The final days of Ramadan this year felt different. I carried a subtle, heavy certainty that life was about to shift. Deep down, I knew that I was pregnant, yet I was trying to delay the test for as long as denial would let me. Even before I missed my period, I could have told you something had fundamentally changed, but with each passing day, the feeling solidified. It wasn’t until a late iftar party towards the end that I finally found the courage to face the truth. Within seconds, reality snapped into focus: I was very much pregnant. The stick confirmed what my body had been telling me, and the stick did not lie.

That evening, my husband and I sat suspended in a complicated mix of emotions. A flicker of excitement existed – this was a completely novel experience – but it was swallowed by anxiety. The timing felt relentlessly wrong.

Our marriage was hanging by a thread. We were both unmoored: his career in limbo, my own ambitions shifting, debt climbing, rent rising, and the world outside steeped in conflict and precarity. The idea of bringing a child into that world felt both miraculous and impossible.

We spoke late into the night, wrestling with what it meant to carry this pregnancy to term and what it meant to end it. Though we both agreed that a child wouldn’t fix our relationship, my husband feared that an abortion would end ours altogether. We picked apart how this news landed for each of us individually, for us as a couple, and what it would take to truly support each other through a decision that felt intensely private yet profoundly political. Is having a child a viable choice when every system seems to punish children and their parents?

The next twelve weeks are a blur, mostly defined by the logistics of appointments and a suffocating silence. We kept the news entirely private for the first two months, which meant the pregnancy existed solely within the confines of heavy, fleeting conversations between my husband and me. While it remained at the forefront of my mind, I would go about the large majority of my day procrastinating all pregnancy-related thoughts. Every therapist session became an audition: could they make sense of two people breaking while something inside me was just beginning? Should I carry the pregnancy, letting the future unfold by trusting in a divine plan, a kind of spiritual rebellion against the rising tide of a liberal fatalism? Or should I end it and reclaim a sense of control over what felt like decades of life spinning out of control?

The weight of deciding alone crushed me. I was torn between the urge to confide and the fear of igniting premature joy and possible judgment. The part of me that searches for religious meaning didn’t simplify any of it either. It simply lived alongside the confusion, another thread in this knot I was trying to untangle.

On paper, I checked off all the boxes for a ‘good’ pregnancy. My support network fell into two wildly distinct camps: one faction loudly convinced the world was too broken to responsibly bring children into it, while the other only saw the singular, uncomplicated joy of a baby. At one point, my husband and I came to the conversation with written “pros” and “cons” lists, determined that logic would make the decision. That, too, failed.

Unable to find space for my own complicated truth, I found myself speaking with women whose relationships to motherhood stretched across the entire emotional range. I started reaching out to people I knew only peripherally, and to strangers. The personal, so quickly, became universal. I found the most honest and clear takes on online forums and subreddits, in the social commentary where women, behind the veil of anonymity, finally spoke their difficult truths, and the vicious, funny, terrifying, and tender opinions of everyone about everything.

All around me were women grappling with emotions that felt illegal, faithless, and uncultured. Women raising children they deeply wanted, women who loved their kids but quietly regretted what their lives had become, women whose children had died and who lived with a grief so unnameable it resisted language, women who ended pregnancies and felt relief, women who made the same choice and felt guilt or shame, women who miscarried and still weren’t sure what they were meant to feel, and women who didn’t know how to categorise their experience at all. I wanted to understand how any of us are supposed to make a decision that every script insists has only one correct answer.

How do you choose when the world refuses to admit that the choice exists?

And once the decision is made, what does the aftermath actually feel like, in the body and in the soul? That, too, failed. I just felt a much heavier appreciation and sadness for the ways in which women keep showing up, no matter the weight that they’re holding.

In so many ways, I had rare rights. I have wonderful health coverage in a country where prenatal care is a punishing financial hurdle. I lived in a state that afforded me the time to process the decision without being rushed, a geographic lottery. My OBGYN was a quiet anchor, informative yet profoundly empathetic, helping me explore every angle of my choice. She reiterated that I could take as much time as I wanted, and when I made the choice, she, as my medical professional, was here to ensure the delivery of the fetus or the baby was handled in the safest way possible. Choice is not the opposite of constraint; it is its most complicated form. To have options is a privilege; to bear their consequences alone is the price.

It was an enviable position of agency, one that few are afforded, and the weight of that freedom sat heavy. Thousands of Muslim lives were being extinguished overseas, while Islamophobia continued to grind constantly at home. The pregnancy itself felt like such a fragile gift, but slowly it also began to feel like a quiet act of resistance—a whisper of survival against the tide. The screams and cries of mothers in Gaza trying to hold onto their babies, feed them, and keep them safe are mental images etched deep into my conscience. And here I was wondering whether I could afford to bring a child into the world. I felt incredibly guilty to have the choice, along with all of the privileges, and let go. My fears felt small against the vast scale of suffering, yet they were real, etched by the same systems that determine who gets to live safely, and who never had a choice.

Then, on the eve of my 30th birthday, the decision was made for me. I began to bleed – first a spot, then more – and within hours, the pregnancy ended. Even in loss, I was lucky. It was quick, natural and safe.

In that instant, a strange, overwhelming relief washed over me. I felt like a different person. The impossible decision had been made for me; I had somehow regained control without having to reach out and seize it myself.

An OB would later tell me that it was my body protecting me, knowing that it was something I did not want. It felt like an answer from Allah ﷻ, a moment of personal, quiet intervention in a life dominated by decisions. For the first time in months, I could breathe. It felt like mercy.

Exhausted, I slipped into bed, surviving the rest of the evening by bingeing an entire season of Is It Cake? My husband was away, and I didn’t ask him to come home. I only asked for one thing: a real cake because that’s all I craved. Strange, in retrospect, the hunger for something so associated with celebration. There was no ritual, no mourning; just exhaustion and a quiet, guilty gratitude that I hadn’t been forced to choose. He delivered, coming home with six different slices from some of our favourite places across the city. Almost in full circle, we sat eating multiple flavours of cake slices late into the night.

The shift in my mood was immediate and radical. I went from a week of intense anxiety and depression to suddenly feeling like anything was possible, a temporary lifting of the immense emotional burden of the future. I finally called my mother, telling her in the same breath that I had been pregnant and that I was likely miscarrying. The following day, I started telling everyone else – my siblings, my closest friends, my boss and colleagues at work. It was so easy to share the news of the miscarriage. The pregnancy was no longer a secret, no longer a heavy question mark permanently attached to my body, but a contained event. For the first time in 12 weeks, it was just me and my body; I felt free.

What followed in the quiet moments of the following week, in which I worked from my bed, was a strange harmony of relief and grief, each rising and falling in its own rhythm; a relief loosening the grip of fear, grief threading itself quietly through the spaces it opened. Whenever the relief settled, I found myself remembering the smaller moments where excitement had crept in, feelings I hadn’t acknowledged before. I locked into the ultimate millennial reflex: to data-mine my emotions, to translate randomness into reason. One in four of all known pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. Still, when I asked my doctor why, she could only offer a kind but firm answer: some things just happen. My support network reminded me I couldn’t have known, but logic rarely wins against emotion. Part of me tried to accept that as faith, part of me resisted it, unsure where trust in Allah ended and the fear of not knowing began. The lack of medical knowledge was glaring; research would not be so shockingly thin.

Internally, the weight of what happened was crushing. I started to blame myself fiercely: I hadn’t been grateful enough for a gift so many longed for. I wasn’t “woman enough” to handle the simplest biological task of holding a child – an old, suffocating, gendered expectation that has survived centuries. I was so disillusioned with the modern pressure cooker that I felt relief when I should have felt devastation. I moved through my days seemingly unchanged, yet underneath, I carried the weight of centuries of expectation: that womanhood is endurance, that motherhood is destiny. I knew these thoughts were irrational, but rationality did not matter.

Where science failed, patriarchy, in all its forms, filled the gap, providing more than enough space for guilt and blame.

At a summer community event, every conversation circled the same themes: marriage, children, milestones. I was firmly “no-kids” then, and certain motherhood was not for me. People read grief in my face, in my silence, and in my hesitation, but what I felt most was an untapped peace; an unexpected clarity about the life I already loved. I loved my freedom, my work, my quiet routines, and the version of myself I had fought hard to become. I loved the life I had so painstakingly nurtured. Recognising why people choose a life without children felt natural; what proved harder was releasing the grip of other people’s interpretations.

Fertility, I realised, is treated as public evidence of progress. Aunties offered prayers for “good news.” Friends with toddlers alternated between exhaustion and recruitment. My husband mentioned the miscarriage to an auntie mid-conversation, using it as an escape hatch from the usual interrogation. My mother’s reminders grew gentle but insistent: try again. Each inquiry carried an assumption: that motherhood was inevitable, that delay was deviance, that choice must always end in motherhood. The pressure wasn’t overtly cruel, but it was always there, in the unspoken words and actions of everyone around me. Saying not now felt almost heretical. I was called selfish for not wanting children, though no one could name a selfless reason for having them.

My certainty existed in tension with a world that refuses to take such choices at face value. The difficulty to hold onto my truth when everyone tried to translate my decision into something they could live with was really hard.

Yet amid all that noise, I still carry my own quiet contradictions. It’s a strange, profound burden to have held a secret that was, for a time, both more and less important than my job, my debt, my future, or even the headlines I follow so closely. I may not want to, but I was listening, constantly wondering if I was being naive, would I regret this? The months since the miscarriage have been about putting the pieces back together, about thinking of where I want my life to go from here. There are days when I believe the relief I felt was the truest reflection of my heart, and days when the sheer absence of that little life is a hollow ache in my arms. Because I didn’t really make “the decision,” I often find comfort in handing that responsibility back to Allah; He intervened when I couldn’t. That relief is a flicker of my trust; the knowledge that I wasn’t abandoned when I needed Him and didn’t have the strength to face this alone, and reminding me that whatever comes next will be met with the same care.

Months later, the strangest echo of the pregnancy arrived in the mail. Thick envelopes of formula samples, baby-product coupons, and post-partum deals piled up – a consumer machine acting on data points already obsolete. I don’t remember giving out my address, but there it was, delivered to my doorstep. I left them unopened for weeks, a small shrine to what wasn’t, before bringing them to the local masjid. In a country where formula is a daily worry, the irony of abundance felt absurd. Those envelopes made it clear; even the possibility of motherhood had value to someone. Not as care. Not as a community. But as commerce. I was a sales opportunity.

It’s only now, so many months later as I write this, that I feel like I want to be a mother one day, selfish in the same way all deeply personal desires are. I want one, not because it serves any larger purpose or meets anyone’s expectations. I’m not sure why: it could be desire, it could be spite, it could be conformity, it could be boredom.

If the decision is mine, the selfishness is mine too, and that feels honest. I wasn’t cornered by circumstance.

Amidst the constant burden of negotiating the space between the personal cost and the public expectation, I have the right to self-determination. A right that millions of women globally and increasingly within the US are fighting for: the ability to decide when, how, and if we become mothers, free from external force.

That certainty is fragile; I may change my mind again. It bends under the noise of a world that continues to insist on answers: When will you try again? Don’t wait too long. You’ll change your mind. Sometimes I catch myself half-explaining, trying to prove that my timeline is part choice, part chance, and not something I can tidy up for someone else. Other times, I simply smile and let the silence stand. I used to think motherhood was a deadline, a box to tick off the list. Maybe I will become a mother. Maybe I won’t. What I understand now is that it isn’t a prize or a punishment. It’s a possibility, and for the first time, I’m not afraid of wanting it and not afraid of walking away from it either.

Hurra

The Privilege of Not-Choosing: Grief and Relief in a Broken World of Miscarriage