had to change. I had to change was the thought that drove me in those months of planning. Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be — strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.

It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament' was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn't going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn't tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn't [positive].

[on his ex-wife's abortion] Has anyone had an abortion? You're all rapt with attention now, all of a sudden, so I assume you all have. It's a fucking horrible thing to go through. And not horrible in that "Oh, it's a living thing, what are we doing?" Fuck the living thing. A genital wart is a living thing. If it's gonna irritate you for life, burn it off, right? Bladder cancer is alive and growing like a baby in you. If you try to remove that, I'll protest you and say "stop playing god." … Before you actually go and get all quiet and pissy like I'm some asshole about this, keep in mind I'm just telling you the parts that I think are funny. You don't know the reason we had... The reason we had an abortion was... It wasn't because... It wasn't frivolous. We didn't have an abortion because we weren't ready to take care of a child, we were irresponsible, or because we're not financially capable of taking... The reason we had it is 'cause I really wanted to see what it felt like to kill a baby.

It was the thing that had grown in me that I’d remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

By the way,” I said, “I wanted to tell you — about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced. I was married and not long ago I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died — she was only forty-five and she got cancer suddenly and died. It’s been a hard time in my life and I’ve sort of gotten offtrack. So I …” He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. “I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here.” I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I’d let so many tumble out.

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

I had been pregnant in the sixties, and at nineteen years old had had an illegal abortion that probably influenced the messy state of my reproductive organs. For the next nineteen years my priority was to finish my education and pursue my career. Now I couldn’t take my fate: You’ll never have a baby. That was the sentence handed to me. I began to beat my fists against a door that maybe I had locked on the other side.

I was told I couldn’t have kids and so, I had to have a hysterectomy (removal of the uterus) to have a life again and to stop going through what I was going through. I’m literally telling women and men, it really doesn’t matter if you can’t bear children. What really matters is what you would do for the world, for the universe.

I’d made the arguably unreasonable decision to take a long walk alone on the PCT in order to save myself. When I believed that all the things I’d been before had prepared me for this journey. But nothing had or could. Each day on the trail was the only possible preparation for the one that followed. And sometimes even the day before didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.

I felt my life needed a shake-up.

You should think about your character. Know where you are changing, how you will be changed, what cannot be changed back again.

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education.

I was a whole new human being, he said of this transformation. I liked people, they liked me. It was like an exorcism, kicking the devil outta me!

A watershed in my life was getting divorced in Puerto Rico—that was my second marriage—and leaving Puerto Rico to become part of the women’s movement. In my formation as a professional, there was always a kind of pressure to deny or not use a lot of your personal experience. The science of medicine, to some degree, negates the human, feeling, experiential part of it. But I was now discovering a whole other world out there through my personal experience of a deceptive marriage. That triggered quite a bit of growth in me toward understanding what happens internally to people, what happens in their lives and what they can do or not do…So I went back to New York and I got very involved in reproductive rights. I began to join in the women’s movement. At Barnard College there was a conference called the First International Conference on Abortion Rights that was attended by a few thousand women…We organized one of the first consciousness-raising groups of Latino women…A number of incredible things emerged from women talking about their experiences…We shared and we became very bonded. That was the beginning of my identification with women’s issues and reproductive health.