The FBI uses something called a “lethality assessment” to predict the likelihood of future violence in intimate relationships. When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10.
But we didn’t have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I’d had a medication abortion.
At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become. Besides, I was well-trained in ignoring red flags. I grew up in a chaotic household, walked carefully through the hallways of my father’s anger, his mood a thermostat nobody could regulate. As kids, my brothers and I blistered in the heat of his rages, we shivered in the absences of his affection, we breathed as softly as possible in between.
I had only been dating my partner a few months when I got pregnant, mostly long-distance at that, so I had only caught glimpses of the behavior that would later become all-too-familiar: the demanding voicemails, the incessant texts, the accusations followed by silence, then the extravagant flowers, and long, poetic apologies that sounded just sincere enough to make me believe I could rewrite the ending to this story.
The rest of it — being shaken awake in the middle of the night to resume an argument, the plate of pancakes thrown so hard against the wall the syrup stain stayed for months — was still in the future.
But when I saw the second line on the pregnancy test strip, faint but visible, a voice inside me said: No. You cannot have this baby. You cannot bring a child into the same chaos you had to survive.
I was 25, in graduate school, unsure if I ever wanted to be a mother at all. But this was different. Not ambivalence; a warning. A hard stop. A knowing that came from somewhere deeper than thought, a place in me that could sense the danger long before I could articulate it.
Two days later, I lay on the clinic’s white butcher paper and listened as the doctor said loudly that she was legally required to perform an ultrasound, then leaned in close and whispered that the law did not require me to look.
I swallowed one pill at the clinic and slid the other in my pocket for the following day. My mother made the six-hour drive to stay with me; my partner did not. I told myself that I only had the one air mattress anyway, that my one-bedroom apartment wasn’t set up for multiple guests, but his absence was the first glimpse of how lonely and isolated I was about to become.
Photo Courtesy Of Sarah Hanson
The next five years unfolded in an escalation that is glaring in hindsight. I finished my graduate degree and moved home, ending the distance between us and lighting the fuse on a long burn of degradation, isolation, abuse and control.
When my diploma arrived in the mail, I sent him a text message that I wanted to go out and celebrate. He took a second shift at work instead, and shoved my diploma in a dresser drawer. When I got a promotion, and then another, within a year, he drank himself into surliness both nights.
There was so much alcohol then. We lived in a house filled with more liquor bottles than water glasses, drowning in the hazy sense that neither of us were going to be able to keep living like this.
That his rages were predictable did not make them less terrifying. Something would aggravate him — traffic, a toothache or too much noise. He’d fixate on it, working himself up, voice raising and arms flailing, and my job was to guess whether he wanted to be calmed down, or whether he wanted to be amped up and affirmed.
I rarely guessed right. The nights would go rapidly downhill, lubricated by vodka tonics and shots of tequila, until either his yelling or my sobs woke the neighbors.
In the morning, I might find an apology note on the counter, or I might find the remnants of a fight still strewn about like tragic confetti. One morning, as I left for work, I found a picture of my face taped to the top of his punching bag.
In spite of all this, I was working on a plan to get him to marry me, so that I could fix all of the chaos with my love. We had an engagement ring made out of our grandmothers’ rings, and I imagined myself marching grimly and steadily toward the aisle until I heard the same voice again: No. You cannot marry this man.
All of a sudden, I could see everything clearly. The tipped over vodka bottles empty on the kitchen counter, the small shards of glass under the refrigerator from the picture frame he’d recently smashed, the unfamiliar bend in my left pinky finger where he’d broken the bone and then kept me from the doctor for three weeks.
He told me he would drink himself to death if I left, and I believed him. For a long time, that belief kept me there. I also desperately wanted to believe that I could save him, and change the story of my childhood in the process. But eventually, the fear that he would kill himself was overtaken by the fear that he might kill me, too.
One night, I shoved two suitcases into the back of my car, scooped up both cats and drove away while he screamed after me from the driveway. To stop my hands from shaking, I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my fingertips turned white. I looked in the rearview mirror only once; he had gone back into the garage, and was tearing signs and posters off the wall and throwing them to the ground in a rage.
The next morning, when I returned to the house for the rest of my things, I found the loaded gun on my pillow.
That was the day I took the FBI assessment.
Studies have long shown that the moment a woman tries to leave an abusive partner is one of the most dangerous times in her life. Research on intimate partner violence consistently identifies separation as a period when threats intensify and the risk of homicide rises. In the United States, about one-third of women who are murdered are killed by a current or former intimate partner, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Pregnancy carries its own set of dangers. Intimate partner violence can begin or worsen during pregnancy, and homicide is now recognized as a leading cause of death for pregnant and postpartum women in this country.
People who work in domestic violence advocacy understand what the data makes plain. Leaving is rarely a single, courageous act. It unfolds through a series of calculations that can mean the difference between survival and harm. Women weigh the likelihood of retaliation, their access to money and other resources, whether they can leave without being tracked and move through the world safely.
When children are involved, escape becomes far more complicated. Custody agreements, court orders and required contact can bind survivors to their abusers long after they have fled.
Photo Courtesy Of Sarah Hanson
I think often about what my life would look like if I had not had an abortion years ago. If I had carried that pregnancy to term, my ability to leave later would have been severely limited. Financially, emotionally, logistically and legally, my options would have narrowed. I would have had less freedom to move and a far higher level of risk. I would have likely remained connected to a dangerous man through custody arrangements, shared expenses, mandated interactions and the constant need to anticipate his moods.
I would not have been able to load two suitcases and two cats into my car and leave. When you try to escape an abusive relationship with a child, there is no clean exit. There is an ongoing entanglement that can last for decades.
That reality has taken on new weight in a country where abortion access is rapidly disappearing. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, tens of millions of women of reproductive age have found themselves living in states where abortion is banned or heavily restricted. In states with abortion bans, domestic violence programs have reported new obstacles to safety planning, including an increased number of pregnant clients who cannot legally end a pregnancy and must navigate abuse while carrying it to term.
Advocates have documented reproductive coercion for years. It includes sabotaging birth control, refusing condoms, and pressuring women to stay pregnant in order to increase dependence and control.
In the current legal landscape, those tactics are reinforced by policy. While courts long ago rejected spousal notification requirements because of the danger they pose, abortion bans, mandatory waiting periods, travel requirements and criminal penalties now function as restraints that limit mobility, delay care and make leaving an abusive situation far more dangerous.
When lawmakers restrict abortion while claiming to protect families, they are also expanding the power of abusive men. The consequences are not abstract. They play out in the bodies and lives of women whose ability to escape harm has also been restricted by law.
The truth is painful and simple: I was able to escape because we did not have children. He didn’t leave a note when he left that handgun on my pillow, but his message was clear: me, him or both of us. The FBI assessment confirmed it. If we had children, the danger would have extended to them, too.
Nine years after I left, his body was found in the same house I had fled. He died by suicide, a gunshot wound.
In another version of this story, there is a child, a custody battle, visitation exchanges and years of court-mandated contact that keep me within arm’s reach of danger. In yet another version, I do not make it out at all. There are two bullets instead of one, because I never find the means to leave.
I’m alive today because I wasn’t in the room when he finally pulled that trigger, and because five years earlier, I had the legal right to decide my own future.
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
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