Two months after I turned 17, I found out I was pregnant. I was living with my boyfriend at the time and his mother because my relationship with my father was severely strained, it was difficult to be around him so I left.
When I found out I was pregnant I sat in the stall of my local grocery store where I bought and took the test and cried for an hour. I had been dealt a shitty hand of cards for a couple of years, first dealing with depression, then sexual assault, drug addiction, being kicked out of my home, and I had just started to feel as if my life was getting back on track. But those two horribly pink lines were a punch to the face. I had just hit my first month of sobriety, I was doing well in school again and had begun studying for the SAT, I was going to therapy and trying to get my life back together. But a month before that? I was doing heavy drugs, drinking, smoking, almost every day. There was no way the fetus would have been healthy. I knew immediately what my choice was, for me there was no other logical choice but to get an abortion. So about a two weeks later, I went into a planned parenthood where church goers were holding up those propaganda signs about murder, went under alone, made the decision alone. At the time, things had been getting really messy with my boyfriend. He was becoming more and more violent and verbally abusive.
A week after my abortion, he beat me into a shell of someone I used to be. The abuse had stated before the pregnancy but just kept escalating and I had no way of leaving this abusive relationship I was in. But after the pregnancy things got so much worse. He ran me over with a car, threw my belongings off the apartment balcony, bashed my car window in, left me on the side of freeways and cities away from my home. I was beat an inch from death. And when I woke up in the hospital all the negative feelings I had about myself and the abortion went away. If I had gone through with the pregnancy, I would have brought a baby into that world of abuse. That child would have grown up watching its mother get dragged and “punished” waiting for its father to turn around and do the same to it, I would have never packed my things and left because I would have depended on him to help support the baby, even if my life was constantly in danger. I probably would have relapsed into heavy drug use again. I would have never gone on to leave that abusive person, or gone to college, or made a life for myself let alone a life worth living for another being.
As I laid there, recovering from two years of constant abuse, I was finally at peace with my decision on abortion. I knew I had made the right decision for myself and my wellbeing. In a way, that abortion in a way saved my life. One of my biggest driving factors in life is one day if I want to have a baby, it will have a beautiful life because I gave myself the opportunity to make something of myself, not the life that would have been for my first pregnancy. #abortionsaveslives
