The fight over a pregnant teenager (or how the pro-lifers won me over, I suppose) 

Let me start by saying that I am officially pro-choice. I vehemently do not want to see abortion become illegal. However, I don’t think I would ever have an abortion, and that is based on my own experience. I also would not counsel another woman one way or another about abortion.

It was the summer of 1993. I had just graduated from high school and would be heading off to Ohio University on academic scholarship in the fall. In a fit of fickleness, I initiated a sort of temporary break-up with my boyfriend of two years. He already attended Ohio University, so I suspected we would reunite at some point. In the meantime, I started a carefree dating relationship with an outgoing and popular “party guy” from the town near me.

Now, I wish I could say that my scholastic aptitude translated into common sense, but I convinced myself that I would not likely become pregnant after two unprotected episodes temporally close together, rationalizing that women are only fertile a day or two out of the month.

Intuition told me almost immediately that “something” was happening. Without knowing, I knew.

The day my period was expected, I went to a Meijer store and bought an early pregnancy test and a box of condoms (wishful thinking). I stopped in the store bathroom to take the test. The results were simultaneously shocking and wholly expected. I was 18 years old with a non-serious boyfriend, planning to head off to college in two months to become a doctor, and I was pregnant.

I immediately talked to my boyfriend, who was horrified. His first comment was, “You don’t expect me to marry you, do you?” followed by, “You should have an abortion.” I talked to my best friend. “You should have an abortion,” she said, followed by, “if you are really pregnant.”  Neither of us had ever been to an OB/Gyn, so we did not know what to do in order to confirm the pregnancy without alerting my parents. We looked in the yellow pages and found an answer, Pregnancy Decision Health Center on the local university campus. While I didn’t know of Planned Parenthood at that time, I imagined PDHC was the same thing, a full-service reproductive issues center.

PDHC was located in a nondescript office building. I was introduced to a pleasant, dark-haired, middle-aged woman, who took me into a quiet office to talk. I think I was crying as I told her I thought I was pregnant. She administered a pregnancy test, which confirmed the previous findings. She calculated my due date. Then, she started talking to me about options. She spoke very kindly and seemed empathetic. Mind you, I did not know I was at an anti-abortion center. I told her I was thinking about having an abortion. She showed me a glossy chart with in utero photographs of embryos and fetuses at every stage of development and pointed out where mine would be. She talked to me about the abortion procedure in technical terms. I believe she showed me a few photos of aborted fetuses, although I seem to have blocked them out from my memory. She talked to me about adoption. I told her I was still thinking about abortion. She told me that they did not perform abortions. To her credit, she let me go with some literature and with the advice of giving my decision time and careful consideration. She never told me outright not to have an abortion.

I went home and tried to hide my despair from my parents. It worked for a couple of days. Finally, my dad asked me what was wrong, and I burst into tears and blurted out, “I’m pregnant!” In a fit of horrible timing, my older brother called at the same time to say that his girlfriend had just delivered their baby, who was going to be adopted privately. My dad called my mom at work and told her to come home immediately. My parents were devastated. They asked embarrassing questions. They were openly ashamed of me. They immediately started talking to me about abortion.

The next day, my mom took me to see her OB/Gyn. He did a quick ultrasound and showed me the evidence of early pregnancy. I asked him about abortion, and he told me that he didn’t perform them but that Planned Parenthood would do so. I later learned that he was a devout Christian who was anti-abortion.

I called Planned Parenthood myself and made an appointment for an abortion. The sooner, the better, I felt. I was shocked to learn from the woman on the phone that I was too early in pregnancy to have an abortion. I would have to wait three weeks to do so. These were the days before pharmaceutical abortion, so D&C was the required method. I scheduled the abortion. My parents were pleased. My boyfriend was pleased. I was becoming less and less pleased all of the time.

The nightmares started. In them, I was always on the operating table, getting a local anesthetic injection before the abortion. My decision was gnawing away at me. I couldn’t get away from the fact that it just felt wrong to me. While I didn’t appreciate the underhanded way in which PDHC had given me the anti-abortion spiel (and my parents were very angry about it), I couldn’t argue with some of the facts I had received there. My embryo/baby did actually look like the ones in the photo, and I would be terminating its potential life with the abortion. Could I live with this decision?

The answer was no. Abortion was not right for me. I had to tell my parents and my boyfriend. I had to find a way to make this pregnancy fit into my young life.

As expected, the response I got was shame, shame, shame, with a heaping serving of, “Get an abortion. You are ruining your life!”  My grandparents told me that abortion was no different than using a condom; it was just another method of preventing a birth. My mom took me to see a psychologist for personality testing to see if I was prone to being a martyr. My parents both thought I was trying to replace my brother’s baby (given away for adoption) by having a baby myself. There was no truth to any of these theories. I had made a mistake in getting pregnant, and I felt I would be making a colossal second mistake by having an abortion.

I wanted to keep the baby. I contacted my local university, Ohio State, where I had been offered a full scholarship and had never officially declined admission. They told me the offer still stood, a National Merit Scholarship covering tuition, room and board and more. I would be able to use the room and board money to live outside of the dorms, if necessary. I would take one quarter off after the birth and then arrange for child care when I started again. I would need to get help with child care expenses from my boyfriend, who had a full-time job. I would make this work, damn it. I would do it. I would not become a cautionary tale. This baby and I would take on the world. I had an inkling of excitement hidden in the despair.

The relationship with my boyfriend fizzled out. The last straw was probably when I encountered young guys from his hometown at the restaurant where I was a waitress.  They were chatting me up and had no idea I was pregnant. I asked if they knew “X” (my boyfriend, although I didn’t tell them he was), and one guy said, “Oh, I heard he got this girl pregnant and she had to drop out of college and he doesn’t want anything to do with her!” Despite his pleas that he never said anything like that, I am certain he did. His reaction to the pregnancy was the reason I could never take him back, even years later when he called me to reconcile.

Two days before the start of my college career at OSU, I went shopping for books with a friend. When I got home, the bleeding started. My parents took me to the emergency room, where blood work showed low progesterone levels. I was sent home with an ironic diagnosis of “threatened abortion” and referred for an ultrasound the following day. The ultrasound confirmed a miscarriage. I was 11 weeks along, and the embryo measured two weeks earlier, indicating it had stopped developing at that time. “Here is the heart, and this is where we would normally see beating,” the technician said. She printed off ultrasound photos and gave them to me. I couldn’t bear to look at them, so I asked my mom to keep them.

I was scheduled for a D&C on the morning of the first day of classes. As soon as I could be released from the hospital, I went to those classes. I didn’t miss one.

About 6 months later, I had another boyfriend. I told him about what I had been through the previous year, and he was disgusted. He said, “Where I come from, only whores got pregnant as teenagers.” I decided not to tell people about it anymore. I stuffed it inside. It came out once in a while, like when I wrote a poem in poetry class that referenced the bleeding and shame. My professor asked me to stay after class and told me that if I needed to talk to someone, he was there.

I still think about it at times, like when I fill out medical forms and have to list the number of pregnancies and births, and they don’t match. It’s right there under the surface. I’m sure many women have that feeling.

I don’t know if there is a reason things like this happen or if it is all by chance. It is extremely coincidental that the pregnancy happened right before I went off to college, causing me to change colleges, and then ended in miscarriage at the exact time classes began. I ended up staying at Ohio State for 14 years finishing multiple degrees. I met my husband there. Some good came out of the bad.

The experience has absolutely affected my perspective on abortion. While it is incredibly wrong for anti-abortion activists to use disgusting tactics to try to sway pregnant women away from abortion, I believe it is nearly as bad for pro-choicers to pressure the women in their lives to have abortions. How can someone make that decision for you?  Abortion has a huge psychological impact. Only a person facing that decision is equipped to weigh the consequences of taking either route.

There is still a little awkwardness between my parents and me, although it lessens year by year. I always suspected they were relieved about this miscarriage, and that bothered me. I wished for a reaction like the father in the movie” Juno”, which was kind of muted disappointment followed by unification of the family behind the decision. I am not one to blame parents for everything. I am a parent myself now, and I realize that we are all just winging it and doing the best we can with what we have. A couple of years ago, my mom apologized to me for trying to pressure me into having an abortion. I appreciate that.