Student Shares Personal Journey to Remind Others “You Are Not Alone”
By Annabelle Kennedy | Observer Contributor
One in four American women will have an abortion by the time they are 45 years old, and I am one of those women.
I had an abortion when I was 28 years old. I feared having a child. I was not in a place where I was mentally or emotionally ready to be responsible for another life. I was living in a small apartment in Allston at the time, had two roommates and a job as a waitress, and I felt incredibly alone and ashamed.
The baby’s father and I hadn’t been dating for long, and he wasn’t ready to have a child either. I decided that I could live with the decision of not having a child and regret it, more than I could live with the idea of having the child and not providing a loving, stable home for them.
What I did not know at the time was that I would not just feel relief after the abortion. Society makes you feel like you should only feel relief. The only other emotion allowed is overwhelming regret that you must hold inside you and take to your grave; that you have done a shameful and terrible thing no one wants to hear about.
Turns out, I would feel many emotions intensely. As someone who cannot name emotions easily, it was an overwhelming time of confusion, agony, and anger. I didn’t know anyone personally that had an abortion.
I probably did based on the numbers, but society says we are not allowed to talk about and share those experiences. We aren’t allowed to know what may be normal and what may not be. Even small groups of women who consider themselves friends may not tell eachother that they had an abortion due to the shame that is associated with it. Most women are left to deal with it all alone.
In the time immediately after the abortion, I started to drink even heavier than I did before. I engaged in dangerous behavior. I drove the baby’s father crazy with late-night drunken phone calls; He even blocked my phone number for a time.
I had no support system in place to help me with this trauma. I didn’t even know I should have a support system in place. It felt like to me that now I had the abortion, I have no issues, and I can continue my life as it was before. But, the thing is, my life will never be what it was before. There is a distinct line separating my life before and my life after.
Counseling may have helped me figure out what I was feeling and how to handle them, but I didn’t even know services were available for counseling after my abortion. You don’t receive information on the mental health effects of this type of trauma.
This is a trauma. No one makes this decision lightly. No one uses this service for birth control. We agonize for as long as we dare to make this decision. In the end, I told myself that I could have an abortion if I made my life the best it could possibly be, that my child wouldn’t be sacrificed in vain. For many years I failed on that promise. I spiraled and fell into a deep depression that I am truly just coming out from the other side of.
I felt a tremendous amount of sadness. I don’t know if it is possible to miss someone you have never met, but if it is, I do. I wonder what my child would be like. Would they look like me? Would we be a team against the world? Sometimes driving a car, I envision a child back there in a car seat and wonder what our conversation would be like. Would they be an uber-nerd like their father and me? Or would they love sports (Something I am lost at unless it’s roller derby)?
I wonder, and I feel my loss. I allow myself to feel it deeply. I know now that, yes, I did make the right decision. I would never want to put my trauma on another person, especially a child.
Being ten years removed from the situation and having spent the last three-ish years in quarantine isolation, really exploring myself and my mental health, I have a better understanding of what I was feeling then. I was angry with myself for having to make the choice in the first place. I should have been more careful, maybe celibacy is the way to go, and I am so dumb, kept running through my mind while I figured out what I wanted to do.
After the abortion, I had a tremendous amount of grieving to do. I just didn’t know that I was allowed to grieve over an abortion. Then I found the book May Cause Love by Kassi Underwood. It was everything I needed, and I didn’t know it.
Underwood’s book allowed me to acknowledge my anger and grief and let it go. It led me to discover that I am not a bad person. I am a person who had to make a hard decision and did the best she could with love in her heart. I even developed a healthy, loving friendship with the baby’s father. That is why I am telling my story.
I want young women, especially now with Roe vs. Wade being overturned, to know that they are just people doing the best they can with the circumstances they were given. That they are not alone, that they are allowed to grieve over having an abortion, and that we all need to tell our stories and share our experiences.
Nothing gets better if you don’t talk about it. I want women to know that being one in four is not a shameful thing. They had the courage to make the best decision for them. That is not an easy thing. I would ask people who are opposed to abortion to realize that we are all humans trying to get by in the same world. We all want the same thing: happy, healthy children when we are ready. Women only want the chance to decide when that time is going to be.
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