The Word She Searched
Masha Sedgwick was a student in 2010—at least one part-time job, a relationship that had been quietly unraveling, a life in mid-chaos—when she held a pregnancy test and watched both lines appear. She described the moment in her podcast MatchaLatte with a precision that made it feel immediate: Everything inside me was screaming No. No. No. No. I don’t want this.
She’d barely survived a bad car accident not long before. The relationship was ending even if nobody had said so out loud yet. And now this, on top of everything else. She went online and searched a single word: abortion. That evening she told her partner. He was, she said, simultaneously disappointed and relieved—a combination she recognized in herself too. We simply weren’t ready—and what I’d maybe already sensed: we never would be.
She made the decision. Afterwards came relief, and pain, and something grief-adjacent she hadn’t quite expected—not regret exactly, but the awareness of a door that had briefly stood open and was now closed. What remained was a desire for a different future, one where she chose to have children from a place of intention rather than accident.
None of this is statistically unusual. In Germany alone, nearly a hundred thousand abortions were registered in 2015, the majority among women between eighteen and thirty, more than half of them unmarried. The numbers are large enough to stop conveying anything. What Masha did—sitting with a microphone and saying plainly "I was pregnant, I ended the pregnancy, here is what it felt like"—is rarer than those numbers should make it. Abortion is still treated as a confession in most social contexts, something requiring justification and the right circumstances before you’re permitted the decision out loud.
The shame mechanism is exhausting to watch from any angle. You make an intimate decision about your own body and your own life, and then spend years calculating whether you’re allowed to say so, and to whom, and in what tone, and whether your reasons will be judged sufficient. Masha chose to say it plainly, without mitigation or apology. That’s not nothing.