i grew up really poor. eating out of dumpsters, being a homeless child living in a van. eventually my mom got her act together and got us an apartment in a really bad area of town. i ended up developing a drug addiction. by the age of 11 i was using cocaine, and all sorts of crazy hallucinogens. my older friends and i would have parties where we would just take all the drugs out of our parent’s medicine cabinets. by the age of 12 i had a strong addiction to methamphetamine and became a child prostitute. i was raped repeatedly. by the age of 14, i decided to get clean and found my way into foster care. shortly thereafter i found myself to be pregnant. in the state of arizona, i was not able to go and get an abortion without parental consent, and since i was in foster care it made it even more complicated and next to impossible. i remember searching on dial-up internet, impatiently waiting for pages to load, to figure out how to do an abortion myself. i remember not wanting to do a bleach douche. i didn’t have the nerves to stick something inside my uterus, and the probability of being able to abort after being beaten up or thrown down stairs wasn’t high enough for me to consider those options. i found a recipe online for concoction that i could make it home and drink. it took me a couple weeks to get all the ingredients together. i waited until no one was home, and drank the disgusting brew. a couple hours later i was in agonizing pain. my stomach hurt with the most painful cramps i had experienced at the time. i was worried that maybe i’d accidentally poisoned myself, but refused to go and get help. i was fortunate enough that the concoction worked. eventually a strange looking mass of cells came out of my vagina. it was only a few inches long, and you could tell where the head was eventually going to be. i was a child recovering from a drug addiction, struggling not to go into another relapse, having an abortion in the bathroom of my foster home. i never talked to anybody about it. i’m so glad i had an abortion. i only wish that i could have had medical help, instead of having to trust a recipe i found on the internet. the person i was then, and the things that i was struggling with, i could not have been a mother. i know that i would have hid the pregnancy and it probably would have been another dumpster baby. i couldn’t even see myself as a person, let alone bring another being to the world. now i am in my thirties, have an amazing husband and an incredible son. i own a very successful business that i started by myself with only $1,000. i had an abortion. no one should have to go to the lengths that i did so they can live a full and complete life.