An article tells the story of “Nichole Anderson” who had an abortion:
At night, after Nichole Anderson found out she was pregnant, she would take her boyfriend’s hand and lay it across her stomach. “Can you feel our baby growing inside me?” she longed to say. But he would snatch his hand away. He wanted Anderson to get an abortion. Their wedding would be in September, nine months away. It was enough to prepare himself to become a husband, let alone a father.
She took a short of methotrexate to induce a miscarriage.
That evening the contractions started. At 11:30, lying on her bathroom floor, Anderson passed a blood clot the size of her fist. She flushed it down the toilet.
The following week, Anderson was in such physical pain that she could barely walk. For the rest of the month, she continued to bleed spottily. But worse was her depression. She tried to talk to her boyfriend, but he always changed the subject. A month after the procedure, he told Anderson they were through. She says she envies his ability to walk away from the situation. “If I could have stopped what I felt and walked away, I’d have done it, too.”
A few days after he left, Anderson began hemorrhaging. She drove herself to the hospital, where she was scolded by the doctor: “If you had let nature take its course, you wouldn’t be having these problems.” Even after the bleeding stopped, Anderson felt increasingly alone. In February, she slit her wrists but survived. A friend told her about a crisis pregnancy center in downtown Richmond, where she met other women who felt devastated by their abortions. Slowly, her psychological torment began to ease.
In September, Anderson finally put away the crib she had kept in her room for several months. She painted a watercolor that reminds her of the ultrasound of her fetus and hung it in her apartment. Around her neck is a gold charm in the shape of a baby, set with an August birthstone, the month her child would have been born. “I don’t want another woman to have to feel this,” she says, explaining her decision to discuss her abortion. “It’s time for women as a group to stand up and say ‘This hurts me.’
Elise Ackerman, Cheryl L. Reed, Ilan Greenberg, Natela Cutter and Jill Jordan Sieder “Who Gets Abortions and Why” US News and World Report Jul 7, 2011
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