My ex-boyfriend and I had been dating for about 3 months. I was 23 and he was nearly 30. It was the most mature relationship I had ever been in at that time in my life – the only other serious boyfriend I had was verbally and emotionally abusive. I was hesitant to date again, but my ex persuaded me, and I fell head over heels pretty quickly.
We used condoms sometimes, but the rest of the time he pulled out. In retrospect, my youth and romantic history made me very bad at advocating for myself. One day I realized that even though my boobs had been throbbing for a couple of weeks, my period hadn’t started. I walked to the drugstore and bought a pregnancy test and a bottle of wine.
They don’t tell you on the boxes that a positive result shows up almost immediately – there was no time for any kind of denial to set it. I peed, and there was a plus sign. I wept. My boyfriend asked me what I wanted to do, and without missing a beat, I told him I wanted to abort it and opened the bottle of wine. He was supportive, he paid for it, he took care of me before and after.
I grew up Catholic. When I was a child, I wore a necklace with tiny gold feet on it, understanding that I was supposed to be opposed to abortion, even if I didn’t understand yet where babies came from. To do otherwise was blasphemous. I lost my faith in god when I was 15, which is the only reason I began to question the pro-life movement. I consider myself very lucky for that reason.
The clinic I went to performed a transvaginal ultrasound with barely any warning. I didn’t expect it, but figured it was normal. “7 weeks, 3 days,” they told me. It made no difference to me – I felt humiliated by the device in my vagina, but those numbers meant nothing to me. It haunts me to this day that I would have missed the cutoff by a week and a half according to the laws of my state now.
When I left the clinic, my boyfriend told me that the light in my eyes had come back. And he had good reason for saying so – the relief I felt that day is still hard to describe today. But even though I never felt a single moment of guilt for my choice, I’ve felt burdened by the secret I’ve felt I had to keep for fear of being disowned and ostracized by the community I grew up in.
It was the best decision I’ve ever made in my life. It breaks my heart that so many other childbearing people will not be able to make it when they need to.
