One in four.
Here we are again.
Once again the ignorance of our government (and our people) has made my blood boil. Once again I’m tired of people trying to dictate what women do with their bodies…
And this time I’m ready to get personal.
In 2016 I found myself to be a single mother. Adam and I got married when we were 21 and 19 – six months before he deployed to Iraq. After he came home we tried for the next 7 years to have a baby. After multiple miscarriages and years of heartache we decided to adopt and we found the most perfect boy to ever exist. He and I had almost nine years together that gave us a million incredible memories, one perfect son, and an absolute dump truck of heartbreak. We both knew it had been coming for a while so it had been months of pain before the end followed by an indescribable numbness I felt upon him moving out. It was as if after all of that time my emotions had been taken away from me and scattered throughout all the places we made our memories because they weren’t my life anymore. A mall with a movie theater in Norfolk, the barber shops at Pendleton, Disneyland, the hospital we met Luke, the day his adoption was finalized…a lifetime of memories that I found myself struggling to figure out how to place and what to do with them.
I had met someone at work who told me how beautiful and funny and lovely I was and I immediately fell for it. I didn’t know him well but I knew him well enough to know he had a good job, he seemed like a nice guy, and for the first time since I was in high school I found myself single.
Then the absolute last thing I thought would or could happen happened.
Adam and I tried to have a child for seven years and the only times we conceived was with medication to force my ovulation.
How could I possibly be pregnant? What kind of sick cosmic joke was this?
I wasn’t even divorced yet. I was still on Adam’s insurance. I only had a part time job. I was moving back in with my parents until got my feet on the ground. There’s no way I could support two children. Especially while my son, who I have the majority of the time, was showing clear signs of Autism. I already felt like a failure of a mother by making him live in a broken home but then to add in a newborn to this shit show. And to top it all off I found out around then that the guy I had met was not quite the nice guy he said he was. So it would be me + Luke Roper + baby on our own. What. the. fuck. was I going to do?
And I made the decision to terminate my pregnancy.
I educated myself. I saw an OBGYN to have an ultrasound and bloodwork. I talked about it with my sister and my closest friends. I humiliated myself by delivering what I’m sure was a swift kick to the emotional balls for Adam by telling him I was pregnant before he found out via our insurance. I fought loud and violently with a man I had just met about what he thought I should do with my body.
I found out at five weeks I was pregnant and at seven weeks my sister drove me to do what I knew I had to do.
My story is common. One in four adult women in the United States under the age of 45 have terminated a pregnancy. One in four is very common.
However, my perspective is a bit less common. I wasn’t one of the many stereotypes that people throw around when assuming they know the “type of women” who have abortions. (News flash: there IS NOT a type of woman who would have an abortion. If you have a functioning uterus you’re the “type of woman” to have an abortion because that’s the common thread.)
I am the mother of an adopted child. His birth mother decided to keep her pregnancy and place the baby for adoption due to her and her family’s religious beliefs but this did not come without monumental personal suffering for her. She spent the entirety of her pregnancy and postpartum being told how she was a sinful person for having gotten pregnant and how wrong she was for giving him up. That she’d go to hell for that too. She matched with four other families before us and she backed out on each one because she was getting pulled back and forth by guilt from her mother about giving the baby up for adoption. I’ve never been more grateful for anything in my life than for the life she gave my son. I respect her beyond words. I respect the decision she made for herself and her right to choose what she wanted to do with her body. Because that was her choice alone to make.
If I had not terminated my pregnancy I would have had a child with an abusive, controlling man. I’d have never moved to Seattle and met my husband, which was the single greatest thing to ever happen to me. I’d not be carrying our child. My second child. A child we will bring into a happy, healthy family. An environment of love and not chaos. Parents who respect and care for each other.
Our neighbor to the north Georgia just became the sixth state to pass the six week abortion ban.
At five weeks, two days I found out I had to make a decision about what to do with the future of my family. The state of Georgia is saying that I should have made that life altering decision in five days to reach their six week ban. Many women get past six weeks before even knowing they are pregnant.
I only have one friend who has spoken with me about having also had an abortion yet the black and white numbers say one in four women. That doesn’t fit, guys. That means a lot of women are afraid to speak up. That means a lot of women are silently reading Facebook posts about how they’re condemned to hell for making the single most personal decision a woman can make because some person thinks God has given them the answers and their loud mouthed judgement is approved by Him.
I am scared for the women of our nation. Banning abortions is not going to stop them from happening. Banning abortions will simply encourage women to find unsafe alternatives.
This is scary, people.
I can’t sit by and watch.
I can’t keep my mouth shut anymore.
One in four women have made this decision and I am one of them.
So now you know someone who’s had an abortion. Now you have a decision to make about me. Does your opinion of me change? Am I less of a good person than I was an hour ago? Less of a mother or a wife? Less of a human being? Do deserve less happiness?
