It wasn’t hard at all to figure out that May was with child, considering the daily morning sickness. When her mother found out, she didn’t say anything. It was an empty response to say the least. “I knew she was angry,” May said, “but she didn’t say anything to me. She stopped talking to me. She didn’t show any emotion.
Again, we see typical Thai-style suppression in response to May’s situation: pretending the problem doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, in this case, the problem would only get bigger and bigger (literally), until it would reveal itself in about nine months. And you can’t ignore a screaming, crying “problem.”
May said she didn’t have a close relationship with her mother. “Thai parents don’t talk or discuss things, and my mother worked a lot, so there was no time to talk,” she explained. “I did, however, have an aunt who had a farang husband, and she was a lot more open, so I talked to her about everything.” She also explained her mother’s insistence that nobody else know about her being pregnant, presumably to save face.
May confessed that she did try to get rid of the baby. She went to an abortion clinic, but it was closed, so she ended up not going through with it.
Side note: under Thai law, only abortions of pregnancies that result from incest or rape or endanger the lives of the mothers are legal. The penalty for performing an illegal abortion is as many as five years in prison and a fine of up to 10,000 baht.
She decided to try aborting the baby herself. “I would sit on the top of the stairs everyday and then let myself fall down,” she explained calmly. “I also tried jumping and falling off the bed, but nothing worked.”
It’s awful that someone would want to get rid of something so bad that they’d go so far as trying to kill it, thereby hurting themselves in the process as well. It is just as incredible to hear May describe with such ease and nonchalance how she tried to get rid of her own baby by hurting herself.
She had the baby at 17, and is now in a home for single mothers and children in Chiang Mai, called “The Home of The Swallow.” The home provides a daycare service for her child, while May attends adult-learning school in hopes of becoming a hairdresser. May’s mother and stepdad pay for daycare, but they do not visit.