Advertisement - Continue Reading BelowIn ELLE's November issue, features director Laurie Abraham wrote a trenchant, honest essay about her abortions. Here, we share stories from other women who had abortions, to show that different women have different reasons for having an abortion, and that the procedure inspires all sorts of feelings—all of them, valid.
S., 22
I found out that I was pregnant when I was in Colombia on vacation with my boyfriend at the time and my family. It was unexpected. I was 19. It was something that I wish I could have spoken about to my family, but they're religious and I wasn't sure how they were going to take it. Abortion is illegal in Colombia, so I didn't know where to turn. I had to contact a friend that I had known that had an abortion in the U.S. I had to ask her, "How do I do this? What do I do? I can't have a kid right now. I have college, and I work, that I have to do first." She basically guided me and let me know that there's Planned Parenthood, and there's this other clinic that also does it normally, and that's where she had it done. She said that at Planed Parenthood there were a lot of protestors so she ended up not going there.
More from The Abortion Issue9 articles How Ruby Rae Spiegel's Play 'Dry Land' Confronts... What Abortion Was Like in the 19th Century This Woman's Little-Known 1972 Case Could Have... Ending the Silence That Fuels Abortion Stigma I had to call from Colombia to schedule the procedure for after I came back. I always considered myself pro-choice, even though I was really religious around that point in my life. I was like, "I don't think I would personally get an abortion, but I don't think they should be illegal." That was always my mentality. I came back from vacation, and I went to have the medical abortion. You take pills you insert either by mouth or vaginally. I didn't really feel guilty about my decision, but I felt like I couldn't talk about it. That got to me because I tell my mom basically everything. To have this sense of judgment that I felt coming—like if I spoke about it, someone might look at me differently, someone might think I'm a horrible person just because of a personal decision that I made with my body— impacted me and I felt silent.
My mom ended up finding out about my abortion in the end. She found the paperwork because I never threw it away. Then, she confronted me about it. This was two years after the fact. I was like, "Yeah, I had an abortion." She, surprisingly, took it very well. I feel like she didn't really know what to say. She was kind of like, "Ok, why didn't you tell me?" and like, "It's ok." She didn't yell or anything, so that was good. Basically, she just told me, you know, like "Be safe." It's hard, because I come from a Hispanic family so they don't really talk to their kids about sex or anything like that, so it was nice to know that she was willing to, you know? Especially because she ended up taking it pretty well.
I come from a single parent home and there was no way that I would be able to continue my education and raise a child. My mom barely had enough to support both of us at the time. I needed to make the good decision that I made.
Dr. J., 66:
Both of my abortions happened in my late 30s or early 40s, when my kids were under the age of ten. They happened two years apart. I felt annoyed when I found out. It just felt like a hassle. I knew I was pregnant extraordinarily early in the pregnancy. I went to the obstetrician who delivered my two children to get the abortions. He was able to do it in his office. He just did a medical D&C. Quite frankly, I never thought I'd end up getting an abortion. I mean I was surprised that that would happen to me because I was careful, but birth control fails.
I knew immediately I did not want more kids. It was really tough for me to be a parent of young children. I think that's the hardest thing for me personally, that I ever did. Much harder than medical school and all that. For all the big things, I think I was suited to be a reasonable parent. But for the day-to-day of a child between the ages of 2 and 6, I was very ill-suited. Because I desperately needed internal space. And you don't have it with a kid that age. When I got pregnant for the third time, I was already stretched to my limit. And actually my husband said the same thing. I was surprised, because I thought caring for little ones was more bothersome to me. But we started talking about it, and he felt the same way. We felt we had nothing left to give to another child. Now, if we'd had to, we would have made the best of it. But we had no internal resources left for another child. That's how we felt.
I think medical school forces you to just put medical issues in a box, and medical problems in a box, and to be able to disengage emotionally. Like when my mother-in-law had Alzheimer's. And I think that's how we felt about it. These days, every once in a while I think–we're so involved with our adult children, and they give us so much pleasure, and we're so proud of them–that it would have been nice to see who these other people would have been. But that's it. It's truly not a saga in our lives. It's not even a chapter. It's a blip. Which probably would enrage somebody who's pro-life.
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