Some things are done a little differently in the south. For example, whenever a girl was knocked up in the small, Georgia town where I was raised, she got married. It was as simple as that. And as crazy as it sounds, I knew two girls who were fifteen– the age of my daughter –when they took on the grown-up roles of wife and mother. They were too young to even drive themselves to their obstetrician appointments, or anywhere else, for that matter. As most parents saw it, though, if they were old enough to have sex, they were old enough to accept the repercussions of their actions. Of course, the shotgun unions weren’t destined for the long haul, and they usually crash landed in divorce court before the five year mark. But not before they’d had at least one more baby and had been saddled with no hope of ever pursuing the life they once dreamed about.
I was seventeen years old when my birth control failed, and like anyone that age should have been when they found out they were pregnant, I was scared. That dark ring in the center of the at home pregnancy test spelled out my future for me, and it wasn’t one full of rainbows and sunshine. I would become another statistic; a young divorcee who had been battered and bruised. I would eventually be that single mother who had no skill or education, struggling everyday to put food on the table, that is, if our fights didn’t escalate to a fatal level before I found the courage to walk away. THAT was the life I saw and it was not the one I wanted.
My boyfriend, who was twenty when I got pregnant, had it all figured out. He said we were going to get married and have a family anyway, we would just start our life together sooner than expected. He swore he would take care of me–he promised everything would be okay. Deep down, though, I knew it wouldn’t be okay. When I resisted his plan, when I told him we were too young to be parents, his happiness of jump-starting our future turned to anger. Once again, everything was my fault.
After days of non-stop fighting and emotional explosions, he took my right to choose away from me when he threw me against the open tailgate of a pickup truck. But as I lay face down on the driveway, my thoughts weren’t about what could happen to the baby–I wondered how I was going to explain my fall and whatever marks it left behind to the friends and gawkers around us.
I didn’t miscarry from the impact, but the damage done was irreversible, and when the ultrasound showed that the placenta had begun to tear away from the uterine wall, my doctor labeled the complication a ‘high risk’ for both me and the fetus. Sure, I could have had my cervix sewn shut and gone to bed for the duration of my pregnancy, but I was just a kid myself. There was no way I was emotionally able to handle that. At that point, terminating the pregnancy was the best option for me. But even then it was far from easy.
Don’t misunderstand– there was never a moment where I didn’t want to have the baby, but I was only seventeen years old. And for every reason my boyfriend and my heart threw at me to keep the baby, my head countered with logical, reality busting rebuttals why I shouldn’t.
Few people knew about my pregnancy, and even fewer knew about the abortion that followed the very public tailgate tumble. Those who were sober enough to retain what they’d witnessed that night gossiped briefly around town about a miscarriage. And even though all of the reasons I did it were in my best interest, I was terribly ashamed of terminating my pregnancy. Because of that, I let their assumption stand. In a way, I began to believe it myself because it was easier to swallow.
I was still in denial five years later when my pregnant step-sister and I were escorted through a sea of angry protesters who threw things at us while screaming “baby killers” as we entered the clinic for her abortion. My mind didn’t race back to the time I sat with my boyfriend in the waiting room of a similar one years earlier, because it was a painful memory I had suppressed. In fact, it wasn’t until I wrote the first draft of BROKEN four years ago that the shame I’d lived with for so many years finally lifted, and I was able to say I’d had an abortion out loud.
The thing is, though, I wasn’t a person who used abortion as a means of birth control. I was someone who had gotten pregnant by a man who was physically and emotionally abusive, the pregnancy was high risk, and I was a teenager.
I know now that the miscarriage I had in between my daughter and son wasn’t God’s way of punishing me for the abortion I’d had so many years ago. And it wasn’t the reason I had such difficulty conceiving my son. Those would have been cruel punishments, and I don’t believe God operates in that way. I don’t wonder what my life would have been like if I’d made a different choice because I already know the answer to that– a sad and painful one. I don’t live with fear of being judged for my choice anymore either. If people do, they’re not who I want in my life anyway. I now stand behind the choice I made long ago, hold my head high, and speak openly about it. I’m no longer ashamed–I have no reason to be.
If I had to relive that time in my life, would I do things differently? Some, but my life experiences are what has shaped the person who I am today and that, my friends, I wouldn’t change for the world. I’ve even asked myself if I would choose abortion again and the answer is absolutely. Why? Because it’s my life, my body, and my right to choose.
