I have had two abortions. Both of them were for completely different reasons, and I don’t feel bad about either of them, regardless of the fact that people have tried to shame me for both getting pregnant at such a young age, and for deciding to terminate my pregnancies on my own terms. I really don’t care what they think or have to say, I just know it must be exhausting for these people to walk around passing so much judgment on others.
My first pregnancy, and subsequent abortion, was awful. I was 17 years old and had already been on my own for three years due to a very toxic and hostile home life, which certainly made me more grown up than most other 17-year-old girls, but I was still just a child. I was in a horribly abusive relationship with someone who essentially stalked their way into my life. I had never put it together how odd it was that he always seemed to already be present wherever I was planning to go on my own, and over the course of a few weeks, he got me drunk and coerced me into sex. At that age, I believed that having sex with a person meant that you were then in a relationship, so I followed suit and we began dating. I was just trying to do the right thing after making a mistake and not wanting to be labeled a slut by my peers.
After dating for six months or so, he started telling me that I should just stop taking the pill, insisting that he was sterile and I had nothing to worry about. He “just wanted me to be healthy” and told me that if I didn’t need the pill, then I shouldn’t be taking it. This seemed logical enough, so I stopped the pill and wound up pregnant exactly six months later. He was over the moon with excitement, and trying to behave as though this pregnancy were some sort of miracle. As an atheist, I don’t believe in miracles, and this whole thing seemed fishy, but he almost had me convinced (malignant narcissists and sociopaths are quite good at that). When I was ten weeks along, I told my dad about it, and he immediately told me that if I didn’t have an abortion, he would kick me off of his insurance (at this point, everyone in my life was a total piece of sh*t).
I made the appointment and had the abortion. The doctor and his staff were so nice and supportive, nobody made me feel like a failure or a morally corrupt baby murderer… until my boyfriend came home. That’s when he started getting extremely abusive with me, raping me, and trying to convince me that I was a horrible person for killing his baby without his consent. I finally left him after he tried to set me on fire by pushing me into the closet and dousing me with lighter fluid. After I left him, I heard that he had gotten someone else pregnant about six months later. And then another a couple of years later. And then another after that. This guy actually happened to be a psychotic serial reproducer and pathological liar, and I dodged a f***ing missile, rather than a bullet.
My second pregnancy was far less sinister. I had been with my boyfriend (at that time) for about four years when I got pregnant through the pill. He supported my decision to get an abortion, which was definitely for the best, as we were living in a van at that time and literally had no way of caring for a baby. I ended up opting for the medical abortion, rather than a surgical one, because my first one felt so invasive and I didn’t want to go through that again. The night I took the pill, I was bleeding buckets (actually, red solo cups, because I didn’t have a bathroom so I was basically getting up to fill plastic cups with blood every few minutes). My boyfriend told me that he would be there for me and support me through the entire ordeal, but he went to band practice instead, leaving me to bleed and cry and writhe in pain alone for about four hours. I realized then how selfish I was, and that my decision was all the more justified because I would have ended up with a baby that only I cared for, while he was off doing whatever he felt entitled to do whenever he wanted to do it.
Had I not made the decision to terminate these pregnancies, I would be bound to these men for the rest of my life. I would not have had the freedom to move to a new state and start fresh whenever I needed to. I would not have had the resources to give these babies good lives, because I was already living a rough life on my own. Babies do not make your life easier by any stretch of the imagination. I am grateful that I had the option of terminating these pregnancies, because my life would not be what it is today if that option hadn’t been available.
