My experience with abortion

I’ve never been sure if I wanted children or not, and I’d always been really careful to not get pregnant.  I was 28 when I found out I was pregnant and 2 months into a new marriage.  A lot of people in my position would’ve been over the moon, or even have planned on getting pregnant at this point, but when I saw the pregnancy test was positive I began to cry because this was the last thing that I wanted.  I immediately felt angry with myself and that I should’ve known better and that surely I couldn’t end this pregnancy because I was arguably old enough to know better. I also felt scared, I had never thought that I’d have to make this type of decision and I wasn’t sure what the “right” thing to do was.

Nevertheless I booked the appointment quite soon after finding out and got the earliest appointment available. In all honesty, I should’ve probably given myself a bit more time to process my decision before booking the appointment but at the time I was 100 percent sure that’s what I wanted.  I should also probably mention that my partner was supportive with my choice, there was a lot of confusion surrounding that support, but that’s another story.

The experience in the clinic was detached and a bit cold as you have to go it completely alone and the emotion is fully removed.  I understand why this is the case, but I can’t help but feel it would’ve been nice to have a familiar face with me along the way. After the procedure was done and I went to the waiting room to pick up my partner, I broke down in tears which really surprised me.  I had expected to feel relief, but what I felt was sadness.  Part of the sadness came from thinking that people were going to judge me, because of my age, because I was married and because on paper I was probably able to raise a child. The sadness and guilt was something that took me a few months for me to get over, however, the more I talked about it and realized people weren’t judging me the better I felt.  In hindsight the judgment I felt was probably only coming from myself and I should have known that my friends, who loved me, would’ve accepted me no matter what. I also know that there was no right way to be feeling and that I just had to accept and move through it (easier said than done). I hope that by sharing my experience, although difficult to fully explain in less than 600 words, can help a girl or women who is feeling the same way that I felt to know that there are people that understand and that you can be free to talk about it. And to know that today I can without any hesitation say it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and I know that one day I will become a great mother when I am ready (if ever!).

Small Town Stigma

One of my best friends has had two abortions.

I remember when she told me about the first one. We were 18, and were sitting on the kitchen counter cross-legged eating Okanogan cherries and drinking some horrible cheap white wine. I had already heard through other friends.

“So, you probably already know, but I just wanted to tell you myself - I had an abortion.” Her eyes teared up and the expression in them was almost as if she was pleading with me. ‘Please don’t judge me’, ‘please don’t stop being my friend’. She seemed to be searching my eyes for judgment – there was absolutely none. I would have done the same thing in her situation.

I held her as she cried. It had been late enough that she needed someone to go with her to drive her home. She had also been so worried about people in our town finding out that she had opted to drive 4 hours to a different city to have it done.

She told me about the car ride home with her stone-faced and silent mother – so utterly, disgustingly and disappointed in her daughter. She maintains to this day, that that was the worst day of her life.

Despite her precautions, everyone found out. She had told the would-be-father, her ex-boyfriend. Because he was angry over their break up, he openly told his friends - soon it seemed the whole small town knew.

She told me that one day she ran into a girl who had gone to high school with her. This girl said, “I’d be so embarrassed to be you, I’d probably never leave my house.”

Slowly I noticed that more and more people began to look down on her. Some began to give her last name new and derogatory twists implying she was unclean or slutty. Men began to treat her with less respect and seemed to be more aggressive with their advances. Women were even worse; they looked at her like a second-class citizen.

The biggest change was in her. She began to look quite pale. She changed from the size 6 she normally was to a size 00. She lost her ‘sparkle.’ She didn’t want to ‘do’ as much.

She started dating genuine ass holes because she thought that was all she deserved.

When we were 20, she has become pregnant again. This time her boyfriend has asks her to ‘get rid of it.’ He was furious that she had somehow messed up ‘again!’ He had often said things to her when he was drunk like she was lucky he even wanted to date her with her ‘reputation.’

She felt she owed him an abortion because having a child would ruin up his life. That second time, I believe that she didn’t really want to have one. But she did.

Her mom doesn’t talk to her anymore.

At age 24 and were at a department store shopping for bridesmaids dresses for our friend’s wedding. The party of giggly girls happened across the baby section on the way to pick out shoes. One of the girls has a baby and many have nieces and nephews. My friend looked at me over all of the ‘ooing and awing’ about the cute baby clothes with tears in her eyes: ‘please get me out of here, I can’t bear it’ they said to me.

We’re now 26. She is in an abusive relationship. She has tried to leave him 4 times but ends up back with him. She doesn’t have enough confidence to leave him. I can’t seem to convince her that she is worthy of so much more. She feels unlovable and undeserving of kindness. She said feels “tainted” by that small town stigma.

Although there are many reasons women develop low self-esteem and feel trapped in abusive relationships, I believe things may have been different for her if her abortions were destigmatized.

Family Secrets

Trigger warning: potential family violence, physical injury & death

There are so many ways that reproductive rights affect people. This is my family's story:

My grandma's cousin got pregnant as a teenager and in desperation her mother tried to give her a coat hanger abortion at home. She died. Not knowing what to do, her mother and boyfriend told the community that she had ran away and buried her in their basement. My family only learned about what happened relatively recently when the boyfriend came forward in old age and her remains were found in the house where her mother had lived for the rest of her life.

I wonder about one thing in particular – if my grandma's cousin wanted to abort her baby. If she did want her baby, the mother would live the rest of her life knowing that she had killed her daughter for something that this girl felt she needed. If she didn't want the baby, had she been able to access proper healthcare, she would have had advocates in abortion services to protect her from having an invasive medical procedure that she didn't consent to.

My family will never know, which of these two versions of events was truly the case. I'm not sure that either is any less tragic. 

Synchronous Eggs

I found out I was pregnant a week before taking a trip to Hawaii. When I looked down at the pale blue line I was overcome by something best described as calm distress. I wasn't ready to bring a child into this world. I had been dating a guy for only a couple months at the time and even though he said all the right things I had this urgent desire to become un-pregnant. It was my body and it was my choice.

Luckily for me I have some amazing and supportive friends who helped me figure out what my options were. What I learned: there are two ways to abort. Surgical and medical. Surgical meant you can't swim, and I wasn't planning on cancelling my trip to Hawaii just because I got pregnant. I ultimately went with medical abortion which involved getting an injection in my arm to terminate the pregnancy. The usual method is to take some pills, insert them up your vagina, and miscarry the contents of your womb, but I was stating my trip in a camper van and I didn't want to deal with a lot of blood without easy access to a bathroom so I held off on taking the pills.

The first week of my trip was a breeze but on the first day of week two I started to feel intense cramps and I realized I was miscarrying!! By this point we were staying on a farm on the Big Island which had a bathroom which was helpful because I bled for a couple days.

On the last day of bleeding I found something hard in my underwear. I inspected it and it looked like a tiny kidney bean covered in blood. It was then that I realized I had passed the embryo. I was shocked and a little disturbed. Since I caught the pregnancy early I expected that I would just bleed out an accumulation of cells. No one warned me about the embryo. I didn't look at it for too long before wrapping it in toilet paper and flushing it down the toilet. I didn’t know what else to do.

 At the farm there were chickens and we had a fridge full of eggs to use as we pleased. That same morning that I found the embryo, I pulled out a frying pan and cracked an egg. To my absolute shock and horror, the egg was fertilized! I screamed as though I was dying and the farm owner and my friend ran into the kitchen. I shrieked "The egg was fertilized!!!"

The little red kidney bean came back into mind and stayed there for some time. I’m still not sure exactly what the Universe was trying to tell me but I don’t believe it was a coincidence that I had that experience with the egg the morning my abortion completed.

Trigger warning: self-harm

So I had an abortion. I don’t feel proud and I don’t feel guilty. If I could go back, it would be nice to think that I wouldn’t make all the same mistakes but i was so messed up at the time, I highly doubt it. I was a student and suffering from the manic highs and excruciating self inflicted lows of depression. At one flat party I was trying to find happiness in empting glasses but feeling progressively more hopeless. I locked myself in the bathroom scoring my wrists with a razor blade contemplating what pain I could release. A friend tried to look after me and console me but with the affection and alcohol we just ended up having sex. Sex was one of my only sources of ‘love’ in my life at the time, it was a drug for me, I was incredibly lonely. I let the need for condoms be dismissed and the morning after pill was enlisted. It didn’t work. I remember the nurse asking for my medical history, after letting them know about my depression she looked at me sternly and said ‘don’t use this as an excuse to make your depression worse’. She was right, I had punished myself enough through depression, I had to make sure that an abortion didn’t add fuel to the fire of self loathing. The understanding and judgement free care I received made my experience less of an ordeal and more empowered, an informed choice about my life, body, dreams, potential. I finished the final year of my degree, pulled myself together and went on to do a PhD albeit with depression often by my side. I had counselling and good friends to help me help myself. Now many years later I have a job I love at a leading research institute studying infectious disease genomics. I have people in my life that love me and depression is something I used to have. I’m stable and proud of the strength I’ve had to get myself from there to here, a place that I’d be happy to bring new life into.