Facing My Second Unwanted Pregnancy I learned I was pregnant for the second time in the 86th Street subway station. This was before cellphones. I exited the train at 5:28; the clinic closed at 5:30. I called from the pay phone on the platform, my finger pressed against one ear as I strained for the news. "Positive!" the nurse at the other end kept shouting, while I refused to understand. Two years earlier, pregnant by a husband I did not love, I opted to terminate - first the pregnancy, then the marriage. Ardent for reproductive choice, I failed to anticipate the grief I would undergo in the aftermath. Nightmares stalked my sleep. I swore never to repeat the procedure. But here I was - single, barely scraping by in Manhattan and pregnant. The first time, the error was the diaphragm, two sizes too small. This time, a condom broke during my first intimate encounter with an older guy who was happy to squire me around New York but would have fled at news of a baby. I was well educated, liberal, feminist and rational to a fault. But when I dragged myself home from the subway, I called my New Age friend Nancy and asked her for "the recipe." Nancy had told me that there was a way to induce miscarriage using herbs. Miscarriage seemed more natural than an abortion, like something that just happened to you, not something you chose. The next day, during my lunch hour, I picked my way through melting piles of dirty snow to a Wiccan shop in the West 20s, off Ninth Avenue. In the back, from a rotating stack of hooks, I plucked one dusty envelope of herbs after another. Goldenseal, black cohosh, tansy . . . the list went on. The guy at the counter, a skeletal figure with a goatee and a shock of black hair, took one look at my choices and averted his eyes. The tea I made, according to Nancy's instructions, tasted like hot mud. I had to drink it three times a day on an empty stomach. It was a foolproof recipe, Nancy had said, though one woman she knew took three more months to miscarry. "But it wasn't alive in her," Nancy said. It hadn't been alive for awhile. I brought the herbs and an immersion coil with me on my Christmas visit home, where everyone consoled me on my divorce and wanted to know about my exciting new life in Manhattan. I avoided the nuts and eggnog and slipped away to my room to make and drink the tea. I was drinking death, I told myself. I felt death working its way through my stomach, into my veins. No one knew what these herbs really did. If they killed me as well as the fetus I was carrying, maybe that was the consequence I needed to face. Who was stupid enough to get pregnant twice in as many years? Who was too stupid and obstinate to take advantage of the abortion services we had all worked so hard to make legal and safe? Me, that was who. In my journal, I wrote letters to each member of my family, to my close friends, to my ex-husband and my current lover. This brew might kill me, I confessed in the letters, and I was sorry, and I loved them. A week after returning to New York, I stopped drinking the tea, per Nancy's instructions. Two weeks later, I came to my senses. I made the appointment at the clinic. The doctor squeezed my hand after the procedure was complete. "It's O.K. now," he said. It's over. It wasn't over, of course. Deep in my throat, all these years later, I still taste that tea. Its remembered tang is the sour end of regret, the underside of choice. Like Stephen Crane's desert creature, I find myself savoring it, "because it is bitter, and because it is my heart." Lucy Ferriss is a writer in residence at Trinity College. Her latest novel is "The Lost Daughter." E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.