when i was 16 i cheated on my boyfriend and got pregnant. i had no idea as i was just a kid and didn’t really keep track of my periods. i went to a clinic with a girlfriend who thought she was pregnant and decided to get one in solidarity with her – and to my horror it came back positive. at this point i was about three months along.

i was mortified to say the least.it took me a few days to tell my mom at which time my delusional friend and i had already made plans to have the babies and raise them together. we thought it would be fun. this is what 16 year old girls think when they get pregnant and were raised with almost no information about sex, contraception or pregnancy.
my mom flipped. she had my older brother when she was 16 and didn’t want me to have to go through that, so she made the decision that i was going to have an abortion. i was a kid and thought what my mom said had to go. i didn’t know that i had a choice and that i could have legally said no. i am glad that i didn’t.
a week or so later my mom took me to a clinic i remember as being in a not very nice neighborhood. we had to park in back and enter through the alley. the only thing i remember was being sedated, dozing off, then waking up crying and confused over what happened. at that time i had no real notion of what was going on, or what it really meant.
just like any other teenager, i got over the ordeal fairly quickly. i went back to being a stupid kid and never really thought about it again until i was older and understood what happened.
despite this, i still support a woman’s right to choose. i was a reckless and naive kid when all this went down, but my mother knew what was best for me. i can’t imagine what my life would have been had i actually kept the baby.
i am lucky that my mom knew what to do, and that it was legal.