Blog for choice day

Today is Blog For Choice Day and I'm going to get all brave and overshare about why access to abortion without limits is important.

I am probably one of those women that the forced pregnancy wingnuts think "uses abortion as birth control". I've had 3 and I have one kid. If I hadn't had those abortions, I'd have 4 kids. I can barely support one, four would probably kill me.

I first got pregnant at 16 after having sex with my long term high school boyfriend. You could just attribute it to youthful stupidity, but...

When I was 16 my mother went into a mental hospital and I went to live with foster parents. They might have been nice enough people, but they were only taking me in so that it would look good on their application to adopt. As a foster kid, I had Medicaid but I had no access to a doctor without my foster parents help. I also had no money of my own, not an allowance or even lunch money that I could hoard up to pay Planned Parenthood for a birth control prescription. I got pregnant about a month after living with them.

With the help of my awesome school counselor, my boyfriend, his mom and his ex-girlfriend (weird, I know but she drove me and held my hand) I got the money together and a ride to the only clinic in a hundred mile radius. I never thought twice about having an abortion. I knew that I was too young and that there was no way I could give a kid up for adoption.

My foster parents found out about the pregnancy and abortion afterwards. They'd been suspicious that I was pregnant to begin with, what with all the puking. When I came clean and told them I had an abortion, they were very quiet. The next day they packed all my belongings into garbage bags and took off for Disneyland. A family friend stepped in when my evil social worker tried to send me to a "group home" that had just been in the papers because several girls had been stabbed there. Very soon after I was in Florida with Wonder's family. Thank god I didn't live in a state with parental notification laws. My foster parents would have been the ones with authority to consent.

I don't know if the foster parents kicked me out because a teenage girl was too much to handle, or if they had hoped that I would decide to give them a baby I didn't want. But even having all my stuff loaded into trash bags and the threat of group home violence were not enough to make me change my mind about having an abortion. Actually, it reinforced it. If the foster parents were the kind to give up on a kid so easily, they certainly were not the kind of people I wanted anywhere near a child of mine.

When I was 21 and the Kid was almost 2, I left his dad. His dad had gone from a hapless pot smoker to a crazy, possessive meth fiend who stalked me for months. I was still breastfeeding the kid and I hadn't had a period in forever. I was very far along when I figured out I was pregnant. Almost too far along for an abortion (and perhaps I was too far along but the doctor was kind). I had been stalked, attacked, harassed and threatened for months. I had a protection order (civil) and a no contact order (criminal) against his dad. I could not see myself with one more tie to the guy and I had nearly died having the kid to begin with. If I did die, or even just became incapacitated having another child, I knew he would be all over my kid(s) and tormenting them in place of me. So I had a late term abortion at 24 weeks. I borrowed a shitload of money ($2400 if I recall correctly) that I worked off cleaning houses. I didn't have childcare for my then 2 year old, so he went to clinic with me and a girl who I had just met at a domestic violence group counseling session. The clinic was in the city (I was in the suburbs) and without a driver there was no way I could have gotten there. A cab would have cost me 50 bucks easy. But I was lucky. There was a 15 year old girl there with both her parents who had driven 4 hours from another state. Thank god she had understanding parents. I don't know if my 15 year old self could have made such arrangements.

The last one is the one that I beat myself up for, cause damn it, by now I should know better. Just to shorthand it- sex without condom, emergency contraception taken too late, found out about his wife and child when I told him I was pregnant. But I am here, in a wonderfully liberal city in a blue state. Medicaid covered the abortion . Actually, as soon as I became pregnant I became eligible for Medicaid and was covered within a few days of the positive test. I took a cab with a friend to the clinic which was only 2 miles from my house. I was well taken care of for little more than the cost of a cab ride.

So access to abortion AND birth control is obviously a big deal for me. I have exactly the number of children that I want. When people complain about the kind of women who use abortion as birth control, they mean people like me. For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know how hard I struggle with just one child who was very much wanted. Think about that next time the idea of abortion squicks you out. It is easy for us to be okay with abortion once, or if the mother has a significant sob story about her health or the health of the baby. But most abortions happen to women like me. All we have for justification is that it would ruin our lives and lives of our children. I think that is enough.

I don't regret my choices, though they haven't been easy. There were complications during the last abortion that made the whole thing a bit of a medical nightmare. But not enough for me to regret my choice. The second abortion was late enough to make me squeamish, but the result of having another child could have made me dead and my children abuse victims. The first one I sometimes forget that I had at all. 16 was exactly half a lifetime ago for me. I have many more years of fertility left, though I think that my 35th birthday present to myself is going to be a tubal ligation. In the mean time, I hope that anyone else who needs an abortion is as lucky as I have been in being able to get one. And I WILL NOT VOTE for anyone who who even hints at making abortions more difficult to get. I've been lucky so far, I think everyone who needs that kind of luck should be able to get it.

Update 8/18/09: If you are here from a certain forced pregnancy site link, then I suggest you read this. Then please crawl back in your slimey hate hole and try to keep feeling superior while knowing you could have helped a real, living child and instead choose hate and viciousness.