I wrote this in response to someone who said that no women ever goes to have an abortion in a cool, calm and collected frame of mind. This is my cool, calm and collected abortion story.
I became pregnant at 22 years of age to a guy I had no intention of spending the rest of my life with and who wasn’t interested in keeping the baby. Yes, I was using birth control.
I was only just emerging from a psychologically traumatic childhood, and was in the middle of completing year twelve as an adult student.
Financially I was living from day to day, I could not count on support from my family, and I had no long term friends to count on for support.
My life was just beginning, I didn’t want a baby. A baby would have been a complete disaster.
I went to the doctor and he asked me why I wanted an abortion. I shrugged, and said that, “It’s just what I always thought I would do if I became pregnant at the wrong time.” He wrote me a referral and I was in the hospital a week later.
I was calm, cool, collected and sure of myself. As were the other women in the waiting room.
When I compare my experience with some of my friends I was incredibly lucky, there were no protesters outside the hospital, I was not physically assaulted by them as was one girl I know of. Now THAT would have been upsetting.
I signed a consent form outlining the risks, was told about the procedure in detail, saw a counselor (who knew a woman with her mind made up when she saw one) and was offered post operative counseling which I refused.
If I could change one thing I would accept the post operative counseling. Although you are told that your body goes through a grieving process it is still a shock when it does. And given that I’d been diagnosed with major depression at 16, counseling would have been the smart choice.
No matter though, my GP was able to help me with that when I needed it.
I’d always said that I’d have a baby at twenty-five, usually in a flippant “whatever” kind of way. But it turns out that three years later I did become pregnant (contraceptive failure again). It felt right, I was confident of being able to continue my studies at university and the guy was willing to support me. So I chose life. Yey for me.
My beautiful boy was full term 100% problem free and born in a birth center with midwives only present. It was a beautiful experience, made possible by the fact that as an educated woman I could make informed choices about the birth process.
What puzzles me about ProLifers, is that they seem to think “potential life” is so important. My son is here, so obviously he was a potential life at some point. Yet if I had not had the first termination I would not have been where I was when I met my son’s father. (He’s not the sort to go for single mothers so even if I had met him I doubt anything would have come of it.)
So, if not for the first termination I would not have the gorgeous boy (and girl) I have today.
It’s a puzzle isn’t it? If I’d chosen to have the first one, I would not have gone on to Uni when I did, and would not have met the father of my son. So I would have prevented my son from being born.
Whatever my choice, a baby would have been prevented from coming into the world.
The world is so much more complicated than ProLife black and white views allow.
