Rachel Cairns always knew she wanted to have a child someday. But she didn’t start thinking seriously about the particulars—when, where, and how she would afford it—until the instance she chose not to. In 2019, she had an abortion after an intrauterine device slipped out of place and she got pregnant. At the time, Cairns was thirty-one and had been working as an actor and director in Toronto. “My twenties were so career driven,” she says. “I had the choice, but it didn’t feel like one. I peed on the stick and immediately thought, This can’t happen right now.”
If it had, she’d have been financially dependent on her fiancé, Will, who works in waste management in a senior position. The one-bedroom apartment where they live could barely fit a crib, and it isn’t where she imagined she’d raise a child. “Certainly, it was doable,” she says, noting that people parent every day with less. “But it wasn’t what I wanted.” The experience got Cairns thinking seriously about what she hoped to have in place before becoming a mother and how much the idea of choice is intertwined with socio-economic realities. In summer 2022, she launched Aborsh, a podcast about reproductive justice in Canada. The following year, she wrote and performed Hypothetical Baby, a play about the mental calculations that led to her decision not to continue her pregnancy.
