In quiet moments, her mind drifted to an upcoming European skitrip.
Peagram had just gone through a bitter breakup.
On that winter nightmore than a year ago, unloading on an old friend felt good.
A fewglasses into the evening, her friend confessed that he worried hisrecent wedding had been a mistake.
“I told him it wasfirst-year-marriage syndrome,” Peagram says.
She offered him somearmchair psychoanalysis, and talk turned back to old times.
“What did Ido?”
“Why didn’t we date?
I just realized you are the one girlI always had fun with.”
To break up the awkwardness, she ordered another round.Before she knew it, they were kissing.
“He went from friend to loverover intoxication,” she says.
“I made a stupid judgment call.”
She opened her eyes at daybreak to sheets so radioactively white theycould only be hotel linens.
“My mind started racing,” she recalls.
“I’mnot on the Pill.
We hadn’t used a condom.
What am I going to do?”
Shehad stopped using birth control pills after her last relationship.
Shewasn’t having sex; plus, she liked not having to remember to take them.
She stared at her friend’s naked back; he was still lightly snoring.
But before long, she missed acouple of periods and some days woke to bone-splitting fatigue.
Still,the symptoms were easy to rationalize for a sworn vegan training for amarathon.
“On my vacation, I missed my third period,” she says.
“In my heart, Iknew I was pregnant.”
That wasn’t her only problem.
The day she returned to Chicago, Peagram took a home pregnancy test.
Shewas crying even before she went into the bathroom.
She saw the lines:positive.
Each test gave the same answer.
Divorced and 42, her timeseemed to have expired.
Yet here was her little sister, pregnant,jobless and eager to find a way out.
“For once in my life,” Peagramsays, “I felt like a failure.”
This isn’t supposed to happen to smart women.
We want to believe thatunwed mothers are teenagers who have been careless or clueless.
“It’seasier to coalesce around this idea that it’s not good for teenagers toget pregnant.
It’s not as clear what pregnancy means for the life of awoman in her 20s.”
For some women, surprise motherhood ends up being the blessing of alifetime.
Others choose abortion with no regrets.
Then SELF sat in on focus groupsas young adults talked about sex and contraception in candid detail.
For starters, we found that single women are much less savvy about birthcontrol than they think.
Nearly half of survey respondents said theydon’t seek out information on preventing pregnancy because they knowenough already.
Why no urgent need to be informed?
They’re not really trying, but they’re not really not trying."
Nine months after anunplanned birth, 29 percent of women report frequent conflict with thefather.
These facts are often contrary to expectation.
“They see pregnancy as something that occurs or doesn’toccur, not something consciously chosen.”
“You tend to see a heaping at 1, 5 and 10,” Finer says.
Somewomen are thrilled, some are horrified, but about a fifth are a mixtureof both.
“So they take the risk.”
And magical thinkingthat a pregnancy might lead to a marriage proposal makes the stakes feellower than they truly are.
She believed that ababy, if one came, wouldn’t do anything to harm their relationship.
“Ithought I really knew him,” she says.
Recently divorced, Edwards was enrolled in cosmetology school in SouthCarolina at the time.
Her boyfriend was in Detroit, her hometown, butthey saw each other as often as they could.
But they grew more cavalier astime passed, and she stopped taking the Pill during the months theyspent apart.
“I felt like if it happened, it happened,” she says.
“Thiswasn’t a man I didn’t love.”
One night, Edwards had a strange dream that she had twin boys.
Shecouldn’t stop thinking about it and soon took a pregnancy test.
When shecalled to tell her boyfriend the test was positive, he was upset.
Theybegan arguing, both on the phone and across text exchanges.
“I trustedyou,” he messaged her.
She resented the implication of his words.
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she replied.
“I’m sure you knew when you were ovulating,” he texted.
“I’ll come down there and holdyour hand,” he offered.
Even if she could goback and do everything over again, she insists, she would still havegotten pregnant.
“But I definitely would have done it in a betterrelationship,” Edwards adds.
Still, researchsuggests these women do face hurdles to health and happiness.
These exposuresincrease the risk for low birth weight and cognitive and physicaldefects.
Numerous studies link unplanned births with economic hardship andinterrupted education.
Women withunplanned babies also report becoming severely depressed one third moreoften than women with families they planned.
“It’s not that the childrenare automatically unloved,” Brown says.
“It’s that the environmentthey’re born into has more stresses.”
“I was so lost,” says Hannah, who got pregnant at 25.
(Her name has been changed to protect her confidentiality.)
“Everything was just taken out from under me.”
“I just didn’t see a future for us,” she says.
Now they were having a baby.
How could this be?
A few weeks earlier, shehad forgotten to take her pills for a couple of days.
She did what shealways hadtook the pills she missed and assumed (erroneously) she wascovered.
Hannah, who grew up in a devout Catholic family, kept the baby.
She took her finals when she was nine months pregnant.
When the baby arrived, the commute and classes became overwhelming.
“I love my daughter and would never trade her for anything,” she says.
But the National Campaign survey reveals disturbing gaps inpregnancy-prevention knowledge.
Twenty-three percent ofwomen falsely believe that taking birth control pills raises the riskfor all cancers.
Half ofwomen have done sonot a stellar showing, either.
“Buteven if somebody had fantastically complete sex education in 10th grade,now they’re 25 or 35.
They don’t have that information at theirfingertips, and some of it has changed.”
In Chicago, Kortney Peagram wasn’t going to allow one wrong turn to ruinher life.
Hetold her he would stand by any choice she made.
With no job, she couldn’t evenafford to buy health insurance.
Peagram knew this is why she had been avoiding hersister.
Kim suggested that Peagram spend therest of her pregnancy in Orlando, where she would cover the medicalcosts.
“I love you, Kortney,” she said, and they hung up.
Peagram clutched the phone and stared into the darkness.
I’m in ifyou’re in."
Jack Edward Peagram arrived on September 21, weighing 7 pounds 4 ouncesand sporting a full head of hair.
He was delivered straight into Kim’sarms.
“I didn’t hold him,” Peagram says.
“I’ve never loved anyone like Ilove Jack, but I’m not his mom.”
When he is older, Peagram says, “we’regoing to tell him the truth.
We’re going to tell him I carried him andthat he was chosen.”
But hewaived legal claim to his son, never wanting so much as a photo.
“Thatgot too hard for me,” Peagram says.
“There was so much baggage betweenus.”
For now, though, she’s backon the Pill and takes it daily, without fail.
“I want kids,” she says.
“Next time, I will be prepared.”
Photo Credit: Levi Brown
