My story happened back in 1982. I was coming of age finally while a sophomore in college.
I didn’t know about condoms or birth control. I was with my second girlfriend and as nature would have it, “we” got pregnant. She tried doing the poisonous hemlock to abort but it didn’t work.
She came to the conclusion that we needed to get an abortion. I was a novice and didn’t even know what an abortion was (American sex eduction = 0), but I was in for whatever she needed. I had no money to speak of since I was working through college and every penny paid for tuition or food. I may have had some, but not even close to half of the cost.
I rode in her mom’s car with her and her mom to the clinic. We had to walk past the stupid protestors with their signs and taunts. The wait in the Waiting Room was forever, and sitting next to her mom yakking about how she wanted grandkids, just basically guilt-tripping me the whole time. I watched the fish tank in the center of the waiting room as much as possible to avoid eye-contact with her mom.
When the abortion was over I helped hold my girlfriend because she was a little wobbly. Her mom finally let me do something. My girlfriend expressed how very glad she was that I was there with her (to deflect mom’s sharp tongue). (By the way, her mom guilt tripped me about her wanting to be a grandmother, how her other children wouldn’t be able to bear children, and how she and her husband had poor health. They were both dead about 6 years later. They would not have been able to help us raise our children anyway.)
I am sure that I would never have finished college if I had had a child then. I eventually got my Bachelors Degree in Physics and continued to work on a Masters Degree in Physics. I was then and still am today a bit socially retarded, always behind the social etiquette curve, raised by wolves my friends here say. I was too immature emotionally to raise a healthy family then, and only with the help of lessons learned from a failed first marriage 15 years later and no kids, and the lessons learned from a very patient second wife (I was then 40 years old) who understood a lot of jargon from mental health professionals was I able to be a decent husband to her and father to her 4yo son.
I have learned a lot since those days. If I were that immature again, and in the same predicament, I’d do it again.
Another little side note. I was adopted by my mom’s second husband at age 12. That was cool. It’s not the normal adoption most people think of. I found out 33 years later that my step-dad was sexually molesting my sisters as soon as I left home at 17 and my mom knew about it. Those are the wolves that raised me. Adoption, in retrospect and my opinion, isn’t for everybody. It’s not always a happy story despite what pro-lifers would have me believe.
Thanks for listening.
