What it’s like to cover abortion while pregnant: ‘People saw me as a container for a child’

‘Every person I report on is as complicated as me.’ Illustration: Chantal Jahchan/The Guardian/Getty Images/Poppy Noor

I was six weeks and two days gone when I found out I was pregnant. I had just gotten back from covering the US midterms in such a sickeningly frantic way that I hadn’t had time to think about the changes going on in my body, but the signs were there: a creeping nausea that felt like seasickness, breasts as sore as swollen pimples, sheer exhaustion that willed me into bed for three days upon my return.

I had reasoned this was a normal response to a week spent shuttling across hundreds of miles, working 21-hour days on the abortion beat in the fury of election season.