In effort to demystify it, woman shares the story of her abortion. Which inspires me to share mine.

Here is one woman's story:  

Recently, I had an abortion. 

Lining the street in front of the clinic were a dozen or so protesters. They held up large banners with anti-abortion slogans, religious iconography, and images of dead babies. 

Just past the bulletproof security doors, the graphic nature of that imagery haunted me in the waiting room. What would my abortion look like? I decided to secretly document my abortion with my cell phone. My intention in documenting and sharing my abortion is to demystify the sensationalist images propagated by the religious and political right on this matter. The perverse use of lifeless fetus photographs are a propaganda tool in the prolife/prochoice debate in which women and their bodies are used as pawns to push a cultural, political, and religious agenda in the United States. 

At 6 weeks of pregnancy, my abortion looked very different than the images I saw when I entered the clinic that day. 

This is my abortion.

This woman did indeed take pictures with her cell phone, and if you wish to see them you can click here. (As it turns out I was too concerned about upsetting some of you to post them on this blog.)

If you are like me this may be the first time that you have ever witnessed what an abortion looks like. Not nearly as horrific as you probably imagined is it? As a matter of fact it seems considerably less disturbing than MOST medical procedures that I have witnessed. In the end I guess it is simply the removal of tissue, nothing more.

As I am sure all of you already know, or have simply assumed, I am pro-choice. However that of course does not mean I promote the idea of abortion.  In fact I have very strong, and very mixed, feelings about it.

So I thought, after reading this young woman's very blunt description of her experience, that I would share with you my experience with abortion.

Now I am of course a male so I have never had an abortion, nor to my knowledge has any pregnancy that I was responsible for ended in abortion, so I do not have an actually abortion story of that type to share. But that does not mean I have never been touched by the issue of abortion.

Because I have. And here is that story.



When I was a junior in high school I often spent time that I did not wish to spend in class in the school's library. I loved the library and felt I learned far more there than I did attending the actual classes. (Yes I graduated.)

On this day I was reading one of my favorite books on animal behavior (I was still planning to be a veterinarian in those days), when I heard this quiet sobbing coming from one of the cubicles set off to the side.

At first I tried to ignore it (Not my business away) but soon it had increased in volume and became impossible to ignore. So I got up to investigate.

I soon came upon a girl who I recognized from a couple of classes we had shared over the years, but did not know that well. Her eyes were red and puffy, and tears flowed down her cheeks in great torrents of despair.

Her sobs had reached a volume which had begun to attract attention from some of the other library visitors, including the clearly irritated librarian. Somehow I knew that she did not want to talk about whatever was upsetting her so much, so I asked her if she wanted to go outside, away from prying eyes.

She stood up and I grabbed her books and started walking her toward the exit. (There are a couple of things about my high school experience which are not exactly typical, but I don't feel this is the proper time to expand on that. Let's just say that I essentially had the freedom to come and go as I pleased with very little concern from the faculty.)

As we walked to the door she leaned into me and began to cry even harder than before. By the time we reached my car parked outside she had increased the volume to the point that I really began to fear that somebody might think I was doing her some sort of harm.

Once safety inside of my Toyota she continued to cry in the most pitiful manner I have ever heard. To this day I have never witnessed such anguish.

I had a box of tissues in my car and I handed it to her. She took it from my hand and clutched it to her chest as if to find some comfort, and continued rocking back and forth and crying until I thought she would never stop.

I know what you are thinking, "You should have asked her what was wrong." But in fact you are incorrect, in her state she could never have formed the words to tell me, and somehow I knew that she did not want to talk about it. She just needed a safe place to cry.

So I sat there, and sat there, and sat there. Thirty minutes, forty five minutes, probably closer to sixty minutes before the wailing became quiet sobbing.

The contents of the tissue box, which had been almost completely full, lay crumpled around her feet almost up to her ankles. As she sat next to me she was still miles away in her pain, but she had started to furtively glance in my direction like a frightened animal. Slowly her shoulders began to relax, and soon she seemed empty and drained of emotion, almost like a discarded wrapper with the contents removed.

Finally she spoke, "I'm okay now."

"Okay," I said. Then we went back into the building just in time for our next class.

I never asked her what was wrong, and she didn't tell me.  And to my eighteen year old mind, it really didn't matter.

I think I already kind of knew I was going to find out eventually.  And I did, about five days later.

This time she was standing in the hallway in front of her locker.

The world swirled past her, in the kind of frenetic energy which only seems present in hallways stuffed full of pubescent teens, but she was almost perfectly still. Only her shoulders were moving. Shaking really.

None of the dozens of students filing by noticed her at all, they simply could not see her as their lives demanded their constant attention, but I had seen those shoulders before.

So I stopped and stood next to her. After a few minutes she seemed to finally realize she wasn't alone, and looked at me with those now familiar red rimmed eyes.

"Can we?" She whispered.

"Of course." And with that we worked our way through the phalanx of sweaty teenagers until we were once again sitting in my little green Toyota, a fresh box of tissues at the ready.

This time her crying did not attain the same volume as before, but she still managed to make an impressive dent in that tissue box.

And this time she found her voice. It took her awhile, and her frightened eyes flitted across my face for signs of disgust or judgement as she spoke, but there were none.  In the end the story was one that high school kids often hear whispered about in the locker room, or twittered about by clutches of suddenly holier than thou teenage girls. Nothing new really, she was pregnant.

Her on again, off again boyfriend, a friend of mine, was the father.  When I had seen her that day in the library she had just told him, and he had reacted badly. First essentially challenging that it was his, and then telling her to "take care of it."

She had been unable to tell her parents, and in fact I was now only the third person to even know. She didn't know what to do. At eighteen I did not feel that it was my place to offer advice, so I just listened.

As we left the confines of my little green confessional booth, she suddenly clutched my arm. "Jesse, please don't tell anybody."

I told her I wouldn't.

And I never did.

I guess it was about two days later, maybe more than that, when she approached me.

"Can you cut class?" Silly question, of COURSE I could cut class.

"Can you give me a ride tomorrow after lunch?" I agreed, though she did not explain where we were going. I'm pretty sure I knew.

After lunch that next day she sat in silence as we drove, only occasionally pointing to where I needed to turn.  After we arrived, she spoke for the first time. "Can you wait out here? I think I'll be okay, but I need a ride back."

Once again my answer was "Of course." After all SOMEBODY needed to be there.

I had a Stephen King book if I remember correctly, so I sat outside and waited. I don't recall how long, but it did not seem as long as I anticipated.

I caught the opening of the door out of the corner of my eye, and for the first time realized how tiny she was, and how alone. She walked stiffly toward the car and took each step gingerly, as if walking over ice even though the parking lot was clear.

I got out and opened her door (My mother would have been so proud) and once back inside we sat for a few moments in silence. There were probably things that should have been said, but I realized I did not know what any of them might be, so I did what I had done before, and simply sat quietly, feeling woefully unprepared for this situation.

After a few minutes (She had been quietly sobbing again) she said "Okay," and I started the car.

We drove without talking, listening to the radio, and looking everywhere but at each other.

At the school we went our separate ways, once again without talking, though she did stop at the entrance to take my hand before leaning in and resting her head on my shoulder. She was there just for a moment, just long enough to leave a single tear stain. And then she was gone.

We never spoke of that day, not once.  We did have classes together, and even saw each other in social gatherings having to do with school activities, but never a word was spoken of that day.

She and the boy continued seeing each other for a few more months, until he cheated on her and they finally broke up.

Somebody in the church they both attended apparently found out and offered counseling which essentially turned out to be sessions of shaming (One of her friends told me about this.), which she bravely endured until she simply could not, and then she, and her now brought up to speed parents, left the church altogether. She seemed much happier in her new place of worship.

The boy stayed on in the church never the worse for wear. As did his parents, who apparently were the source of the money used to "take care of it." (Give yourself an extra point if you figured out that this church was probably homophobe extraordinaire Jerry Prevo's Anchorage Baptist Temple, because it was indeed.)

Like I said this is not really MY story of abortion, I was really not much more than an observer, however it is the story I always think of when somebody talks about doing away with sex education or slashing federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

To answer your next question, no the girl and I never had any kind of romantic relationship beyond a simple friendship.  We were different kinds of people and I was at that time kind of working my way through the cheer leading squad if I remember correctly.

You have to keep in mind that I may have had brief episodes of sensitivity, but I was still just an eighteen year old kid.

One more thing, my mother gave birth to me when she was fifteen years old, after the local football hero knocked her up at fourteen. After this episode at school, I started to imagine how much better my mother's life might have been if she had simply opted to end HER pregnancy. At this time in her life she was working very hard, trapped in a loveless second marriage, and was struggling with health problems.

I was such a coward that I could not bring myself to ask my mother that question until I was well into my thirties. "Mom, do you ever wish that you hadn't gotten pregnant, or that you had simply taken the abortion route? I mean you could have been the homecoming queen, and probably married to some rich guy now."

She looked at me for a moment and said, "No I loved becoming a mother, and never regretted a moment of it."  Then she paused, "Would have kind of liked a shot at that rich guy though. But with you three holy terrors scaring off all of the GOOD men THAT was certainly never going to happen now was it?"

Yep that's my mom!

So I guess the point of this post, at least MY portion, is to illustrate both perspectives from one male's point of view. Both my high school friend and my mother made the decision that they felt was best for them. A decision, let's not forget, that is not always accessible to many women around the world, or even here in America.

They both have undoubtedly had reason to regret their decision, but it was THEIR decision to make. And none of us, myself included even when it comes to my own mother, have the right to tell them what decision they must make concerning own bodies. Or the potential for life growing within. Period!