Anesthesia? I don’t honestly recall! I don’t even recall if I was offered any. Sorry. I don’t think I was on any.
None. I caught the second or third time we had sex. By then we had picked up condoms and begun to use them.
But the first couple of times we just didn’t even think about it, and well, you see what happened.
PP is one of my designated charities and I give to them every year and I defend them endlessly. Many people make them out to be some kind of demonic entity, hawking abortions to young girls. In reality many of them are underpaid hardworking girls and women and they do so much more than abortions.
Amazingly, never. But then I haven’t been to a clinic very often. I started getting regular pelvic exams after I started working, since my mother didn’t believe in them and wouldn’t let me get it on her insurance, and I just picked a doctor out of the insurance website. So I didn’t need to go to PP again.
I’ve encountered them, also in St. Louis, incidentally.
I’ve come across picketing at my local PP. My PP is surrounded by a gate, and the picketers are only allowed to protest outside that gate. I’ve never seen all that many people there. Last time I went, there was a priest, and a few old ladies with signs, and one handing out roses. We drove in past them, they held out pamphlets but did not try to block us.
When we parked and got out of the car, volunteers came to meet us and escort us into the building (I was with my husband). They were basically there to make people feel safe, though I honestly wasn’t threatened by the protestors myself. I can see how someone else might be, especially if they were young and/or alone. They also walked us to our car when we left.
Mostly what they were trying to do is make people feel guilty, and I’ll be damned if I feel guilty for picking up birth control pills from a place that offers them to me at a price I could afford.
I used to use PP for my yearly checkups back before I got insurance through my work and I ran into them on a regular basis.
They kept demanding to know why I was determined to murder my baby. I kept patiently explaining that I wasn’t pregnant, merely in search of low-cost gynecological care. Not so much pregnant as trying not to die young of cancer (as I have a family history of it, it’s a concern of mine). They never believed me and brandished gruesome pictures and prayed loudly for my eternal soul.
I’ve been to Planned Parenthood on several occassions, for everything from an annual exam to birth control to termination of unplanned pregnancy and the only time I was ever harrassed by picketers was when I was going in to get birth control for the first time.
Talk about barking up the wrong tree, people.
Anaamika, thank you for starting this thread. I hate that abortion is a topic so easily swept under the rug. When I first considered an abortion, I felt more alone than I have at any other time in my life. I was struggling to raise a small child and I was barely more than a child myself. I was already completely disappointed with myself for not getting my birth control shot in a timely manner and I knew that I had neither the financial security nor emotional wherewithal to endure another pregnancy.
There was no one who would commiserate with me because the only person I knew who would admit to having an abortion (my mom, oddly enough) had become “born-again” and still carries alot of guilt and shame for her decision to abort.
I was terrified to call PP, but the woman on the line was calm and supportive, urging me to come in and discuss my options. The procedure honestly wasn’t as painful as I’d imagined it would be. There were a few women women eating graham crackers and drinking juice in the recovery area and it was hard for me to be there with them, I remember. One woman was crying hysterically and seemed genuinely heartbroken. I felt numb and worried that something was wrong with me because I felt nothing but relief that it was all over.
The only lasting damage is knowing that I’ll always need to keep a secret from my mom, for the sake of sanity on both sides.
I hope this thread serves as both education and support for anyone who may, at some point, need to make this decision.
Your experience mirrors mine (my ex had the abortion) in most ways.
Very soon after I started dating the woman who is now my ex-wife, she got pregnant. This was in 1990. She told me that she was on the pill and she was but she has just started taking it and it wasn’t for long enough or something.
We both immediately agreed that she would get an abortion and that we would split the cost. We made an appointment at PP in San Diego and went. I don’t recall that she had an initial consultation but she might have. I think that it was a few hundred dollars for the procedure. I also think that they would write off some or all of the cost for low income people.
They only did them a couple of nights a week. No protesters in sight. There were probably eight woman waiting to get one that night and my ex was the only one who brought the man with her. The waiting room experience was surreal. All but two of us were chatting it up and even joking a little while waiting. A couple of the women admitted that they didn’t even tell the guy who knocked them up.
My ex was like the third one to go. When the first woman came out to leave. Someone asked her how it went and she got tears in her eyes and walked out without saying anything. The waiting room conversation stopped after that and the mood turned eerie.
When my ex came out, we left and went out to dinner. She said that it was painful but not too bad. We abstained from sex for a few days after that (per the doctor’s orders) and that was that. We both viewed it as no more than a medical procedure.
We were together for another fifteen years and the subject very rarely came up. It wasn’t an elephant in the room kind of thing, it just wasn’t that big of a deal. We would both have done the same thing if we had it to do over again.
I have donated money and/or books for their used book sale to the local Planned Parenthood most years since then.
Parents being in denial that their kids are having premarital sex, and being shocked when that becomes obvious, are by no means limited to families of Indian cultural background. Either that, or my parents are actually Indian and haven’t told anybody…
Right. That is prevalent throughout the world. Just look at the daddy-daughter balls in the US, and the meme of shotgun weddings.
The main difference is in our culture we have some arrogance that it “doesn’t happen to us”, that premarital sex is a Western-only thing. Which is of course one of the stupidest ideas to come down the pike. Kids have been horny and unsure since the beginning of time. As long as we have teenagers there will be premarital sex.
I went to a Planned Parenthood for my abortion and they didn’t offer me anything by way of anesthesia except two Advil which I threw up immediately after the procedure, which btw was extremely painful. Maybe your clinic was different, but not every Planned Parenthood is like that.
OK upon re-reading that I realized you meant you worked for a private clinic, kurilla. I misunderstood and thought you meant the OP must have been at a private clinic. My bad.
What a courageous and compassionate young lady you are to start this thread - kudos! I wish I had information like this 28 years ago when my mother forced me to have an abortion at the age of 16 and then swore me to secrecy lest our family be broken apart. Oddly enough, I confronted her a few years ago about her actions and what do you know, it has split our family up :rolleyes: because of her rewriting history. My hope for you is that your relationship with your parents heals.
I would also like to mention that in different seasons of your life, you may experience different feelings surrounding the abortion you had. If that happens, please consider working through those feelings as they surface rather than pushing them back to deal with later, which is what I did and it seems some of us can only push them back for so long before they surface volcano style. Take care of yourself and reach out to those who love you unconditionally if and when that happens, okay?
Again, kudos for your honesty … you may have unknowingly helped many young women and their significant others with this thread.
No problem. It’s a shame that the PPs don’t offer anesthesia (or for that matter, referrals to private clinics that do).
(speculating wildly here) I wonder if it’s part of a “discouragement” approach… don’t give anesthesia, so it’ll be painful so the patient won’t want to have another one and will therefore practice contraception. Thoughts?
My thought was that the sliding-scale payment thing made it so that they didn’t have a whole lot of money to operate with and anesthesia is usually quite expensive.
To you, what was that ‘stuff’ that you got removed from you on that day? In other words what do you consider that ‘thing’ that was growing inside you when you had it removed?
“It doesn’t happen to us” is a very common attitude in many cultures, applying to many different things that are considered to be bad (premarital sex, drug use, mental illness, and a whole bunch of other things). Only the definition of “us” and the “them” who whatever it is supposedly does happen to changes. There are parents out there who think their kids can’t possibly be having sex, because they go to church every week, don’t wear revealing clothes, get good grades, etc. That’s absolute nonsense, of course, but it seems like a lot of people would like to believe it.
The procedure you describe sounds like a “D & C” (Dilation and Curettage). A friend of mine who’d had an abortion–the only one to go into great detail about it–had a catheter instead. Did they offer you a choice of several procedures, or was your input pretty much restricted to “yes” or “no”?
We charged $250 for a first-trimester procedure and that included anesthesia, post-op meds (coagulant, antibiotic, one month of birth control pills) and a follow-up exam. And this was just twilight sleep, not full-on anesthesia. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Are there other instances besides abortion when D&C is performed? I remember when I was young my mom mentioning that she had to have a D&C and I’ve always wondered if she miscarried or had an abortion or something. (I would just ask her, but, ummm, we don’t talk about stuff in my family…)