, unrelenting stances. However, my view on abortion did not change. No circumstance made the killing of an unborn life okay. Until I met Matilda.
Matilda was a small, six-pound black cat that came under my care senior year. Despite not being allowed to have pets on campus, the lib(eral)s had taught me how to lie and be deceptive. I successfully hid her for months in my apartment, and she became my closest and most beloved companion.
A month after I adopted Matilda, one of my close friends commented on how big her belly seemed. I was already aware and was worried that maybe she contracted worms or I was feeding her too much.
“Naw man,” my friend laughed. “That cat is pregnant.” I blinked a couple of times. It was utterly impossible that Matilda would have gotten the chance to get knocked up under my care.
I had gotten Matilda from a woman who was getting a divorce. The poor woman’s husband had bought her a cat as a last-ditch effort to save their relationship. As cute as the cat was, it was not enough to save their doomed marriage, and the woman was all too eager to dump one of her husband’s idiotic grand gestures on me. I remember visiting her house to pick up Matilda’s stuff and seeing that the cat was allowed to roam the streets as she pleased, like a tramp.
I was still mostly sure that my cat had worms, so I booked an appointment with a local vet to get her checked out. The veterinarian, a silly older gentleman (who definitely wasn’t worth the 95 dollars the visit cost) told me she looked perfectly healthy and was pretty sure I had nothing to be concerned about. He was woefully incompetent because three weeks later I visually confirmed Matilda did in fact have worms and had to pay for another visit and prescription.
When I further questioned him about the size of Matilda’s belly, he snorted. “If she’s pregnant, you’ll know in the next two months for sure. My advice is to just wait it out.”
I was frozen. Cats have a gestation period of about 63–67 days. I was only two months away from graduation. If she was pregnant, I would be stuck with a litter of kittens who would need to stay with their mom for two months before I could find them proper homes. My parents were NOT on board with letting me move home with kittens, and it would be significantly harder to hide a bunch of kittens in a 100 square foot apartment.
The vet’s assistant took pity on me. Maybe she knew her boss was an idiot, maybe she saw the panic in my eyes. After he left, she leaned over casually. “You know, your cat needs to be spayed. We do that for a really good price, and if you do it soon, we can take care of anything unwanted.”
My poor brain couldn’t handle what was happening. Was this woman offering to help get my cat an abortion? I didn’t even know that was possible. Since the vet hadn’t confirmed she was pregnant, no one would be liable if they proceeded with spaying her and found something there. I knew I was in the south, but this backwater coat hanger solution being offered to me just seemed like too much. I practically fled the clinic with my poor cat.
Matilda is a very small cat, and as I read up on cat pregnancies, I began to worry about if she could even handle the pregnancy, especially since I was away in class so often. As well, as exciting as having 3–8 kittens around might sound, I had nowhere to keep them. I was a broke college student feeding my cat dollar store Friskies; I couldn’t begin to imagine the cost of kittens.
As an older, more responsible cat owner, I am 100% against people owning any animal before they can truly afford the responsibility, but at the time, I was a dumb kid who had accepted the responsibility of owning an animal without truly understanding the cost. And now that animal’s pregnancy had completely thrown a wrench in my plans.
So I did the unthinkable.
I called the vet back and scheduled to get Matilda spayed. In my mind, I didn’t even know if she was pregnant. For all I knew, she was a fat, overfed cat, and I was paying for a necessary procedure so that future scares didn’t happen. When it was time to pick my kitty up, the nurse handed her over with instructions for post-op care and a higher bill than anticipated.
“There was a little extra there,” she said sympathetically.
“Oh yeah, turns out she was pregnant with five kittens,” the moronic vet chimed in.
Cold water was dumped on me. I had just paid for and condoned an abortion. And not just an abortion, the abortion of *kittens*. Jesus, Mary, and PETA forgive me. The animal rights activists, not to mention God, would never forgive me. I’m not ashamed to say I cried for three days straight. Every time I would look at my cat, the tears would start anew. I wondered if she knew what I had forced upon her. Did she know she was going to be a mom and looked forward to it? Was she blaming me for taking away her babies? I know she blamed me for the stitches she kept trying to rip out.
I had a friend who joked with me relentlessly for the sin I had committed. They thought I had made the best choice based on my situation and that my guilt was overblown.
I realized my guilt went beyond the fact that I had kept five kittens from seeing the light of this world; I had betrayed my values. It took weeks of wrestling with what I had done before I saw the truth: I didn’t actually feel bad. I felt like I *should* feel bad.
My entire life I had learned that life was sacred, and that I didn’t feel more guilt for my actions plagued me. Simply put, I wasn’t ready for kittens, and my vet had safely taken care of the matter. Matilda was perfectly fine and still seemed to love me. She was healthy and safe. The only thing holding me back was how I chose to look at the situation.
The entire ordeal completely changed my view on abortions, and I am now squarely pro-choice. After all this, I finally understood the value of women being able to choose for themselves what they want to do with their bodies. I also understand the economic and personal reasons why going through with a pregnancy and putting the child up for adoption might not work for everyone (the most popular pro-life argument).
Life is sacred, yes, but we’re allowed to control it when it enters the world. Women should be able to make the best choices for themselves and their future without shame, and with as much support and compassion as we can provide.
It just took me paying for an illegal cat abortion to understand that.