The year was 1983. I was fifteen years old. My friends and I were sitting in the bleachers, which was where high school students ate lunch at our school, since the cafeteria wasn't big enough for all the students. There were five of us, three boys and two girls, sitting in a rough circle, colorful hardcover books spread out on the bleachers around us. Periodically one of the jocks sitting higher up in the bleachers would peg one of us in the head with a peanut M&M, but we ignored them. We were far away in another world.

Today, we were staying in an inn. The handsome gentleman who had played my friend and I against each other, finally choosing me over her and leading me back to his room, had turned out to be a vampire. My loyal (despite our romantic rivalry) half-elven cleric friend had suspected foul play and followed with the other two friends, a dwarven fighter and an elven mage. The three of them had come running in response to my screams, but the ancient vampire had proved too powerful and well-prepared for them. I was the last person left standing, as he advanced towards me, trembling in my nightdress.

"I still have spells prepared," I said. "I'm going to fireball him."

"You carry your spell components in your nightgown?"

Our dungeon master, a scrawny, buck-toothed, but utterly charming boy who made no secret of the fact that he was praying for my current boyfriend to drop dead, was a stickler for the rules.

"Maybe I was expecting a situation like this..."

"Maybe you weren't," said my best friend, laughing.

"Okay, describe the room again," I said. There were windows on one side, a door on the other. I was trapped in the corner, backed up against the fireplace.

"Is there something like a stake in the fireplace?  A piece of firewood?"

"It would count as an improvised weapon. You're a wizard. And it would be on FIRE. If there even is such a piece of wood."

He made up a number, a random chance that there was a sharpened stick of about the right dimensions among the burning logs. Rolled. There was. I lunged for it, grabbed it. He made me roll not to drop it from the pain of grasping the burning wood. I made the roll.

"This is so stupid," he said. "There's like, zero chance you can just rush at a vampire and stab him through the heart with a piece of firewood. I should just kill you all and make you reroll characters."

"Give me a chance," I pleaded.

"All right. One in a hundred chance. Roll percentile dice. No modifiers, because the whole situation is absurd. On a natural one hundred, you can stab the vampire."

And I did. And the dice clattered, and spun, and we all leaned forward to see:   two ten-sided dice, each with zero uppermost. Or, in percentile dice terms, one hundred.

I thought about that roll later the next year, when I missed my period. I was the sort of person who read things, so I had dutifully read the little paper insert which came in my fake leather "wallet" of pills, all of it, down to the fine print about weight gain and blood clots. The pamphlet explained the odds of getting pregnant while using the Pill versus other kinds of birth control, per sexual encounter and over a period of a year. Then it explained the risk of death using each method, versus the risk of death from complications of pregnancy.

I don't remember the exact numbers now. I do remember that the Pill was less likely to kill you than being pregnant was. That mostly everybody got pregnant within a year of having unprotected sex. That condoms, as used by the average moron, were surprisingly ineffective and the rhythm method, backed up by taking basal temperature and checking mucus consistency, was surprisingly more effective than I would have guessed. And that the Pill, if you took it at the same time every day and didn't miss any, was supposed to be about 99% effective. 

Well, I took the Pill every morning after I brushed my teeth, and I never missed any. But I had skipped a period, coming up on two, and my breasts were sore and I felt terrible every morning, headachy and nauseous. There were no over-the-counter tests in those days, or if there were I didn't know about them, so I made an appointment with my gynecologist and told my mom I thought I had a yeast infection. 

A nurse took my blood.  I'm not sure why it was done that way instead of by the pee-on-a-stick method - perhaps because my appointment was after school and I hadn't known to collect morning pee. Possibly the evolution of pregnancy tests was just not as advanced as you might think at that time. I don't clearly remember. Presently the gyn, a comfortable older woman, came back to talk to me.

"Negative. It's still possible you're pregnant but very unlikely. Some women do skip periods when taking the Pill. Make another appointment if it keeps up and we'll swap you to another kind of pill."

"How unlikely is unlikely?"  I asked her.

"Oh, a blood test this late is more than 99% accurate."

Knowing that didn't stop me worrying. I knew that 99%, what most adults around me thought of a certainty, wasn't a certainty. Somewhere out there someone was that 1%. I knew it could happen. I had seen those dice turn up. That wasn't the only time I had seen them turn up. My friends and I rolled dice every day. I knew by feel, through experience, how likely one percent was, five percent, twenty percent.

I think, in retrospect, that I probably was pregnant. When I finally did get my period it was severe, a real gusher. And many years later when I had a miscarriage, it turned out that my Rh negative blood contained antibodies against my Rh positive fetus, which normally only happens when a woman has been pregnant before. But there's really no way of knowing. I could have been pregnant, or it could just have been one of those things that happens sometimes.

It made me think, though. How much of a risk is too much of a risk?  How much fear is too much fear to live with? And I decided, not to become abstinent, but to think things through. If I did get pregnant, what would happen to me?

I asked my mother what she thought. My mother knew I was sexually active. It was she who had first taken me to a gynecologist, she who said that if I wanted to have sex I should do it safely under my own roof and not in a car or a park where I risked being harrassed by police or hurt by strangers.

"I would make you get an abortion," she said, without hesitation.

"You don't have the right to do that," I said.

"Yes, I do," she said. "You live under my roof and you live on my money. It would be me raising your baby and I'm not going to do that."

I was outraged. "But it's my body!  If I said no, you couldn't force me."

She told me that I could say no, but then she would throw me out on the street, and I would be placed in a foster home. And besides, the discussion was stupid, because I was smart and didn't want to throw my life away.

And she had a point. I didn't want to throw my life away. I certainly couldn't see myself being tied, through a child, to my current boyfriend. But I didn't like the idea of abortion, either.

So what did I do?

You can probably guess. As most sexually-active people do in the same circumstances, even adults with theoretically mature judgment, I went on having sex. And I prayed, a lot, that those dice would never come up. I decided that the risk of getting pregnant was low enough that it wasn't worth giving up sex, which I really loved.  I should point out here that  sex, for me, as a teenager, was an entirely blissful, fulfilling, and soul-enriching experience which made me feel better about myself in all ways, and if I could go back in time to advise my virgin self whether or not to remain a virgin until the age of 18, I would laugh and say, "Are you kidding?  And lose some of the best memories of my life?"

And my luck held through high school. It held until my second year of college, and when it ran out it wasn't because the Pill failed but because I had stupidly gone off the Pill between boyfriends. I trusted my new boyfriend to pull out, and he didn't pull out. I swear I knew the exact moment it happened, could feel the arrow hit the target. A week later I had minor bleeding and rejoiced that I had my period - but it was bleeding from implantation, which stopped almost as soon as it started. This time at the gyn's office the message was, "These are 99% accurate when negative... it's more than that when it's positive. False positives are very, very rare."

Suffice to say I felt very stupid because I had been very stupid. I wavered back and forth on whether or not to have an abortion (complicated by his being Catholic and convinced that abortion was murder) and finally settled on pretending this wasn't really happening to me alternating with intense praying that the baby would just die and relieve me of the responsibility for killing it. And then it died, and I felt absolutely like shit, as if my prayers had the power to kill.

Before I became pregnant I had been clinically depressed - the depression was one factor behind my (unusually for me) reckless sexual behavior. Absurdly I had begun to emerge from my depression only after I became pregnant - carried on a potent wave of good feeling which must have been caused by hormones, since logically I had every reason in the world to be miserable. I miscarried, but the mood boost remained. I never went back into that dark night, that unreasoning blackness of spirit imposed on the mind by the body.

No, any misery I felt after the miscarriage wasn't chemical but purely mental - guilt and self-loathing. I was certain I had been wicked and yet I had escaped punishment. In a different era I would have flagellated myself, or joined a convent.

I had a revelation then.

Did you know that supposedly, in America, 50% of pregnancies are unplanned? And of those about two-thirds are unwanted?

I've rolled a lot of dice in my day, so I know what one percent feels like. But it doesn't take a dice-rolling geek to know what fifty percent feels like. If you've ever flipped a coin, you know what fifty percent feels like.  Fifty percent is half.

Pardon my language, but... Jeeeesus. Half of all pregnancies are unplanned. Point five times point six six is... a third of all pregnancies are not only unplanned but unwanted.

We are some dumb broads, you know? Oh, don't shake your head. I mean it. With birth control as almost effortless as it is today, for one third of all pregnancies to be unwanted means a lot of women are a lot of dumb.

And that was at the root of my revelation. We're just not very smart, most of us. Not even me, the one who was supposed to be so smart. We can know the odds and we still choose to ignore them.

In the face of such an absurd magnitude of stupidity, what possible response is there but compassion?  What's the right answer to an unwanted pregnancy?  How the fuck should I know?  I'm the one too dumb to take a pill. You may be shaking your head as you read this, but odds are, you're pretty dumb too. We're all stumbling around in the dark here, and sometimes we fall down and hurt ourselves, and sometimes we hurt other people, and it's really pretty terrible that so many people get hurt, but who would want to punish anyone for it, when there's so much hurt already? It seems to me that in a bad situation, you try not to make it worse, you do the thing that contains the disaster that's happened already as much as possible and causes the least possible new disaster, and sometimes it's not obvious what that is, not to anyone.

I hold strong opinions about a woman's right to control of her own body, and those form the basis for my rational support of the right to legal abortion, but the basis for my irrational support for it is this:  we're dumb, we mess up, and I'm on the side of anyone trying to muddle through life, because this shit ain't easy. The numbers don't tell the parts of the story we need to know and almost everyone rolls those dice sometimes.