I was very sexually active in my first year of university. I got pregnant in November. I didn’t immediately know what I wanted to do. My roommate was the first to know. We spent a night bonding and having takeout and she told me even though she’s Catholic and pro life, she changed her mind and she told me I had to get an abortion. I was a bit taken aback by this, partially because she’s spent her whole life believing abortion was wrong, and partially because she was TELLING me I HAD to terminate the pregnancy. “(Myname, you cant even make toast for yourself in the morning. How are you going to take care of a baby?” I took offense to it. For some more background, I was also raised Catholic and pro life, but when I say that I don’t mean it lightly. My mother raised me to believe that having an abortion is a worse sin than “any other type of murder”. Every single night growing up we’d say a rosary together and she’d dedicate it to the “unborn children”. We wore veils and went to a really extremist church and I don’t even want to repeat some of the things that the priest would preach. But at around 12 is when I formed my own opinions and stopped believing in god. I spent time on the internet and secretly became pro choice and formed my own political opinions. I’m glad I got a mind of my own so early on in my life because it prepared me for moving away and ultimately prepared me to respect my own options if (when) I got pregnant. My siblings also formed their opinions and call themselves pro choice, but when I told my sister she acted very weird about it and gave me little support.
Anyways, after a week or two I did decide to have my own abortion. I didn’t have the emotional capacity to tell the dad while I was pregnant so I told him after. He was furious at me for making the choice without him, as if it wasn’t my own body and this was something that he went through. Shortly afterwards I was talking to my roommate one night about ethics and abortion came up as a hypothetical example for one of my points. But apparently she had changed her opinion. She called me a murderer, and the argument got so heated I had to step out and go for a walk a few hours long to cry and breathe. I wasn’t ashamed of what I did, but I was just so furious that she not only pressured me into an abortion, but after I decided to get one (independent of her input), she went back and told me what I did was wrong. The inconsistency confused me and the aggressive accusation really hurt. This was my best friend. At this point I felt like nobody was on my side. The choice to have an abortion wasn’t really difficult, and the actual abortion went very well. It didn’t hurt at all. But somehow how people acted in my life after the abortion was what hurt me more than anything. I really, truly felt like nobody was on my side. Oddly enough, despite the constant brainwashing as a child and knowing that my best friend/roommate still looks at me as a murderer, I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel sad about the abortion itself. I don’t ever regret it. It would just be nice to have more people close to me who understand and support the situation.
