My abortion story [View all]

[pnwmom]

Last edited Thu Apr 2, 2015, 09:07 PM - Edit history (1)

It was my senior year of college and she was my best friend.

After a brief relationship with a boy who ended up dumping her, Susan found herself pregnant. She’d been using a doctor-prescribed method of contraception, but it had failed.

She couldn’t tell her parents; her dad was a minister. She couldn’t tell me – she knew I was Catholic. She must have felt all alone in the world.

So after agonizing in silence for several days, never even hinting she had a problem, she made a nice warm bath and lay down in it. She reached for the razor blade she’d put on the ledge of the tub. With the warm water, it wouldn’t take long to bleed out, and it wouldn’t hurt – much. Less than she had been hurting, anyway.

And then something stopped her. She was filled with peace as her path became clear. She would live. She’d have an abortion, but she would live.

The next day she made an appointment and in a few days had the procedure.

She finally told her father, the minister, who received the news with all the love and support that any parent should. And then she told me. What she had done and why she hadn’t been able to tell me till then.

And I felt terrible – terrible that just knowing I was Catholic (though neither of us ever went to church there) made her think she couldn’t confide in me, that I would judge her or try to stop her.

She almost killed herself because she thought she couldn’t tell her parents or her best friend.

I honestly hadn’t thought much about abortion till then; it was barely on my radar screen. But that was my wake-up call. Ever since, I’ve known that I can’t judge any woman who makes that choice. For whatever reason. She’s the one who has to live with the consequences of any pregnancy, not me. Who am I to tell her what she can or cannot handle?

What if my friend had slit her wrists because she was afraid of confiding in anyone, even me? How would I have lived with that?

P.S. After college she went to grad school, got a good job, got married and had children. They've been married a zillion years and she's a happy grandma now.