“I knew what you meant,” I said, and looked away, and wished immediately that I’d been kinder. I felt sorry for this boy, who would get rid of his sadness before he even realized its size, and I felt even sorrier for myself—here alone, with no nervous boy-child wondering what was happening to my body.

I filled out forms: my age, my last period, my method of payment. Did I want to see the ultrasound before the termination? I paused. I checked yes.

I went to the bathroom in the waiting room, which I soon regretted. Later, I had to squat over their plastic cup for nearly ten minutes, waiting for a trickle large enough to stick inside their metal cubbyhole. They took my urine and my blood, and then I went into a small room where a woman strapped a condom onto what looked like a large plastic dildo. This was the vaginal ultrasound, for fetuses so small they wouldn’t show up through the belly. I saw the sound waves resolve into a grainy image on a television screen, the dark jelly bean of a could-have-been against the gray wash of my uterus.

A white-haired woman showed me into a small consultation room. She had weathered skin and calloused hands. Her table was covered with small jigsaw puzzles that showed birth-control methods and the structure of the cervix. “This is your choice,” she said. “That’s the most important thing.”

Her voice was full of pride and fear. She’d fought for all this. She was old enough. And I was the female body she’d fought for—invaded by science, waiting for a pamphlet. Her brochure said: Our Bodies, Our Choices. There was a section called Everybody Has a Choice. Another called Living with Choices. The woman on the front cover was made of orange ink lines. Her sketched eyes were full of hope. She was going to get better.

I couldn’t tell this woman, This is about a man. It was supposed to be about me.

“I’m going to explain the steps of the procedure,” she said. “So you know exactly what’s happening inside your body.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d appreciate that.”

There wasn’t much to explain. Just the things they did: the suction straw they inserted, the cannula, it was called, like a pastry; and how long they did them for—not long, it seemed—to suck everything away; and what they did to make sure I got through it: the sedative first, through a needle in my arm, and then something local into my cervix.