Lorelai
Basically I found out two weeks ago that I was pregnant, to my shock and awe and incredible grief. I had one night of unprotected sex with my longtime boyfriend of 2 years, I had been in the midst of changing birth control and had one night were I could have been fertile before the new birth control took affect. I was incredibly unlucky, and ironically, I conceived New Years Day. For the last two weeks in between the abortion and finding out, I have had the constant feeling of having a baby inside me. Along with the morning sickness, uterine cramps as my body grew to accommodate the life inside me, and avec the hormonal mood swings it was almost impossible for me to forget moment to moment of the traumatic experience I was undergoing. Traumatic in the way that I know and knew that I couldn’t have this baby now, even though I loved everything physically about carrying the child and mentally knowing that this baby was mine and Finn’s, the product of the love of my life. Ignoring the logical standpoint that I was going to have to have an abortion, I was also incredibly hormonally attracted to Finn, he was the father, and I wanted him physically and mentally at all times. I would unconsciously hold my belly throughout the day, cradling it’s swollen contents, feeling “whole” in a way that I have never before. I looked around myself and saw my friends and family as being a part of a human web of love and procreation. Everyone I knew had once been held in the tummy of their mothers and been loved in this way, in the way I couldn’t help but love the fetus I knew I would have to abort. I had always wondered how mothers, who had once been girls like me and self centered as I am/was, could put all their needs aside for their children. What a love for a child could feel like, as more than a love for a man could be. I realized through this experience that its not that I loved my baby more than Finn, but I loved the baby in a way that I mixed my love for Finn and my love for our love together and my love for myself (maybe my mother’s love for me as well) and that concoction of love was what I felt for the child inside me. I felt during this time that my classes and normal worries were tiny in comparison to the new way in which I was seeing the world, the horrible decision I would have to make. This pregnancy eclipsed my normal life so completely that now that it is over, I feel lost.
I feel my body returning to normal. I feel guilty being this affected now as I had the most blessed abortion in some ways. My mother flew across the country to be with me, my boyfriend was loving and supportive and wonderful with my mother even though they were meeting for the first time and there was an inherent awkwardness to doing that while they both were helping me through an abortion. My father was also incredibly supportive. Everyone in my life accepted my choice and mostly didn’t treat me any differently because of it. They weren’t awkward with me when I chose to drink during the pregnancy, chose to go to parties and work normally without having it brought up all the time. If anything, it seems like my friends and family accepted and let go of this pregnancy far easier than I did, which is a blessing as it allows me to let it go if I can. I am not one of the women I read about online who had boyfriends pressuring them to keep the child or, even more terrible, pressuring them to abort it when they wanted their baby. I was not a religious person who was judged by their community or had their difficult choice made painfully more difficult by religious self-judgement. The time I had to take off school was excused by an understanding administration. My abortion itself was easy in comparison to other women’s experiences, the pain only lasted a few hours and I had opiates to numb it to barely an inconvenience. I was only 6 weeks along, and I got to see an ultrasound of the tiny pearl which also, for me, gave some closure. By all accounts, I was very lucky.
However now, that the bleeding has ebbed, and my body is returning to it’s normal state, I dont feel as if it never happened, or the wound is closed. If anything, the pregnancy glow of hormones receding, is leaving me to feeling like a worthless glob of a person. My hunger that I felt, where when I ate I was nourishing something greater than me, is now something I feed with disgust, knowing I am just self indulging. I dont have any sexual desire, or romantic desire towards Finn, something even more frightening. I can’t remember a time in our relationship where I didn’t know how to touch him or I didn’t want him to touch me. I thought the abortion would return us to normalcy, but it seems only as if we have suffered a great loss that neither of us can talk about. I try and talk to him about how I feel self-conscious now, low self-esteem (trying to not dramatize and say, self-hate) but he doesn’t want to, or cant, talk about the abortion outside of light pregnancy jokes. I feel farther away from him than ever before, like we are strangers, and it scares the hell out of me. I am writing this now because I can’t seem to express any of this to him, or my friends in the right way.
I want to talk to someone who has been through this because I feel there is no roadmap to recovery here. Abortion is so taboo that I wouldn’t know who to talk to if they were around me.
I would like to say at the end of this that I do not regret my abortion, but knowing that it was necessary doesn't negate the emotions I am feeling. To be clear, if I was to do it over, I would do it the same way. I didn't see a lot of women talking about the emotional part to this and I wonder if I am crazy or going crazy. Hope that this helps someone.
2018 United States
Mostly painless, but emotionally painful
How did other people react to your abortion?
They were very supportive and loving.