Ginny's Story

It's hard not being able to find more information out there on the internet
about abortion. You type anything related to the issue and you're slammed
with sites raging against 'killing babies'. I don't believe there is the
ability to feel pain for the fetus before 3 months, but I do believe there
is a lot of pain that the mother feels due to her hormones and the actual
process. I had been searching for weeks on data about how fertility is
affected by multiple abortions, and sadly I found very little. More or less
'good academic journals' wary to produce anti-choice collateral only seem to
publish studies based on first abortions. Maybe there is also the shame
that people like me who have had 3 should feel and so we get no data?

I'll explain my 3 very quickly. I'm an overeducated urbanite white
woman...who got pregnant in highschool because I was just plain stupid. I
had tried the pill but it made me sick. More than 10 years past and I had
had tons of boyfriends, a diaphram, more tries to find a pill that would
work for me, when my boyfriend and I were using condoms but something must
have gone wrong (although it was not obvious to me when/how)...and I quickly
decided to have the abortion because it didn't fit into my schedule.

Afterwords I was SOOO depressed, and cried and cried. We ended up breaking
up. Now cut to 5 years later, I'm 32, thinking that the next time I get
pregnant will be for my first baby. But I met a guy, we're only dating for
8 weeks when the condom falls of (a week after I was supposed to ovulate)
and low-and-behold 2 weeks later I learn I'm pregnant.

I tried to convince the guys that we should keep it, and heard his fear and
realized that he would be with me full of resentment. Then I visualized my
future, pregnant with a guy I just met, and no proper house, and a strong
potential that the guy would disappear...and I realized that I didn't want
to keep this pregnancy in that case. So I went to a gynecologist, a nice
one, a lot more upscale than a clinic and had an abortion 3 days ago.

Psychologically it's hard, but I have no regrets. I have regrets about
where I had the abortion however and would like to advice everyone to go to
a clinic instead of a standard OB/GYN's. This time I have had NO post
abortion bleeding(which seems odd to me), but I was puking for a day, still
feel incredibly sick and weird. I hope this will go away soon and that in 1
year I could write back again and say now I'm pregnant and it's planned, and
we're keeping it! Oh I hope. :)

Ginny
March 2007