when i was 16 (going on 17…!) i lost my virginity to a college guy. i don’t remember even really know what was going on but the next thing i knew i was pregnant. this was 3 years after roe v. wade and i had no idea at all what was happening to my body.

i decided on denial and kept it hidden, hoping somehow nature would take care of it. i didn’t know about sex, i didn’t know about pregnancy and i didn’t know about abortion. by what i now know to be “deliberate error” my parents found out. my mother vomited and asserted i was raped (which in today’s rightly evolving definition in fact i was!). my father softened and took over (in a kindly way) and scheduled an appt. for an abortion with planned parenthood. we were catholic and this was very hard on my mother. not so much for me as i wanted my life to go back to normal. i was grateful to planned parenthood for teaching my father and i how to talk to each other before the abortion, forcing us to frankly face my reality – which we did together. it shaped our relationship until he died. but the abortion itself was hard. it felt a bit like a second violation – i hadn’t been to a gynecologist so this was really my first time. i wasn’t prepared for it and likely due to hormone surges i felt very depressed about it during and some time after. then, from the catholic point of view it took years to forgive myself. then, almost miraculously, i woke up to myself and realized had i not had the abortion, i would have delivered a baby into a world where it wasn’t wanted or planned for, i would have plummeted into self loathing and the course of my life would have been dramatically and permanently altered from what it is today. i do not regret the decision – i regret feeling guilty about it for many years. i believe, too, abortions should be legal and infrequent.