I’ve never shared my abortion story with forums like this, because I always felt like it was so cliche: teenage girl gets pregnant, can’t imagine having a baby, decides on abortion. There’s so much that others can read into that brief synopsis that isn’t really true, plus there’s nothing extraordinary about my story. But last night at the Abortion Diaries presentation in Boise, I realized that the importance of my story has to do with shame and stigma. All stories count, even those from old ladies like me.

So here it is:

It starts before I ever got pregnant. It starts generations back, actually, when almost anything to do with sex or mental illness or any kind of handicap was considered immoral, sinful, taboo, and hushed up. Fast forward through those generations to mine. I grew up in a very small town, mostly white, mostly Christians, rural, conservative in every way. In the 60s and 70s, sex education was severely lacking. We got a menstruation class in 5th grade, and in 10th grade biology, we had a reproduction unit. But none of that ever got more specific than to say the sperm fertilizes the egg. The actual process by which the sperm reaches the egg was never even hinted at.

We were raised in a “sex before marriage is evil and should be avoided” atmosphere. Therefore, there was no reason to know how to do it, or what kind of birth control might be available.

When I was 15, I fell in love with a boy. We dated long term, and eventually we started having sex. With no information, no birth control, and no one to ask for such things, we were doomed. We were top of our high school class, debate champions, church youth group kids, generally considered upstanding, good kids. The best of the best. We should have known more, but how? No internet. No books. No adults to guide us. And to even approach my parents would be humiliating, because no good Christian girl would be having sex before marriage. Right?

My mom obviously suspected. She would ask leading questions like “Do you know how girls get pregnant?” But she never took it further, suggesting I could use birth control. It was just assumed that if I knew how a girl gets pregnant, then I wouldn’t do that.

So the whole thing started with lacking adequate information about sex or birth control, and a lot of shame associated with sexual activity.

I got pregnant when I was 16. I had no idea what to do. I didn’t tell my boyfriend when I missed my period. I was nervous, scared. But I had some weird hope that this wasn’t really happening and that my period was just super late, even though it had been like clockwork since I started at age 12. I started having severe morning (all day) sickness, which was impacting my school and extracurricular performance. I went to the doctor, and I think he knew right away. They did a urine pregnancy test. (Back then we didn’t have a stick to pee on.) He told me I was pregnant. I was shocked. He was pretty compassionate, which was nice. He’d been my doctor since second grade. He called my mom to come to his office, and we had a long talk, which I mostly cried through.

We went home and told my dad when he got home from work. My parents were fairly calm about the whole thing. They had probably suspected for a while. They left the decision about what to do up to me and my boyfriend. (This was 1979, and abortion was legal, thank goodness.)

He came over and we talked for a long time. I was well aware of the culture I lived in. Girls who got pregnant in high school faced a lot of shame, and if they decided to proceed with the pregnancy, they usually dropped out of high school and lived in poverty. Sometimes, they married the father. My neighbor got pregnant a year before me, and got married the day after she graduated from high school, then had the baby that fall. We knew this was the future we potentially faced. Neither one of us wanted to be parents this young. We planned to go to college, to pursue professional lives. So we decided I’d get an abortion.

In the state where I lived, there were only two abortion providers, separated by 500 miles. The closest one to me was 70 miles away. My appointment was several weeks out. By the time the day arrived, I had turned 17 and I was 12 weeks along. My parents picked me up after school and we drove to the town where the provider was. We had dinner beforehand, and we ran into someone from our town, who was curious why we were there on a Friday night, just the three of us. (I don’t remember why my boyfriend didn’t go with us. Perhaps shame, or perhaps he had a sports event.) I could tell immediately that my parents were super uncomfortable, and obviously telling them we were there for an abortion was completely out of the question.

The clinic was a small, out of the way, unassuming office building. I don’t think it had any signage. (There was no Planned Parenthood anywhere that I knew of.) Being so completely ignorant of my own body, I was shocked at some of the procedure. I didn’t even understand what terms like “dilation” meant. There was one nurse who was so sweet. She held my hand, talked me through everything that was happening. When they finished, she told me I was brave. I will never forget those words.

The clinic sent me home with a packet of birth control pills and a prescription for more. My mom insisted on filling the prescription at a pharmacy in the next town over from ours because our local pharmacist would know that I was sexually active, and we couldn’t have that. What if someone saw us picking up the pills at our local drug store? Shameful.

The next day, I got up early because I had to take the ACT. That evening, I went to a Job’s Daughters sleepover. That’s a quasi religious organization. I internalized the unspoken message that this should never be talked about or acknowledged ever again. Because it was shameful. If anyone knew, our whole family would share the shame and the stigma.

The only people who knew were my parents, my boyfriend, and the doctor. And it would stay that way for a very long time. Not until my 40s did I tell my best friend or my siblings. It was my shame to carry and I did a very good job of it. So much so that I became severely depressed.

My boyfriend eventually became my husband, after we graduated from college. Ten years after my abortion, almost to the day, I gave birth to my first child, and had two more. I had the life that I had planned. And still, I carried the shame around. I have never told my children, even now that they are adults. My husband’s family has no clue. It was so long ago now that it almost seems unimportant to tell them. But if any of them ever asked me, I would tell them.

Not until last night have I ever acknowledged in public that I had an abortion, but I raised my hand when Jen asked who here has had an abortion. It felt safe. No shame. Only goodness. They said abortion is a blessing.

It helped me create the life I wanted. Without it, I probably would have ended up in poverty. I probably wouldn’t have stayed with my husband of 40 years. I probably wouldn't have had the children I eventually did have.

I am so happy that young folks in this age aren’t afraid of their bodies, aren’t afraid to acknowledge their sexuality, and are more informed about their bodies. I tried to raise my two girls and a boy to know about their bodies and to know it was okay to talk openly about sex and birth control and everything else. Thank goodness for Planned Parenthood; we took all of our kids through their education programs and that was so useful.