In June 2013, I had sex that I later found out was unprotected. Although, I watched the guy put the condom on, he either removed it himself or it came off in the middle of us having sex one night.

I took Plan B about 18 hours after the unprotected sex and was pushed into that immediate tiny statistic of women who still get pregnant anyway; Plan B failed me.

I didn’t find this out until weeks later in July when I went to a hospital for what I thought was a heart attack (it wasn’t, it was the first ever panic attack I ever experienced in life. Immediately felt every ounce of empathy for people who experience that chronically). It was my 3/5 year of college and I had been managing all kinds of stupid social stress amongst pressure during the final phase of my semester.

So you can imagine what finding out I was pregnant did to me.

I broke down. I called my best friend in Atlanta (I’m in Philly) because she had had a pregnancy scare recently and I thought she’d understand. Then I called my mom. My mom understood and came to meet me at the hospital. She stuck by my side through the whole process and I honestly never thought she would if I had told her. I thought she would be so disappointed but she had lived through her oldest sister being an unwed teen mom in the 60s. It would be alright, she told me.

She even came with me to the appointment to get the first part of the pill abortion and sat and waited with me because I had written down the wrong appointment time and was over 2 hours late.

I didn’t want the “father”/sperm donor of this fetus. He didn’t support my decision on the basis that he was very unstable at the time. His mother was terminally ill and it was only a matter of time until she died. She was in Maryland and he had been going back and forth to visit her every weekend. He wanted to start his own family. I wanted to start my life. I felt so young and naive and scared and just disappointed in my decisions, and dumbfounded at his. He was a bike messenger, I was a student/artist. There was no way we were financially prepared to raise any child.

It’s been 3 years officially this month since that turbulent time and, even after all this time, so few other women in my family know about that experience outside of my mom, one aunt who overheard my mom and I just before seeing me wear my “everyone knows I had an abortion shirt” and the 2 cousins I’m closest to–both of which have also had abortions, one at 16 (forced by her overly conservative Christian mother which had to stand because she was a minor and GA law couldn’t help her because she wasn’t emancipated) and one at 25 a few years ago. My family is over 80% women and I think it’s so strange to know that some of them wouldn’t support my decision to have an abortion but that has made me even more appreciative and close with the relatives and friends I have who did.