I Was Told I'm Pregnant. Then I Found Out It's Likely Cancer — And I'm Actually Relieved.

d3sign via Getty Images I sat in stunned silence staring at the ER doctor trying to process what she had just said. The following day at my doctor’s office, she agreed that she can trace my menopause back seven years, and yes, I’m still “pregnant” via urine test. They would be detecting a pregnancy that is just hours or days old, so unless I was drugged and raped, it’s something else ― most likely ovarian cancer. You could be a scientist working on treating or curing COVID, a Supreme Court justice, a student, a cancer patient, a woman being beaten within inches of her life on a weekly basis, a trans person mid-transition ― it doesn’t matter: You are expected to birth a child whether you can or not, whether you should or not, whether you want to or not, and whether you consented to or not. Cancer might be fatal, but during my heterotopic pregnancy it only took four weeks after conception for my fallopian tube to rupture, causing internal bleeding so badly that doctors couldn’t see my organs because of all the blood spilling into my abdomen.