The pills were given and the procedure done and over in what seemed to be merely minutes. That night, I hurt not just physically but emotionally. The physical pain and bleeding began to scare me and I called the doctor to see if it was normal. My heart broke even more. I know in my heart I made the best choice for the two babies I was already holding in my arms, but I fight depression and anger and other emotions to this day.
Today of all days is the hardest, since 17 years ago to the day would have been my due date. I cry and I see the faces of what my babies might have looked like when I see my surviving children. Yes abortion is legal, and yes it is a choice every woman should have the right to make. But it can come with a price. Maybe what they did saved a child from being raised in a home without knowing the unconditional love of a mother.
We still have many unaired personal stories from readers recounting the choices they made during an unplanned pregnancy—or a planned one that went terribly wrong. This next reader, Elizabeth Bercaw, is one of the rare ones in our series to insist that her real name be used. She begins by recalling another abortion ruling by the Supreme Court, almost 30 years ago, that upheld a Missouri law imposing restrictions on the use of state funds, facilities, and employees when it came to abortion—a win for the pro-life movement.
In , when the Supreme Court ruled in the Webster decision, I harkened the call to become active in the pro-choice movement. I helped co-found a pro-choice group on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi, then later helped in pro-choice groups on the campuses of Clemson University and Emory University.
I was firmly committed to making sure every woman had the right to a safe, legal abortion. In , the pro-choice issue became personal for me, as I found myself pregnant for the first time at the age of I had only known the father for a month, and we were both full-time students. At that time, it was inconceivable for either of us that we were in any position to bring a baby into the world.
We were not mentally, emotionally, or financially prepared for it. We discussed it and both agreed the best option was abortion. My boyfriend accompanied me to the clinic. A year later, I became pregnant again from the same boyfriend. By then, I was finishing my degree at Georgia State University. I was 35, and I thought long and hard. Maybe I would not have another chance at motherhood. I feel that I made the right decision in both circumstances.
Both choices were my choices and I stand proud for both of them. By making these choices, I have been able to devote myself to raising my daughter, who has become the most amazing young woman if a mother can brag. I will never forget the words of a woman I met during the early years of my activism. When she got pregnant, her boyfriend wanted to force her to have an abortion. Choice means the ability to choose for yourself, without shame. By signing my real name, I hope other women and men will have the power to tell their stories.
In her post on abortion waiting periods , Emma begins with a statistic:. Approximately 9, women in the United States had abortions after their 21st week of pregnancy in Yet states keep creating legislation on this issue, proposing abortion bans at 24 or 22 weeks.
Many—like South Carolina, where one such bill was signed into law last week—provide exceptions for medical emergencies or fetal anomalies. In fact, many of the women who seek abortions at this stage in their pregnancies do so for health reasons , so these bans affect only a subset of those 9, women.
Among the dozens of unaired notes we still have in our inbox from women responding to our abortion series , I just found one from a reader who appears to be among that 9, subset:. My husband and I made the heartbreaking decision to end our planned and wanted pregnancy at 22 weeks due to severe, but not fatal, birth defects. In making the decision we had to ask ourselves a whole host of questions.
What would her life be like? What were the chances of her living a relatively normal life despite her disabilities? Would we be stable financially, since one of us would need to quit our job to care for her? Would our families help us? Could we do it without their help? Would we be able to be active and involved parents to future children or would her care take priority?
Ultimately we decided that the most loving thing we could do for her was to let her go. She was our first child. Our only girl.
Ten years later I still mourn her loss. I mourn what she was and what she could have been. Though partway through a high risk pregnancy and dealing with hyperemesis [ severe nausea and vomiting ], I considered it for a minute, but I went ahead with the pregnancy and gave birth to a girl. Her father and I had remained together through the whole process, but when my daughter was three months old, our relationship had become strained and I found I was pregnant again.
He admitted that he removed a condom once without telling me. I was beyond frightened. But making the decision to abort was not an easy one. Still, I ended up calling the closest clinic over miles away and making an appointment. Everything I had heard about abortion clinics was you would have a sonogram to confirm the pregnancy, then you would meet with a counselor to make sure this is the choice you want to make. When my appointment came, I had a sonogram and was taken into the doctors office.
He asked why I was there and signed the paperwork. No counseling. I was taken back to a small room with about ten other women, all in medical gowns, while a movie played to distract us. I waited in that room for over an hour before it was my turn. I still regret it to this day. A woman has to do what is right for her and no one else. I was doing an internship after graduate school when I met a young engineer through a personal ad.
We dated briefly and I found out I was pregnant after having sex just once. But at that time I had no job in sight, no money, and no family or other support system. He was very opposed to the abortion, since he was Catholic, but he did end up paying for it.
Afterwards he never spoke to me again, except to tell me that HE was torn up inside. In the meantime, I had to return for a D and C because I had heavy bleeding.
He disappeared from my life, went on to become a successful professor of engineering, married and had two sons. I went on with my life, made an acceptable career, had two marriages, but never got pregnant again. I wanted to let your new readers know that I am among the women who have had abortions after 20 weeks. Because brains mostly develop in the third trimester, so does the hydrocephalus that took our sons.
No, despite many kinds of testing, we do not have a known gene mutation to test for by CVS at ten weeks. Both sons had slightly large between two and three standard deviations up from average, well within the three SD medical range ventricles at 20 weeks.
But we checked again three weeks later and the ventricles had grown rapidly, the existing beautiful brain being obliterated by fluid. These bans or, at our hospital, just the fear of public opinion , with no tie to our medical situation mean that we have to carefully plan out the ultrasounds: 17 weeks, 20 weeks, 23 weeks.
Who could think of the different cruel difficulties, besides the people they happen to? A reader shifts our debate over sex-selective abortion into this broader series on personal abortion stories:.
Removing the ability for the doctor and patient to converse freely is simply punitive to families already in a difficult situation. At the outset, I ask that you please withhold my name because only a few friends and family members know this story. I have never had to consider having an abortion because of my baby having a Down Syndrome diagnosis, but my husband and I did face this decision a couple of years ago during our week ultrasound when our baby was diagnosed with something called hypoplastic left heart syndrome.
This is a heart defect where the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped. Up until about 30 years ago, this was a death sentence for a baby. Babies with this condition generally died within a few days of being born.
These surgeries are just a stop-gap, though. Your baby still needs to be on the heart transplant list. Moreover, there is very little data on the quality of life of children with this condition, and many of these children have other developmental problems, including intellectual disabilities.
HLHS is not Down Syndrome, of course, but it is a syndrome where your child could have a decent life provided there is extensive intervention to make it so.
In my case, though, our baby had other heart defects in addition to HLHS that would have necessitated surgery while she was in utero in order for her to even qualify for these HLHS surgeries. After shedding many tears over this very-much-wanted baby, we decided to end the pregnancy. We have another child, and we would have had to spend most of our time in a hospital once the new baby was born, which would have short-changed him significantly.
We both work and make decent money, but something like this could have bankrupted us and probably would have led to at least one of us losing our jobs because of how time-consuming this process would have been. Our medical insurance is good but probably not that good. Most importantly, though, we just could not foresee this child having a decent quality of life or living very long. This is the most gut-wrenching decision I have ever made in my life, but it was the right decision for my family and we have no regrets.
I would like to think that I would keep a baby who had a Down Syndrome diagnosis because I know they can have a decent quality of life. However, given how difficult it is to raise such a child, I cannot begrudge a parent for making the decision not to do it. And now here is where I get on my soapbox about abortion. Becoming a mother and in particular, going through this experience of being pregnant with a baby who had congenital defects, has made me ardently pro-choice. Being a parent is wonderful, but it is also expensive, time-consuming, and physically and emotionally draining.
If you do not have the financial or emotional resources to handle it, then you should not be forced into it. That is especially true for children with severe congenital defects. Our country is not very kind to families, and we have one political party where many members of it want to turn our country into some kind of libertarian economic paradise that offers even less government support for families than we currently have.
This same party is also hell-bent on making it impossible for women to have safe abortions. You cannot have it both ways. If you want that libertarian economic paradise where it is every man for himself, then you better have abortion on demand. If you want to end access to safe, legal abortion, then you better offer a huge panoply of government programs that make it easier to raise children.
Nine years ago today, in a narrow decision, the U. Thank you for asking for stories. I have waited a long time to tell mine. If you choose to use it, please do not use my name.
I was 31, happily married, and pregnant with a child that was both wanted and planned. We had gone in for a routine ultrasound at The tech was pretty quiet during the whole thing and told us to wait in the room when she was done. The normally upbeat, high-energy doctor was somber when he entered the room and began to tell us about the baby whose crib we had just brought home. I was thinking it would still be OK, and we would love and raise a special-needs child.
Not comprehending what was happening, I called the university research hospital the doctor referred me to. They said they could see me in two weeks. He said that would not work, so he personally called the hospital and told them they needed to see me right away. My doctor knew, although I did not, was that we needed to know quickly what we were dealing with because I could not get an abortion in my home state beyond 20 weeks. Abortion had not yet entered my mind. The second ultrasound was going to be much clearer.
The doctor performing it asked if I wanted to know what he was seeing as he did it. I said I did. The geneticist I saw right after was straight out of horror movie.
Because of how far along I was, and that it was already Thursday evening, he said I would need to decide that day if I wanted an abortion because I would need to do it the next day or they would not be able to do it. I was too shocked and stunned to even burst into tears. Monday came. If I did not, the baby could die in utero at any time, or I might carry to term.
He said I still had a little more time to decide to end the pregnancy, but not much. What do you say? Every minute of the day, I thought about my baby. I began to think about what if I were to go full term and he was born alive.
By an odd twist of fate, my boss at the time had had a very similar situation five years earlier. She did go full term and her daughter was born alive.
She spent four months carrying a baby she knew would die within hours of being born. But life was not one of my choices. It may be a clear, rational decision that she is sure of, but that does not make it easy.
The result is the same. I was branded from the moment I expressed the thought of having one, and we did not have a child to raise. We named him and recognized his death as we would have any child.
Polls consistently show that a significant majority of Republican men, and even as many as half of Republican women, believe that amid the reassessment of gender relations sparked by the MeToo movement, men are being unfairly punished and discriminated against.
In , when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture , or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible. In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T.
Doing work that is fulfilling has become ubiquitous career advice, but no one should depend on a single social institution to define their sense of self. Since the start of the pandemic, Americans have been talking seriously with friends, family, and themselves about the shortcomings of their modern-day work lives.
According to my research, which draws on surveys and interviews with college students, graduates, and career coaches, more than 75 percent of college-educated workers believe that passion is an important factor in career decision making.
And 67 percent of them say they would prioritize meaningful work over job stability, high wages, and work-life balance. Believers in this idea trust that passion will inoculate them against the drudgery of working long hours on tasks that they have little personal connection to. For many, following their passion is not only a path to a good job; it is the key to a good life.
Research has found that having children is terrible for quality of life—but the truth about what parenthood means for happiness is a lot more complicated. Few choices are more important than whether to have children, and psychologists and other social scientists have worked to figure out what having kids means for happiness.
Others have pushed back, pointing out that a lot depends on who you are and where you live. But a bigger question is also at play: What if the rewards of having children are different from, and deeper than, happiness? The early research is decisive: Having kids is bad for quality of life. In one study , the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked about employed women to report, at the end of each day, every one of their activities and how happy they were when they did them.
They recalled being with their children as less enjoyable than many other activities, such as watching TV, shopping, or preparing food. My best friend had gone through a tough divorce and was remarrying. I was thrilled for him. As a bonus, the wedding would take place in New Orleans, where my friend lives. New Orleans is a miraculous place, and my favorite city to visit in America. The notion of a trip there shone out of the fog and dreariness of this whole era of history.
Our fears about what other people think of us are overblown and rarely worth fretting over. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. Social media has opened up our heads so that just about any trespasser can wander in.
If you tweet whatever crosses your mind about a celebrity, it could quite possibly reach the phone in her hand as she sits on her couch in her house.
We are wired to care about what others think of us. According to these sorts of arguments, people who never go to college stay reasonable, normal, or—depending on how you look at it—asleep. In , I was covering a soccer match in Columbus, Ohio, between the U. Fuck yeah! And I was! One of the primary joys of cheering for your country in international sport—at the Olympics, the World Cup, or a particularly rowdy curling championship—is the opportunity to be nationalistic in a mostly harmless way.
Maybe soccer can help bring that back. If you decide to continue with your pregnancy, there are a wide range of services to support you during pregnancy and after you have had your baby. If you're pregnant and on your own, it's important there are people you can share your feelings with who can offer you support.
Find out more about having a baby if you're on your own. If you're pregnant or you've had a baby, you're expected to stay at school and continue education until you finish Year Your school should not treat you any differently. The law says colleges, universities or your apprenticeship employer are not allowed to treat you unfairly if you're pregnant or have had a baby. But if you're a student, you should be able to take maternity-related absence from studying after your baby's been born.
How long you take will depend on your situation and your particular course. Apprentices can take up to 52 weeks' maternity leave. If you're an apprentice, you may qualify for statutory maternity pay. Maternity Action: maternity and parental rights for apprentices. It may be helpful for you both to seek advice. If you feel that this experience has highlighted an area that you need to work on, such as discussion with your daughter on sex and relationship matters, you may wish to discuss this after the event when the time is right.
Relate is an organisation that provides professional, confidential relationship counselling and can be contacted on or visit the Relate website. BPAS offers free counselling to help women discuss their feelings after an abortion, click here for more information about counselling after an abortion. Teenage pregnancy If you have just found out that your teenage daughter is pregnant you can download the teenage pregnancy leaflet from Family Lives , which will give you information and advice.
Family Lives has a free helpline for parents, providing parenting advice and parental guidance Home Contact Us. Book an appointment Call Find a clinic. Book appointment. Toggle main menu. Touch to call us on 30 40 Toggle main menu Abortion care Abortion care Considering abortion? Pregnancy options discussion Advice and counselling What is abortion? Abortion treatments The abortion pill Surgical abortion.
Supporting someone having an abortion Partners Parents Friends Who to bring with you. After an abortion Contraception after abortion Pregnancy remains. Contraception Emergency contraception Contraception after a baby For men.
Miscarriage care Surgical management Medical management Expectant management What to expect on the day Miscarriage Recovery. BPAS Fertility. Erectile dysfunction Viagra Cialis Levitra Spedra. Share your story. Join our mailing list.
Centre for Reproductive Research. Useful links. About our charity Impact Statement — Annual Review.
0コメント