At 7 a.m., the morning after Election Day, I sat in the bathroom stall of a Publix, staring at two red lines on a pregnancy test. I think I already knew. The shock wasn’t there—just the confirmation I had been hoping to avoid. Before I knew it, life flashed before my eyes. I was running a business during this time, and, in a way, it mirrored the pregnancy itself. For so long, I hadn’t been pouring love or passion into it anymore—just this buried sense of obligation that had made me forget why I’d started in the first place. If this unexpected pregnancy taught me anything, it’s that doing things out of duty rather than love breeds a quiet resentment, a gap that isn’t easily bridged. The best option for us was to go through with an abortion because a baby should be born out of love and not unspoken obligation. Luckily for me I knew the exact date of conception. The only date in weeks for that matter. It happened to be exactly four weeks from the moment I found out. My state of Georgia statutes a six week abortion ban. I was safe or so I thought. The closest and earliest appointment I could find was three hours away so, the next day, the father and I set off on what felt like a kind of pilgrimage, if I had to call it something. The weather was dreary that day, and the clinic cast an even heavier shadow as I sat in the silent waiting room. No phones allowed—just blank stares and a thick silence filling the tiny room, broken only by the sound of a solitary TV screen. They called me for my ultrasound, my feet straddled uncomfortably in a room dimly lit by the gray sky filtering through the slits in the shuttered windows.

The nurse’s words made my heart sink to the pit of my stomach: “six weeks, four days,” she said, the words slipping from her lips without a hint of sympathy. That’s not possible, I thought, and I echoed it out loud: “What do you mean?” She repeated herself, unflinching. I was confronted with an unfortunate truth few realize—those two extra weeks, counted from the first day of my last period, made it official. I was already considered six weeks along, though insemination was just four weeks ago. By that logic, every woman with a period was already pregnant and for me It was too late.

My only option was to go another two states over to North Carolina. I booked the appointment, and four long days passed—two of them spent struggling to keep anything down. Then, the father and I began our second pilgrimage, this time even farther, a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Charlotte, North Carolina. You can always tell who works for the clinic and who devotes their days to harassing women outside. Brutal and relentless doesn’t even cover it. Unlike last time, the day was bright and sunny, and the workers greeted us warmly. To my surprise, I felt a sense of ease as I stepped through the clinic doors; the atmosphere was heavy but somehow lighter. Time moved slowly for everyone in there, and the waiting felt like a trial of its own. After hours, I finally reached the finish line—eight of us, crammed together in a tiny room, sharing a silence only we understood. After a few minutes, the group began sharing their stories. By the end, it was no longer about the circumstances behind each choice, but the real lives of the real people in that room—a mother with an eight-month-old, another with two kids already, and plenty of people that just weren’t ready. We weren’t defined by our pregnancies anymore but by the lives we lived, the people we cared for, the commitments we held. I had started this journey alone, weighed down with a mess of emotions, but I left with a truth that too many ignore. This wasn’t a room of murderers or heartless souls. These were women who, in their own ways, were the real pro-lifers, because choice or not, every one of us had made a decision to put someone else, born or unborn, before ourselves.