Cecilia, 33, who had an abortion:
“My boyfriend came with me. He was in the room when they did it. He saw the fetus and it really flipped him out. What I remember poignantly about the whole experience was I was drugged and I went home, took a nap, and when I woke up he wasn’t there. He left a note… It was clear that he was f*cked up emotionally.
I called my best friend and told her what had happened.… I went over and we got riproaring drunk. I got really happy when we were drunk and we were toasting my abortion – “Here’s to your abortion!”… Later, my friend’s sister came up and expressed this sympathy – my friend had told her. I remember saying, “What? What’s this sympathy? What for?” I guess I was really detached from it…
I think I was kind of callous about the whole thing… I treated it like a procedure. I had to go and get a procedure done on my body. It didn’t seem quite real.
It certainly made me take birth control seriously. I was a little lax about it until then, but I knew I didn’t want to go through it again, the pain. It was very painful. And the shame that I had…”
She broke up with her boyfriend shortly after the abortion.
Anna Runkle In Good Conscience: A Practical, Emotional, and Spiritual Guide to Deciding Whether to Have an Abortion (San Francisco: Jossey–Bass Publishers, 1998) 51-52
The baby would be dismembered in an abortion at this stage. See what this looks like.
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