One woman tells of her abortion:
“One reason I chose to abort was simply because I didn’t want to tell my parents that I made a mistake. I knew they would have loved me through the entire thing, should I have decided to bring the baby to life; and I knew they would have supported me if I it still decided to abort after I told them. My parents were like that, unquestioningly supportive. We just didn’t have a communicative relationship. But in my mind I felt that I needed to attain certain goals to keep them pleased with me. That was something I needed, to have them pleased with me. Becoming pregnant definitely did not fit into the scheme of things.
I remember thinking about this friend I had a nursing school who had problems with her ovaries. She wasn’t sure she could conceive, so she allowed herself to get pregnant on purpose to see if she could get pregnant. Then she went and had an abortion. I remember thinking at the time that was a really stupid thing to do. The way she used her boyfriend, that’s what I thought about, too.
I looked up to her; I was trying to learn from her. The blind leading the blind, I suppose…”
She then told her boyfriend about the pregnancy.
“He asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I was going to have an abortion. Then he asked me not to do it. He wasn’t very forceful about it at first; I think he saw on my face that I was more or less resigned to having the abortion. But then he did try to talk me out of it, saying he was ready to get married, even though we’d been seeing each other for a month, maybe, at the most. In fact, he begged me to marry him. I remember that night when we were in bed; he put his hand on my tummy and he cried, because he didn’t want me to have the abortion.…
Anyway, by the time I got around to telling my boyfriend about my planned abortion, I really hadn’t thought much about his feelings. I didn’t think that he had much to say about it. I didn’t really think about whether I should involve him in the decision or not. So I was the only one to make the decision. My boyfriend was brought up a good Catholic, desperately wanted to have children, and knew that abortion was wrong. He tried to convey that to me.
…
After the abortion.
“I went back to my boyfriend’s apartment. I felt so relieved and so pampered. He had a pitcher of ice water next to the bed, and he had the blankets turned back. But he wasn’t there; he didn’t want to be there. I went to sleep, but only for a while. I had to be back to camp that night. My boyfriend came back and was concerned about me being able to drive during the hour and a half trip. But I had to be back, so I waved goodbye.
That was the last time I ever saw him. I came back to his apartment three weeks later to pick up some things I had left there, and he wasn’t there. When I asked his roommate, where he was, he said that my boyfriend wasn’t going to come, that he didn’t want to see me. That was the end of the relationship; he couldn’t face me.
That’s where I remember feeling guilty. At that time I was angry and very, very hurt. I knew this man loved me; he did. I had told him I loved him, though not enough to get married. I expected him to come crawling after me to keep pursuing me; that’s what I wanted. But it never occurred to me then that he just couldn’t look me in the eyes, knowing what I did to his child.”
David C Reardon Aborted Women: Silent No More (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway books, 1987)152 – 155
Read more about men who regret their partners’ abortions
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