One woman recalls how she told her kids about her abortion:
“My only regret about having this abortion is that many years later, within the last three or maybe five years, the boys were out here, the oldest and youngest boy, for Christmas or something, and somehow the subject of abortion came up.
I think [my partner] said that she’d had an abortion, and the kids were interested, and I said, ‘Well, you know, I had one too.’ As soon as it was out of my mouth, I knew that they didn’t know. There was a look of surprise, particularly on my youngest son’s face—he was probably twenty-three or so at the time.
It was either later that evening or the next day when we were out hiking, he said, ‘I feel very sad that I could have had a little brother. That there could have been four of us, not just three.’
He said, ‘[It] just makes me very sad.’
You know, all these years had gone by. I’d never told them, and it just came out in a conversation about pro-choice. That’s my only regret, that I told my sons that I’d had an abortion.
I had no idea that it would affect them so personally. That they, particularly [the youngest], would feel it as such a personal loss.”
Cara J. Marianna Abortion: A Collective Story (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002) 51
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