in my mid-twenties, i was in grad school, working irregular hours at a grocery store for federal minimum wage, and in an abusive relationship. i didn’t have health insurance, so i didn’t have birth control. one day, a condom broke. i was nervous about it from the get-go, and i bought several pregnancy tests and checked constantly for a week, so i caught it very early. but then…i didn’t know what to do. i absolutely could not have a child. i couldn’t support one financially, i couldn’t be tied to this terrible relationship by a baby, i couldn’t shoulder all of this student loan debt and have to drop out of grad school. worse, i have bipolar disorder, and something like 20% of bipolar women suffer post-partum psychosis. i was also, as it turned out, less than a year away from developing a crippling digestive disorder that would keep me from being able to eat solid food for almost a year. i went to the hippie store and bought a shitload of pennyroyal, because i’d read that pennyroyal tea could trigger a miscarriage. when it didn’t work, i finally confessed to my boyfriend’s mother, and she paid for the abortion procedure out of pocket. it was not a pleasant experience, but a week of pain and discomfort was a small price to pay when weighed against the years of difficulty i would have faced as a mother with a serious and untreated mental illness, a digestive disorder with no cure that left me weak and exhausted just from normal daily tasks, and an unreliable partner. not to mention the effect on the child’s life. would a baby even have been able to develop normally on my increasingly limited caloric intake? i doubt it. even after all this, i wasn’t able to get my tubes tied until i was 30. the doctors kept saying, “you’ll want a baby someday!”