After she took the first pill, she then came back and they inserted the tablets for her medical abortion:
After leaving the clinic, I actually felt physically fine, but was advised to get a taxi home instead of walking.
But the pain that came afterwards was the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life. I couldn’t even move, it was like taking on the period pains of 100 women combined. There was so much blood that I’d have to change my sanitary towel every hour. Overnight, my sheets were covered in blood beyond repair. …
Although it was painful, I know I made the right choice.
A woman on a feminist blog wrote about having an abortion because she and her partner had no money. She claims that she went to a crisis pregnancy center and they did not offer her material or financial support, which seems unusual since most CPCs are stocked with baby items and supplies. She says:
“We wanted to have a baby. By the time I made my decision and accepted my mother’s money to terminate the pregnancy, I was very attached to the pregnancy. I dreamed every night about nursing and rocking my baby in a warm living-room, moonlight streaming through the curtains. I dreamed about a beautiful natural birth attended by a midwife. I dreamed about falling in love with my baby and being a wonderful mother. My partner fell asleep every night with his hand over my womb, and I knew it was what he wanted, too. But that wasn’t the course that was set out
for us.
9 weeks
At nine weeks, I had my abortion. Because everyone knows I’m pro-choice, none of my friends or family members– besides my partner– seemed to understand my agony. I was horribly depressed for several months. I bled a lot. I couldn’t have sex for months because I was so traumatized by all of it….
I know that a lot of my fellow feminists would react rationally– it wasn’t the right time, we couldn’t afford a baby, we can always adopt, maybe we should look into IVF. But it’s not the same. I wanted the first embryo I conceived. We wanted to have a baby together…
Maybe regretting my aboriton isn’t the feminist thing to do. Maybe it’s not okay that I was attached to a clump of cells in the vague shape of an embyro. Maybe it’s not okay that the pain of abortion still hurts, four years layer. But it still hurts– feminist or not.”
The story’s writer claims “I am pro-choice. I will always be pro-choice. “
Biologist Dr. Garrett Hardin says an early preborn baby has never been seen “as a human being” because it “may, with impunity, be flushed down the toilet or thrown out with the garbage.”
Garrett Hardin “Abortion – Or Compulsory Pregnancy?” Journal of Marriage and the Family 30 (May 1968): 251
Pro-Choice author Janet Hadley commenting on a proposed law in Louisiana which required a woman to see an ultrasound image of her baby before aborting it, the author calls the ultrasound a “torture weapon”
Janet Hadley Abortion: between Freedom and Necessity (Great Britain: Virago Press, 1996) 150
Cheryl Sabel, President, Montgomery chapter of the National Organization for Women, about a clinic that was shut down due to filthy conditions
“Every time a women’s health clinic closes, it is a huge blow for women and it’s very unfortunate. But women must be protected, and there are standards — as there are for every health care facility — and every facility needs to abide by the rules.”
“Alabama Abortion Clinic to Stay Shut” Washington Post 6-15-2006
On the blog “Abortion Witness” in a post entitled “Talking about the babies: saying the things we cannot say,” a clinic worker writes:
“You’ve written in your chart that you feel guilty.” I say to the patient I am screening. “Can you tell me more about this? Why do you feel guilty?”
“I feel guilty because I am killing my baby,” she answers. “That’s why I feel guilty.”
The first time an abortion patient said this to me, I was completely unprepared for it. Although I was a long-time pro-choice activist, a Ph.D. who had studied feminist theory , and a former abortion patient myself, nothing in my experience had prepared me to talk with a woman about killing babies.
“Oh no,” I said to her as gently as I could. “It’s not a baby- it’s just tissue.”
But the clinic worker later came to feel that her response was wrong.
She describes how pro-choice activists have trouble with using the word “baby” to describe the child who is killed in an abortion and says:
We all know that an unborn child dies in each abortion. And the majority of abortion care workers accept responsibility for our roles in these deaths.
We have, for various reasons, determined for ourselves that having a part in these deaths is an important- and ethical- thing for us to do[.]
The blogger describes how a female abortionist who was 18 weeks pregnant performed an abortion on an 18-week-old unborn baby and felt her wanted baby kick just as she was pulling a leg off of the baby she was aborting. The blogger says:
We might start these honest conversations by asking what differentiates these two eighteen week unborn babies?
The short answer – which is both incredibly simple and very complicated – is that the unborn baby moving inside the physician/mother is being carried by someone who has chosen to complete her pregnancy and deliver a living child, and the other unborn baby is being carried by someone who, for reasons that we may or may not understand, has decided that she cannot complete her pregnancy.
In other words, the life or death of the unborn baby is determined by the mother’s decision about whether she wants to share her body with another being[.]
The blogger admits that “the distinction can feel unsatisfying to many people” but reiterates that it is moral to kill an unborn baby whose mother does not want her. She goes on to say:
… We should never deny that abortion kills an unborn child. When the topic comes up, a simple “yes, I know – and so do women who have abortions” will often suffice. Several years ago, the director at the clinic where I worked was on a radio talk show about second trimester abortion. A caller said, “You can’t tell me it’s not a baby. And you can’t tell me that baby won’t die!” Yes, she said calmly, it is a baby and yes, it is killed. Women know this, and they have abortions anyway. This is exactly why abortion is complicated, like many of life’s challenges. We must remember, though, that complicated does not necessarily mean wrong.
Remains of abortion at 10 weeks
The clinic worker now suggests that the proper response to a woman in an abortion clinic who says “I feel like I’m killing my baby” is something like:
“Ok. Let’s talk about how you are going to cope with knowing that you’ve killed your baby. What do you believe happens to us when we die?” From this point, the woman and I could have an honest conversation about how she understood her abortion decision within the context of her own life circumstances, beliefs, and ethics.
The blogger then finishes her post by saying:
Women have always known that pregnancy means a baby and abortion means the baby will die. When women care enough about the lives of their children – born and unborn – and about the role lives to make that decision, we owe them the respect and support that honesty conveys.
Peg Johnston, who worked at Southern Tier Women’s Services, an abortion clinic, in Binghamton, NY:
“I don’t know if I just started getting bored with Operation Rescue,but I definitely started to get interested in what women were saying instead.”
She’d sit in on a counseling session with a woman who’d say,
“I feel like I’m killing my baby.”
9 weeks
At first, she said, she assumed that the patients were simply repeating what they’d heard outside, having internalized right-wing disinformation that Johnston needed to “correct.” Then she says:
“once I began listening more intently to her,I learned that she wasn’t saying what the picketer was saying–although she used the same words.Frequently [abortion patients] were already mothers and they knew a time when,at that same stage of pregnancy, they had welcomed the lifeand felt like it was their baby.They weren’t mouthing an anti-choice message–they were acknowledging that this was serious stuff.How can I want one kid and not the other?”
“Listening to women about abortion” Fairfield County Weekly May 26, 2005
“Women’s preferences for information and complication seriousness ratings related to elective medical procedures” appears in the August edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Written by Priscilla Coleman, David Reardon, and Matthew Lee, the study of a diverse sample of 187 largely low-income women seeking obstetric and gynecological services found that they overwhelmingly wanted to be informed of all known risks associated with elective procedures in general and with abortion in particular….
The study revealed that 95% of the women surveyed at the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, expressed a desire to be informed of all possible complications associated with elective medical procedures, including abortion. This was found to be true regardless of how common or uncommon the particular complications were.”
“Study Reveals Women Want Information on Abortion Risks” NRL News September 2006, Volume 33, Issue 9
My husband had no moral concerns about abortion, and we went to the appointment together. I cried a lot, but every time I mentioned a baby, I was told by my husband, and counsellor, that the reality was, there was no baby. I was told the children I had were more important.
When I saw the Drs who signed my forms they asked me if I was sure. I said no, but they said well as sure as you can be.
I did have an abortion. I was given a leaflet that said that most women are relieved afterwards, but you can expect a bit of depression.
I am now in counselling, having suppressed the memory of the clinic. It now comes back to me as a trauma I can barely survive.
“Previously, I had been married, and my then-husband and his mother talked me into having an abortion. Even though I recall sitting up with my husband all night saying I did not want to have the abortion. But, I was pressured.
My second husband I also had an abortion. [sic] He said he was ready for a child, but when the crunch came, and I was pregnant, he said he would resent the child and was not ready. I had another abortion afraid of losing the relationship.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I suffer now from a severe hormonal imbalance. I suspect this is from the awful emotional grief and depression I have suffered for years, resulting in a sex addiction, and other behaviours I am not proud of.
I am now forty. My abortion was when I was 29 years old (old enough to know better). I desperately wanted the child. But I went against my heart.”
