You're the Only One I've Told: The Stories Behind Abortion

by Meera Shah

When someone does share, they are immediately labeled as “brave” and “courageous.” Maybe this is true. Given the hostile climate that often surrounds this topic, it is brave to talk about abortion openly. But I fear that this rhetoric may worsen the stigma as well. Should someone be called brave for doing what they felt was best for them?

The focus is on what impact that pregnancy would have on the greater context of their lives.

Medicine can tell us when pregnancy begins and when a fetus is likely to be viable outside of the womb, but the concept of life is more abstract and varies depending on an individual’s belief.

My father always believed that one should never have blind faith for religion, that faith should come after you’ve established a concrete understanding of the core principles that religion teaches.

(anekantvada). This is the idea that a viewpoint cannot be 100 percent true; therefore, every viewpoint has to have at least some truth to it.

Denying someone an abortion to make a statement about morality is ignoring the root cause of the issue.

Believe it or not, everyone knows and loves someone who has had an abortion.

As of this writing, abortion is still legal in all fifty states.

:(

However, with the recent shift in the makeup of the Supreme Court and the very real threat to Roe being overturned, many states have “trigger laws” in place that would automatically make abortion a crime. In other words, many states currently have abortion bans in place that aren’t active because of Roe. But if Roe is gone, these bans become active.

A political science professor at Boise State University discovered that the stronger the parent’s political belief, the more likely the child is going to inherit that belief.3

In the first two years after decriminalization in New York, about 60 percent of the people having abortions there were not New York residents.

She was about four or five months along in her pregnancy. “I remember doing hundreds of sit ups and punching myself in the stomach. I must have used knitting needles. I read about that somewhere.” Not too long after, she ended up passing the pregnancy. “I bled so much I could have died.”

When they met a few days later, Marilyn handed Linda a list of psychiatrists who would write a letter saying that Linda was suicidal because she was pregnant and didn’t want to be. She needed two letters.

Patients should not have to teach their providers how to take care of them; providers should understand the needs of the communities they are caring for.

I realized then that Planned Parenthood isn’t pro-abortion, they’re just family planning.”

Talk to anyone who has experienced loss, and one thing becomes quickly obvious: there is no right way to grieve.

Mary doesn’t feel that she had an abortion or that she was ending her pregnancy. She felt that she was preventing her child from having a life of pain.

“It’s not about being pro-choice, it’s about being pro-truth.”

The priest eventually told her that they should go see a high-risk pregnancy doctor and learn about all their options.

But at some point, she remembered calling her older sister. She was the first person to suggest that perhaps the ob-gyn had withheld some information because of his religious beliefs. “And I said, ‘No frigging way, you’ve got to be kidding me. They’re going to withhold information from me? They wouldn’t do that!’”

“Are you not doing anything for me because of your religious beliefs?” she demanded over the phone. “Yes,” he told her.

Disgusting

“And this is a regret I’ll have until I die,” she said. “I was really afraid that I wouldn’t be able to have the guts to get pregnant again if I was so freaked out by [holding her]. So I made the decision not to hold her.”