I was 20 years old and a sophomore in college when I accidentally became pregnant as the result of a condom failure. My boyfriend at the time had a serious case of major depression, but I was young and idealistic then, and thought I could convince him to take his meds. (Warning to all those reading this: You can’t help a depressive who resists treatment. It won’t happen. Don’t even try.) I was working full-time and going to school full-time, earning about $7 an hour, determined to better my life – and all I felt when I saw that positive pregnancy test was anger, fear, and a sense of creeping horror. I felt as though I had a life-threatening parasite growing inside me. I did NOT want to be pregnant, I did NOT want to have a child, I did NOT want to care for a child. My boyfriend was offering to marry me and raise the child with me, but everything in me was rebelling – I didn’t want to marry him, and I didn’t want to have his baby. My mother and one of my sisters both have bipolar disorder, and I have seen the perfect hell that can inflict upon a person’s life, and I knew that it was entirely possible that the child I had conceived would either inherit my family’s legacy of mental illness, or my boyfriend’s mental illness.
I thought about carrying the pregnancy to term and giving the child up for adoption for about an hour, but then realized, with the (extremely Catholic) parents I have and the (controlling) boyfriend I had, there was no way I would be able to do so without the three of them ganging up on me and pretty much forcing me down the aisle with a man who seemed less and less lovable every second. If I let my parents know I was pregnant, they would give me no peace until I married the father and kept the child. If I told them I wanted to give it up for adoption, the boyfriend seemed as though he would have resisted letting go of it, and my parents would probably want to adopt it themselves, and then I would NEVER be rid of the responsibility for it. If I didn’t take control of this situation I would end up married to a man I didn’t love and raising a child I didn’t want, a child who might be mentally ill, and as such would be utterly dependent upon me for the rest of my life.
So, I scheduled the abortion. A friend loaned me and my boyfriend the money, about $400. My boyfriend and I were supposed to both pay back $200. I had paid mine back within 2 months, but ended up paying my boyfriend’s half back as well, after he claimed for a year that he just couldn’t afford it.
I can’t say the clinic staff were great, because they weren’t – bored and businesslike about described their attitude, but oh well, I didn’t go there to make friends. I never felt the procedure itself, as it happened under general anaesthesia. Afterward, there was quite a bit of discomfort, like the worst period you’ve ever had, for about three days afterward, but underlying it all was a sense of glorious freedom. My body was my own again. I was not shackled to this shiftless, desperately needy man for life. I could continue working and continue going to school and my relationships with my parents could remain unchanged. Needless to say, my boyfriend wasn’t very reassuring post-surgery – he was actually more upset about the abortion than I was, and I ended up having to comfort HIM afterward. No kidding – I had just had an abortion, and there I was having to listen to my boyfriend whine because “our child” was gone.
I stayed with him for about eighteen months after that (because I’m a big sentimental sap who felt bad about just breaking it off after the abortion – I had to spend some time letting him down easy and letting him make me feel guilty.) In the time following the abortion, I began to think about my attitudes toward children, and realized – I had never really felt any urge to be a mother. I had just assumed that I would eventually have children, because I figured that EVERYONE had kids. (Right?) It weighed on my mind constantly that bipolar disorder is a hereditary condition, and I realized that if I ever did give birth to a child, I was going to spend that child’s life wondering if he or she would turn out to be mentally ill. The possibility that I might end up caring for a mentally ill child for the rest of my life filled me with dread and horror. It was during this time that I started thinking that what I *really* wanted, down deep in my heart, was to be sterilized, and eliminate any possibility that I could ever become pregnant.
Then, I graduated from college at 22, and got accepted to grad school. I was terribly excited and planning to start school in the fall, and my boyfriend was now pressuring me to marry him and have his baby. He took the attitude that he’d “been patient” and that he’d “waited long enough”, and now I was done with college, and I owed him something for terminating “our first baby.” As he pressed this case, I realized I didn’t love him any more, and wanted out of this relationship. I told him that I didn’t want children, ever – and he simply couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe me.
Well, it was a long, messy break-up – he just COULDN’T accept that it was over, and was very cruel and vindictive. Finally, though, he was gone, and my life was really my own again.
There is a very happy ending to my story – I’m now 30, successfully defended my thesis and earned a Ph.D. last year, and am planning my wedding to an absolutely wonderful, loving, supportive, understanding man I met in my department at graduate school. I also had myself sterilized just after my 29th birthday, and my now-fiancé supported me throughout the entire process of interviewing doctors, scheduling the procedure, and getting it done. He was by my side when I woke up in the recovery room, and lovingly nursed me afterward. He doesn’t want kids either, and this is part of the reason why we know we’re so compatible. Unlike my previous boyfriend, who made me feel nothing but guilt for not being mother material, my fiancé makes me feel beloved, cherished, and completely understood. I contemplated the idea of marrying my first boyfriend with dread – but I can’t wait to marry my fiancé.
I genuinely feel that my decision to have that abortion was one of the absolute BEST decisions I’d ever made in my life. Had I carried that pregnancy to term, that child wouldn’t have had a chance. The genetic lottery would have been stacked against him or her from the first – mental illness would probably have been inevitable. That child would have been stuck with unhappily married parents, a mother who didn’t want him or her, and who resented the loss of the academic career she really wanted, and an unstable father who couldn’t manage to care for himself, let alone help care for a child. Instead of being half of a blissfully happy couple who adore each other, I would have been one of three very unhappy people in a miserable, loveless family.
I don’t regret my decision at all, not for one instant. If I had it all to do over, I’d probably just have never accepted the first date with the man who got me pregnant in the first place.
