Note: This story contains graphic and detailed allegations of sexual assault that may be upsetting to readers and survivors of sexual violence.

Ruth Elizabeth Solorzano gazed out the car window as her stepfather went over her new fake name.

Other times, on the six-hour drive from eastern Sacramento County, he’d point out interstate signs and suggest they choose an alias that way. Like it was a game. This time Ruth would be “Elisa Sanchez,” a play off her middle name and her grandmother’s surname.

Her stepfather called her Elisa, so she would get used to it, and told her not to say much. If they asked questions, he said, tell them you’re scared. Scared of what your mother would do if she found out.

Edwin Noe Cuxeva stayed in the car. Except for that first time — when he brought Ruth to a nondescript medical office and pretended to be her uncle — Cuxeva always stayed in the car.

Ruth was 13 then, in 2001. She was 14 or 15 now.

She approached a one-story brick building and ducked her head as protesters called to her waving their fetus signs.

They said that abortion was a sin. Cuxeva’s religion said the same thing.

Ruth took a seat in the waiting room and filled out the forms carefully, skipping the questions she didn’t know how to answer. She almost forgot to respond when a nurse called out the alias she had given. She went through a corridor of closed doors, wondering if anyone was behind them. When the time came, she lay back and watched the ceiling. She felt something leave her, and a secret stay behind.

Back in the car, Cuxeva made the pledge he’d made the first time, the thing he’d say again. Of course it was a lie. He would assault her again. He would impregnate her again. And the cycle would repeat: the 400-mile drive to Los Angeles. The phone-book hunt for a different clinic. The game of a new name.

Ruth would get her next abortion. And her rapist would wait in the car.

According to a Chronicle analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates and Annie E. Casey Foundation child population totals, more than 11 million children experience sexual abuse in the U.S. each year. Like most kids pulled into this devastatingly common epidemic, Ruth wouldn’t tell anyone for years. Unlike most survivors, she would eventually tell the police.

But legal justice is a rare outcome in years-old sex crimes where the only evidence is a survivor’s haunted memory. It would take a cop who saw what others had missed, and a survivor willing to relive the worst moments of her life with the man who caused them. It would take a reckoning that happened to coincide with a national turning point over abortion rights.

Ruth couldn’t imagine any of this as the car snaked up Interstate 5 toward home. Cuxeva said she could listen to any radio station she wanted, a secular indulgence he didn’t usually permit. She twisted the dial searching for a signal.

Isolated in suburbia

Ruth was 11 when Cuxeva, her mother’s co-worker-turned-boyfriend, told her he admired her legs and wanted to watch her shower. They were alone in a car; Ruth didn’t know what to say. After a sleepless night, she told her mom, who confronted Cuxeva. He talked his way out of it:

A devout Seventh-day Adventist with four daughters of his own, he had been testing Ruth to make sure she knew what to do in a situation like that, he said. Ruth passed.

Marisol Keegan believed Cuxeva. Unlike her ex-husband, Cuxeva didn’t wake her with paranoid accusations and hands around her neck, didn’t steal her car or force her to take out a restraining order. Cuxeva “was everything at the time,” Keegan would later tell Ruth. “It was the only support that I had.”

In 1999, the two married and moved with their employer, a title insurance company, from Contra Costa County to Sacramento County. They purchased a four-bedroom house in Citrus Heights, a recently formed city whose citrus groves had frozen over in the 1930s.

It was here that Cuxeva’s faith deepened in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, an American evangelical offshoot of Protestantism cast in the dust and dissatisfaction of mid-19th century frontier life. Inspired by a Baptist preacher who wrongly predicted the second coming and co-founded by a self-styled prophet who claimed to receive visions from God, the faith hinged on an assurance that this hard, unhappy world would end, and a sinless New Earth would take its place.

This was Cuxeva’s belief, and he readied for final judgment in his own way.

He forced his family to give up anything that would offend his god or glorify the devil. For Keegan, it meant no longer wearing makeup or doing her hair. For Ruth, it meant relinquishing her Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys CDs at a garage sale. Cuxeva took them to a local Adventist church and, when a visiting pastor criticized the congregation for being too lax, pivoted to holding services at home. The world grew smaller, especially for Ruth, who was homeschooled at Cuxeva’s urging.

After the first rape, Ruth wept in the bathroom as Cuxeva made her wash. Later, she’d wake feeling drugged and unable to move, sometimes in a bathtub, sometimes in her room, a hand over her mouth, a scream on the inside.

Ruth found momentary escape by jimmying a hairpin into the locks that Cuxeva put on the radio and TV. She tuned the radio to 107.9 The End, and watched Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love” video when MTV aired it. In the video, a girl in pigtails watches J.Lo from the TV set in her room and sways along. Sometimes Ruth danced, too, imagining an altogether different life.

“I always wanted to be a singer, an artist, ever since I can remember,” she said years later.

Eventually, her bit of rebellion would be discovered, and the locks changed. Eventually, Cuxeva used a new lie to get her alone on the open road: To shake Ruth out of her adolescent depression, he told Keegan, he would take her on his weekend trips to visit his daughters in Los Angeles.

It was in one of the discount motels between Citrus Heights and Los Angeles that Cuxeva showed Ruth how to pee on the plastic stick and read the markings that appeared. She cried once she realized what they meant. She didn’t know she could get pregnant. She was 13.

Ruth got six abortions over the next four years, always at different places under different assumed names. During one appointment, frightened by the provider’s questions, Ruth left. She didn’t want to be discovered; she dreaded it.

“They’re the only thing you know,” Ruth said, referring to Cuxeva as an individual and as an archetype of a child predator. “They know your deepest, darkest secrets. You feel so ashamed, and you can’t share that with anyone else. And they make sure that they’re the only person you keep sharing with.”

Keegan divorced Cuxeva in 2005, when Ruth was 17. Ruth began separating as well, attending college over Cuxeva’s doomsday discouragements that the world was about to end.

At American River College, a community college in the North Highlands neighborhood of Sacramento, she found alternatives to Cuxeva’s bleak outlook and counterfeit authority. She took philosophy and English, found the theater department and landed chorus roles in “The Wizard of Oz” and “Jekyll & Hyde,” about a wizard who isn’t what he seems and a man who is also a monster.

After the latter musical’s run, Ruth pulled aside two classmates with whom she had bonded over silly club anthems and a shared appreciation of Four Loko. John Farnsworth, now 33 and an actor in New York, said he was floored by what her fellow “party kid” friend decided to share.

“I never heard anything like that in my life,” he recalled. “We just cried and told her that we loved her.”

Ruth felt supported, believed. She next told her mom inside an Ikea. This time Keegan instantly recognized the truth in her daughter’s words. The two of them alerted Cuxeva’s relatives with children and set about erasing him from their lives, putting every photo they had of him into a fire.

Years later, after much therapy and landing in New York to pursue acting, Ruth watched the #MeToo movement ascend. She told her story to a writer friend, who wrote a blog post that Ruth shared on Facebook in August 2018. It implicated Cuxeva without naming him. A cousin, also a survivor of child sexual abuse, reached out. The cousin’s mother cleaned the house of an Alameda County prosecutor. Did Ruth want to make a report?

She had been asked the question before. The idea never appealed to her. Besides, she hadn’t spoken to Cuxeva in years, had no idea where he was, didn’t want to know. She had worked so hard to put time and distance between herself and the past.

But the past kept calling.

Kid from the neighborhood

The cinder block building hunched behind a stand of palm trees poking at an empty summer sky. On a white pathway leading to its entrance, a plaque showed the names of police dogs who had died in the line of duty. Several were born in 2004, two years before the Citrus Heights Police Department.

Ruth knocked on the locked station door and told the hard-eyed employee who answered why she was there. The door closed and, after a time, was reopened by a 6-foot-1 woman with reddish-brown hair, wearing a floral shirt and a gun on her hip. Detective Chrystal Battaglia smiled and invited Ruth inside.

It was July 6, 2021.

It had taken time and her brother’s encouragement for Ruth, now residing on the East Coast, to accept her cousin’s offer, and then time for the prosecutor in Alameda County to consult a colleague in Sacramento County and determine that she should file a police report in her former hometown.

She didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t Battaglia, unguarded and positive in a way Ruth didn’t think cops were supposed to be. Battaglia, the daughter of a former investigator for the state prison system, had made her department’s six-person detective squad in January 2020, at the age of 29. She quickly went from fielding missing-persons cases to a pandemic-driven wave of child sexual abuse reports that has yet to subside.

One of her first victims was a child with paraplegia who was unable to speak, unable to say what his guardians had recorded themselves doing to him and two other children. He had been born prematurely, at 27 weeks, just like Battaglia’s first child.

Battaglia and her husband named their son Layton, after another boy she met on the job and couldn’t forget. She delivered Layton stillborn in December 2017. A routine ultrasound had discovered that his heart had stopped; his mother’s broke.

Battaglia was induced with the hormone Pitocin and labored for 40 hours through what is sometimes called a medical induction abortion, a term that has become politicized and misinterpreted in states where so-called fetal protection laws can limit the options for people experiencing pregnancy loss, worsening infant and maternal mortality rates.

The medical staff cleaned and bundled Layton, and handed him to his mother. They took photographs and footprints, as with any newborn. They placed him on a cooling bed to delay the natural progression, to give his parents time to say hello and to say goodbye.

Battaglia had spent her career looking for meaning in the dark. Now she searched for it from a hospital bed.

“I don’t know if it’s luck or what, but it’s almost like my career — everything that happens to me — prepares me for what happens next,” she said.

Battaglia led Ruth past the chief’s office to a square interview room with opaque windows and small paintings dappling the wall, one of dogs riding a motorbike. A kids’ table perched in the corner, its royal blue surface covered by a board game.

The two women had spoken before, during a lengthy phone call in which Ruth traced and retraced the abuses committed against her, and Battaglia plotted them into an arc observant of California’s penal code, which demarcates sexual crimes committed before and after a victim turns 14. They were meeting weeks later, in the hopes of turning all that excavated trauma into some kind of legal resolution.

Not every case gets this kind of attention.

A two-year audit by a Sacramento County oversight body found that allegations of child sexual abuse are so frequent, tracking of them so poor and detective caseloads so strained that some local law enforcement agencies mark delayed disclosures (as in Ruth’s case) as “Information” or “I Reports,” without assigning detectives to work them.

Battaglia presented an 11-by-17-inch scroll of printer paper with a dark horizontal line through its center. Pale pink strips of paper, neatly written on, lined either side of the stripe. They read things like: “Last school year in public school,” “Started church — long skirts, no music etc,” “First Abortion 13.” In the corner of the sheet was a sort of key, with a list of years corresponding to how old Ruth would have been. A codex for a child’s time in hell.

Battaglia wanted to review the timeline again. But first, she decided to share something.

The house where Ruth used to live, where the assaults began — Battaglia grew up in the house directly across the street. Battaglia’s family moved to the neighborhood after Ruth’s family had moved out. Battaglia knew Ruth’s former home well; she used to babysit the boy who lived there.

“I know exactly the layout,” Battaglia told Ruth, “so tell me which room, because I’ll know exactly what you mean.”

Ruth couldn’t believe it, the cosmic coincidence of it all. All these years she had waited for the adults in her life to notice, to read in her shell-shocked silence everything that howled beneath its surface. Instead, it was a kid from the old neighborhood who sat across from her, taking notes.

Reckoning

It was a 15-minute drive from the police station to the apartment complex where Ruth was staying with her brother. Battaglia scanned the buildings until she saw Ruth wave from a second story, then parked under a carport. Ruth met her at the older, unmarked Ford sedan, with search lights fixed to the side mirrors.

Ruth had just finished a virtual audition for the CBS police family drama “Blue Bloods.” (Battaglia was a fan.) She’d had to deliver an emotional scene, and didn’t end up getting the part. Now she’d have to go deeper, with more at stake.

The plan was the same as the day before. A decade after their last meaningful contact, Ruth would try to get her abuser to admit the things he’d done, with Battaglia listening in.

Pretext phone calls are a common tool in sexual assault investigations. Survivor advocates and trauma specialists say they can be effective if the suspects aren’t tipped off beforehand — and if survivors can turn the tables on the people who menaced them as children.

The previous day ended with a stalemate. Ruth spent several hours trying to get Cuxeva talking on a Police Department cell phone with a masked number and an app that allows it to automatically record. But he didn’t cooperate. He veered off topic. His signal was weak. His phone dropped calls. Eventually he stopped answering.

Battaglia called it around 8 p.m. and told Ruth they’d try again.

The investigation was at a tenuous point. The crimes were more than 15 years old, and Cuxeva had covered his tracks well, isolating Ruth, taking her to different abortion clinics, even having her call them from different phone booths, always under a different name. There was no physical evidence, no paper trail, no eyewitnesses. Battaglia had Ruth, as credible and as willing a survivor as she’d met. But she needed more.

The next morning, Battaglia sat at her cubicle-walled desk — dotted with photos of her two boys, Layton’s brothers — and sent Cuxeva a text posing as Ruth: “I really need to talk to you about this.”

The reply came a little later. Cuxeva said he’d call during his 2 p.m. lunch break.

Now, seated with Ruth inside the unmarked car, Battaglia reiterated that they needed Cuxeva to not deny the allegations. That would be enough to reach the probable cause threshold to justify an arrest warrant. But Ruth had to be specific. She had to go into detail. Battaglia had brought along a legal pad. In the middle of a page she had written “six abortions” and below that “FACTS FACTS FACTS.”

The temperature neared 100. The car’s vents spat cool air. A laptop sat wedged between them. They waited. It was July 7, 2021, Ruth’s sister’s birthday.

At 2:05 p.m., he called.

The conversation began with halting small talk. Cuxeva discussed his lunch plans and yesterday’s doctor’s visit. He thought he had COVID but was unable to get tested. Ruth listened on autopilot. They were skirting around the abyss that Cuxeva’s crimes had created. Ruth inched them closer to it with a lie.

The reason she needed to speak to him, she fibbed, was that all those abortions had left her unable to have children.

Cuxeva interrupted.

“Yeah, I’m gonna hear you out,” he said. “I hurt a lot of people. I got some people in trouble.” He didn’t specify who or what he meant. He hinted at the blog Ruth had put on social media about her childhood trauma. He sounded aggrieved. “If you want to talk about it,” he said, “I’ll talk about it with you. But I don’t want to say too much.”

Ruth brought up her first abortion, the one where Cuxeva coached her to lie that a boy had gotten her pregnant and she was scared her mom would make her keep the baby.

Cuxeva talked over her. Not all of what he said made sense.

“Well, I don’t want to say anything because I’m going to hurt people — because I’m going to tell the truth, and I don’t want to do that to anyone,” he said. “It was in the past,” he added. And he didn’t remember much about the past.

“You don’t remember that I got pregnant?” Ruth said, an edge to her voice.

Cuxeva said he didn’t and changed the subject. He tried to get Ruth to reminisce about a relationship that never existed. He spoke of caring for her when her asthma flared, omitting that he had used this same lie on Ruth’s mother, to con money to spend on another abortion. He asked Ruth if she remembered drinking together — he an adult and she a teenager. He said the last time they were together — how many years back was it now? — they prayed and laughed together.

It was Ruth’s turn to say she didn’t remember.

“I don’t want to say any more,” Cuxeva deflected. “It’s up to you. You can just talk, and I won’t say any more.”

Ruth was shaking. All the things that he had done to her, all these memories he forced her to carry — he was making them to be small, forgettable, the minor infractions of an otherwise good man. As if she was being ungracious to dredge them up, and he was being magnanimous to let her.

“This happened to me for seven years,” she seethed.

Battaglia motioned to her notepad, underlining and pointing at the details they needed on the record, like Ruth’s age at the time of the abuse. But Ruth was already going, hammering away with facts. She named the discount motel chains they stayed at, where Cuxeva raped her, and brought her back after the abortions were done. Sometimes he’d stop first at Taco Bell, as if he was springing for a treat for a kid who had behaved well at the dentist.

“I was sitting in the bathroom,” Ruth said, each word a dagger. “I was sick, I was bleeding. You gave me pills.”

Ruth waited. Cuxeva said nothing. She went on.

“I deserve a fucking apology, a fucking acknowledgment,” she thundered at him. “So don’t fucking give me this runaround stuff, that you don’t remember.”

More silence.

“Are you going to say anything?” she demanded.

Seconds stretched in the charged air. Indistinct background noise sounded from wherever Cuxeva had called, wherever life had taken him. Finally, he spoke.

“If I hurt you, I’m sorry,” he said. “And that’s all I have to say.”

Battaglia waved her hands. They got him.

Confessional

Ruth said she had to go and hung up on Cuxeva. The call had lasted 14 minutes. If it had lasted a moment longer, Cuxeva might have overheard Battaglia blurt out how well Ruth had done. Ruth moved in for a hug, then pulled back to ask if that was OK. Of course, Battaglia said. “You did such a good job,” she repeated.

Battaglia returned to the station. It took two weeks to get the warrants and plan sorted. On July 21, 2021, Battaglia and Detective Seth Dexter drove out to a brown-and-white office park in an industrial part of Rancho Cordova, where Cuxeva was working as a program technician for the Bureau of Automotive Repair. Because it was a state job, Battaglia coordinated ahead of time with the state’s own investigators. They set aside a conference room, where Cuxeva was summoned by his boss. As soon as Cuxeva entered the room, Dexter handcuffed him.

Cuxeva didn’t ask why he was being arrested. He sat docilely in the back of a squad car. Investigators searched his cubicle and seized his media devices. They went to where he lived, a van parked in front of his workplace.

All signs pointed to a diminished existence. One daughter no longer spoke to him; the others still visited on occasion. About four months before his arrest, he took out an $18,590 loan from a Sacramento lending company using an address that doesn’t appear to exist. His last payment to the company was the day he spoke to Ruth, the day he apologized.

At the station, Cuxeva waived his Miranda rights and agreed to speak with Battaglia and Dexter, two investigators with a knack for drawing out confessions. They brought him to a room with bare walls, a plain table and hard chairs. They got him a cup of water.

The interview lasted 90 minutes. Battaglia and Dexter spent the first part of it building a rapport. Cuxeva recounted the early days of his second family, moving from the Bay Area to Citrus Heights, getting more involved with his church, having his eldest stepdaughter dress more modestly.

At the mention of Ruth, the detectives made the turn. She had told them things. They were here to hear his side. Dexter seized on the religious items in Cuxeva’s van. He spoke to Cuxeva as a fellow Christian. Cuxeva gave it up easily after that, Battaglia said.

He spoke matter-of-factly. He first molested Ruth when she was 12 and sexually abused her on at least a monthly basis from then on, he said. Cuxeva did what so many sexual abusers do, Battaglia said. He rationalized his actions, cast shade on his victim and her mother, but none of that mattered. He had confessed to serially abusing a child.

“He admitted to all the abortions. He didn’t know exactly how many, but he knew there were a lot,” Battaglia recalled. “I think he was just waiting to tell someone. He spent all these years holding on to that.”

A patrol officer drove Cuxeva to the downtown Sacramento jail, where he was fingerprinted, photographed and cataloged. Two days later, he was arraigned and appointed a public defender. A transport bus took him to the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center in Elk Grove, where he was assigned to a barracks-style dormitory typically reserved for inmates requiring protective custody.

It was Cuxeva’s home for the next year.

New world order

In June 2022, Cuxeva pleaded guilty to 11 counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child — one of 25 child-sex crime convictions in Sacramento County that year. A three-paragraph news release from the District Attorney’s Office stated that Cuxeva’s unnamed victim underwent six adolescent abortions.

Ruth gave her permission for that detail to be included.

Cuxeva’s plea came six days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and nine states activated trigger-law abortion bans, in some cases arguing the restrictions would benefit abused children.

That’s become a real nightmare scenario for Dr. Elizabeth Miller, director of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children’s Hospital and a national authority on adolescent trauma and coerced pregnancies. Miller’s research has resulted in changes to national practice guidelines. But the pediatrician and professor has also seen her work twisted to justify legislation against reproductive health care.

“That’s the challenge of a story like this, is that it becomes taken out of context and turned into the next bit of legislation to prevent young people from being able to get the care that they deserve,” she said.

In Ohio, a 10-year-old girl was forced to travel to Indiana to abort her rape-caused pregnancy after Roe’s demise allowed Ohio’s trigger law to temporarily take effect last June. (Ohio abortion providers have since asserted in court documents that at least two other raped girls were forced to seek abortions outside the state, and a judge has blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban.)

According to Child USA, a Philadelphia-based think tank dedicated to ending child sexual abuse, post-Roe abortion restrictions are unleashing other harms on pregnant children, particularly in Southern states with the strictest bans and weakest social safety nets.

“They’re much more likely to die, they’re more likely to be uneducated, they’re more likely to be drawn into a situation where they will not thrive and their health is terribly affected,” said Child USA’s founding CEO Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor with expertise on clergy sex abuse.

While California voters last year enshrined the right to abortion in the state’s constitution, and have rejected numerous initiative efforts to require minors to notify parents before obtaining abortions, the picture is changing in nearly half the country: 14 states have outlawed abortion, while another seven states are trying to muscle bans through the courts.

“I’m scared for a lot of the victims of child abuse at this point,” said Murrieta psychotherapist Nicol Stolar-Peterson, who testifies as an expert witness in child abuse cases and spent 12 years investigating them in Riverside County. She said the youngest impregnated rape victim she ever worked with “might have been 10 or 11.”

“They’re not old enough to consent,” she added. “And they’re certainly not old enough at that age to make a decision as to becoming a parent. They themselves deserve to be parented and protected.”

Trials

In a remodeled basement Airbnb in Lynchburg, Va., Ruth sat in front of her laptop and waited for her cue.

It was Friday, July 29, 2022. About 2,700 miles west, Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney Quirina Orozco texted Ruth that the sentencing hearing was about to begin and that Cuxeva was “in the cage.” Ruth didn’t know what the second part meant until the video feed came on.

Her screen opened on a courtroom in quadrants. Judge Ken Brody behind the bench. Orozco standing at the prosecution’s table. And on one side of the almond-colored chamber, a 52-year-old man in a little holding cell.

He was short and white-haired; he wore jail-issued clothing: gray shirt, orange pants and orange Crocs. A blue face covering sat beneath impassive eyes.

Cuxeva clasped the bars and said something to his attorney.

Ruth narrowed her eyes. She didn’t recognize him at first. She cleared her throat and read from a prepared statement.

“Your honor, I have been living with this tumor entrapped in child sexual assault, rape and abuse for more of my life than not,” she said.

“Because of Mr. Cuxeva, I endured six abortions,” she continued. “I firmly believe that if I wouldn’t have had access to an abortion, he would’ve done anything he could to make sure those pregnancies were terminated, including making it look like I committed suicide.”

Ruth looked straight into the camera. The faces of her mother, brother and sister — who also told the court of abuse and molestation they’d suffered from Cuxeva — joined hers on a projector screen facing Cuxeva’s cell. Ruth wanted him to see her eyes, she said later. But he wouldn’t look. Everyone else in the courtroom couldn’t look away.

“I have … traveled to the furthest depths of my being to rid myself of the tumor that is Cuxeva,” she said. “I am cancer free.”

After composing himself, Brody called Cuxeva “a monster who killed the innocence of young children from a position of trust, using religion to do so,” and condemned him to 28 years in prison, the maximum penalty. Cuxeva exited through a door in the holding cell and the faces of his accusers blinked off the projector screen, one by one.

Pushing away from her monitor, Ruth FaceTimed her mom and siblings and received a congratulatory voice mail from Orozco, who had called Ruth a “storm that helps others speak for themselves.” Then she went outside with her husband Hugo Fowler and their dog Nova to take in a countryside of still cornfields.

In April, Battaglia retired from the department to help her family run a wedding and event center in Missouri. She had spent a decade with people on the worst days of their lives, she said. It was time for something different.

Ruth appeared on “Blue Bloods” in March — as well as on other TV shows. She wrote a short film script — a seriocomic sendup of the health care industry called “Lucha Esencial,” or “Essential Struggle” — that she and other women creators shot over a weekend in May, with Ruth starring. And she has been building her podcast series “Post-Ugly,” featuring conversations about abuse with survivors and subject experts, into an online support community.

In May, she and Fowler left for a much-needed vacation to Hawaii. First, they stopped in Southern California to visit her mother, remarried and working as a trauma counselor. Ruth had something she wanted to tell Keegan, a Dominican immigrant raised by a single mother and blindsided by abusive men. Ruth had discovered something about the family’s past — a root trauma that she felt she had finally severed. She was anxious about bringing it to light, but not afraid. Not anymore.

Coda

Ruth got one more abortion. She got it in New York as an adult, long after she left California but before she returned to settle some unfinished business.

She and her future husband knew they didn’t want children and had been using contraception, but Ruth got pregnant anyway, which happens to about half of abortion seekers. They made a decision that roughly 1 in 4 women makes during her lifetime.

At first it felt like an uncomfortable echo of what Ruth had endured as a child. Was she really doing this again? she thought. But then she realized how different it was.

“This isn’t somebody else making this decision for me,” Ruth said. “This is me making my own choice.”