No one at my job knew I was pregnant. No one at my job knew when I wasn’t anymore.

To be fair, very few people in my life knew I was pregnant because I very much did not want to be. The situation was incredibly complicated. How does someone pop up pregnant at 40 after barely being able to get pregnant in their 30s when they desperately wanted to have a baby?

I was never one for tracking my cycle, but when I woke up one morning with sore breasts. I did some light math and realised I definitely should have had my period already.

“There is no way. No fucking way,” I muttered to myself.

One pregnancy test later and I guess there was a way. I spent a week hoping to see blood when I woke up every morning. Hoping that this was all a bad dream. That never happened. It was all very real.

It took me what felt like an eternity to make a decision. It wasn’t like I was 20. I was a 40-year-old woman. I was already a mum. I mean, really, what’s one more child? But, I knew there was no way I could bring a baby into the world – not for me, and not for them.

During those two gruelling weeks, I was having a conversation with one of my best friends when she said something I’ll never forget: “You know, it’s OK to choose yourself.”

So, I made an appointment with my OB-GYN. Since I was really early on in my pregnancy, I was a candidate for a “medical abortion”: mifepristone followed by misoprostol. All I had to do was go home, pop some pills, wait a day, pop some more pills, expel tissue and stop being pregnant.

I was moderately scared of the process. But what scared me the most was the idea of slowing down. I didn’t have the luxury of taking a day off; I barely had the luxury of a decision.

And if I’m being honest, I didn’t think twice about taking those pills with a full workday ahead of me. After all, I had to get through the bulk of the bleeding in time to pick my kids up from school.

So, on the day I had my abortion, I logged onto Zoom. I smiled. I nodded. I answered emails. I scheduled meetings. At some point, I said I might need to turn my camera off for a bit because I wasn’t feeling well.

If you want to talk about an out-of-body experience, try managing a team while your uterus contracts, and you’re flushing your foetus down the........

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