Read What I Thought I Knew: A Memoir for Free Online Page A

Hashanah it is written. On Yom Kippur it is sealed.”
    Aware of my suicidal fantasies, Sue called her well-connected friend Erica, who called her well-connected aunt Charlotte (a chapter president of Planned Parenthood), who called her brother, Erica’s father (a well-connected doctor), who pulled some strings for me to see Dr. Raushbaum, a feared and revered abortion specialist at New York Hospital.
    I go to synagogue two times a year, on Rosh Hashanah and on Yom Kippur. This year I started Rosh Hashanah in the metal cylinder of a CAT scan. I would spend Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement, in Dr. Raushbaum’s office arranging for a late-term abortion. It was ten days after I found out I was pregnant.
    Michael came with me. Seventyish and stout, the doctor sat in an old leather chair at a heavy wooden desk, heaped with unsteady mountains of papers. He chewed on an unlit cigar and inspected us over his beakish nose.
    “Tell me exactly how it came about that you are six months pregnant but you didn’t find out about it until last week.”
    I told him.
    “Your story is remarkable. Your doctors are incompetent idiots.” He leaned over his desk, rolled his cigar around with his tongue, and glared at me. “You’re also an idiot! You were in denial for the past six months. Every woman knows subliminally when she’s pregnant. You must have felt the baby kicking, didn’t you?”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    He dismissed my protests with a snort, a wave of his hand, a roll of his cigar. “Let’s get to the business at hand. Tell me why you requested this urgent meeting on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the day God decides who is and who is not inscribed into the Book of Life. Not that I care, I’m an atheist.”
    “I don’t want to have a baby. I’m depressed and terrified. I had no prenatal care for the first six months, and the baby was subjected to drugs and X-rays, a CAT scan—”
    “Yes, and?”
    “—And she’s a female but she has a penis, and she might have CAH, a fatal salt-wasting—”
    “Yes, and?”
    “—And I’m scared I’ll go into labor any day and the baby will be premature and severely disabled and—”
    “Yes, and?”
    “Why do you keep saying, ‘yes, and’?”
    “Is your life in danger?”
    “What do you mean?”
    His thick eyebrows joined to form one thick line. “I don’t have time for stupidity. Why are you in my office? I can’t legally put words into your mouth. Exactly how depressed are you?”
    “I think about killing myself.”
    “Thank you! I’m sorry you’re so unhappy, but that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Since you’re contemplating suicide, the mother’s life is in danger, which is the only way you can get a legal abortion. Not in New York State, which has no exception to the twenty-four-week limit. You could, however, have an abortion in Wichita, Kansas.”
    I can’t think of a less likely place for liberal abortion laws. I’ve been to Wichita. My very first solo tour, when I was twenty-eight, was two weeks in south-central Kansas. Antigay and antiabortion protesters accosted travelers in the airport with leaflets and recruitment entreaties.
    “In Kansas, if the mother’s life is in danger, an abortion is legal up until the twenty-eighth week. Seven days from today. Do you want me to call the abortion clinic in Wichita right now?”
    I nodded. He called Wichita and scheduled an abortion for Tuesday, in one week.
    “Now it’s in your hands. You can call and discuss it with them. You can think about it for the next few days before you decide. Meanwhile, I’ll get you an appointment with Dr. Carrie Rosenbloom. She is the only doctor you should be seeing for this pregnancy. The best high-risk obstetrician in the country.
    “I already called her. She wouldn’t see me.”
    “She’ll see you, because I’ll tell her to. And let’s get the goddamn penis question straightened out. It’s hard to read a sonogram. It’s a bunch of