This is a thread about personal (or near-personal) experiences. If you are of the female persuasion, have you had an abortion and care to talk about it (good or bad)? If someone close to you did, your opinions are also solicited, as well as the male POV. The approximate date and location is important, like pre- or post-Roe v. Wade, USA or other.
To kick off this thread, I will share my own. Not being female in any sense of the word, I have never had an abortion. But an ex-girlfriend did, post-Roe, in the 1970’s. I don’t know how it happened (I wasn’t guilty), and saw no point in asking. She came to me for support, not lectures, and I provided same, taking her to a legal hospital appointment, bringing her home, and taking care of her for a few days. We remained good friends for years after and never saw a further need to talk about it.
There was absolutely no way she could carry the pregnancy to term. The “problem” would probably have been taken care of in later years with chemicals, but that was not available at the time. We were grateful that the Roe v. Wade decision was made as it was.
It would have been a significantly different experience under more restrictive laws.
Male guy here. Over the years I’ve helped out a couple of friends who wanted to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. I just held a hand, drove a car, made soup.
My little brother came to me when his girlfriend was pregnant; I knew the drill, gave him the cash he’d need and directions to PP. He avoided me after that for a bit, and I found out his gf did not want to terminate her pregnancy. My brother did what he thought was the correct thing, and married her.
Maybe a week after the wedding, a friend of his wife approached my brother and told him that his “wife” was now bragging to her friends about how she snagged her husband. She told him she was on the pill, but never was and now she was married. My brother got a lawyer and obtained a divorce/annulment. He never saw the baby, but paid child support, joining the army so he could afford to do so.
Fast forward 28 years. My brother showed up at my gf’s house for xmas eve dinner. He had invited his daughter (they’d been corresponding) so I met her at the same time he did. It was wild. She was a very nice girl who told everyone the story of her birth and youth. At some point she found out about her mom’s deceit and because of it and many other reasons, they were estranged.
At one point I was talking with her and I got kind of choked up. I told her that I’d offered to pay for her to be aborted and I was so sorry, now that I’d met her. We both cried a little bit. She reassured me I’d done the right thing. She was and is involved in supporting many worthy causes and is solidly pro-choice.
My now-wife had an abortion very early in our relationship. At first we were going to have it, then we decided it was best for everyone if we didn’t have kids. Soon afterwards we would learn something that would solidify and verify that decision as the correct one. Not going to specify what that was, but I’ll just say that we learned some troubling genetic information about one of us that would have led to us deciding to never have children anyways. That was almost exactly 11 years ago.
I think about it every now and then, what it might be like to be a father, what our kid might look like, might be like. At this point that ship has long sailed, or rather, we scuttled that ship ourselves, but I’ll probably wonder about it the rest of my life. Again, I don’t regret the decision at all, it was absolutely correct for our particular circumstances at the time, but it’s still an intriguing “what if.”
I had an abortion at age seventeen, and another at age eighteen. Same boyfriend. Never any regrets. I count myself very lucky that I was able to have one without permission of my parents. (My mother did find out later).
I believe that first one cost $400. We skipped school and drove to a city about sixty miles away for the appointment. To this day, I call it the most physically painful thing I ever experienced. I remember halfway through the procedure, asking them to stop for just a moment so I could catch my breath. Of course, they didn’t.
The second time, we sprang for anesthesia. I think the cost went up a couple hundred. That time, we also had to reach the building through throngs of protesters. The clinic people came out to escort us. A lady jumped up in front of me and said, “Are you going to have an abortion?” I cleverly answered “no”, but she didn’t believe me, and hollered, “Don’t kill your baby!” Idiot boyfriend wanted to stop and fight them.
Sorry, meant to add: this was approximately 1988, in Florida.
A very close friend of mine et me know she had an abortion when she was I think 15 or 16. Thing is she really wanted to keep that kid, but her parents strongly urged her to abort. Strongly as in you get this abortion or we are disowning you and you leave the home and family. Under pressure she had the abortion, and promptly was disowned and kicked out onto the street, well to a friend’s home. I’m not sure if that was her b/f, or perhaps a relative, and we have long since discontinued this talk so I’m not going to bring it up with her to ask. She suffered with this clusterfuck of a situation for quite some time, but did gather herself together and went on to later have 4 wonderful children. And when I say wonderful that’s an understatement.
Quite recently she got a message that her father was in a hospice, suffering, and expected to pass soon, she said she is sorry for his suffering as a human but he is no longer part of her family, and no different than any other person passing in that situation. Sad but no compelling reason to see this person in particular, and she has a family to take care of, which is her primary responsibility.
I’ve never had an abortion, but a co-worker of mine asked me to go with her when she had one in 1974. She and I weren’t particularly close, but people seem to perceive that I am non-judgmental, and they trust me with things. This woman had had a one night stand with a cool French guy she met on an airplane. I took her to a clinic in a very nice part of town; it wasn’t Planned Parenthood. I waited in the waiting room. When I took her home she said it was weird how easy it was. I have no idea how much it cost.
I was 18, in the military and had an IUD. I started puking my guts out and I went to sick-call and learned that I was pregnant. I knew all my life that I didn’t want children and I really didn’t want one then which is why I had an IUD. My abortion happened at 8 weeks.
The same *black, female military doctor who did my abortion asked me what I wanted to do about birth control next and I told her that I wanted to be fixed. She scheduled me for a tubal two weeks later.
I have no regrets.
*I am convinced that the doctor’s color and sex were the only reasons I was able to get a tubal at age 18 over 40 years ago.