We know that all things work together for good for those who love God.
—Romans 8:28
Abortion is a blessing.
If that sentence made you uncomfortable, I understand. Abortion stigma impacts all of us, myself included. Let me explain what I mean when I say that abortion is a blessing. I am not claiming that abortion is easy or without loss, grief, or other complicated emotions. To the contrary, I am affirming that the very process of identifying and coming to terms with one’s full experience of abortion can lead to tremendous growth and positive change in a person’s life. Abortion has the power not only to save lives but to bless them too.
As I talked with people about their experiences, I heard about the ways that abortion helped wake them up to the realities of their lives that they might have ignored otherwise. By making the decision to end a pregnancy, they gained clarity about their sense of purpose and direction in the world. Some ended relationships that were abusive, toxic, or otherwise unfulfilling. Others spent time exploring their desires to become parents or not in the future. Many say that having an abortion helped them turn inward and uncover truths hidden within themselves.
Take a moment to bring to mind some of the times in your own life when you experienced significant personal growth. My guess is that it was not during a time of calm and peace. It was likely a time of chaos, grief, confusion, or uncertainty.
One of these times in my life happened just a few years ago when I was in the middle of some sudden professional upheaval. Even though these changes were mostly positive, at least from the outside, I was surprised by how my emotions were all over the place, ranging from sadness and anger to self-doubt and anxiety. With all of this negative emotional energy swirling around me, I began to wonder if I had made a mistake by making this decision to take on a new endeavor. If it was a good decision, why was it making me feel so bad?
At the recommendation of a few friends, I picked up a copy of the book Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes with the hope that it would help me work through my confusing feelings. Author William Bridges describes the difference between a change and a transition. A change can be a decision we make or a thing that happens, but a transition is an internal process of coming to terms with the change. It requires us to go inward, to let go of the past, and to come to a place of acceptance of a new reality. Every change is an ending of something. The transition of coming to terms with that ending is where our growth happens, and oftentimes it involves loss.
So much of our public conversations and debates on abortion focus on the moment of decision and the moment of access. Particularly in pro-choice circles, we pay little attention to the ways that someone processes their abortion, how they weave it into the greater narrative arc of their lives. In other words, we ignore the ways that people make meaning of their abortion experiences.
As an adolescent, I was taught a simplistic faith in God’s good plans for my life. If you grew up in a white evangelical church like I did, you may have been encouraged to memorize this verse (completely out of its historical context) from Jeremiah: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). My idea of what those divine plans were exactly was sophomoric; I was a teenager after all. But putting childish things aside, the basic sentiment of releasing my anxieties about the future and putting my trust in Spirit to work things out remains a central part of my faith today. When I feel out of control and I’m grasping for answers, I return to the practice of surrendering to the unknown with the absolute knowing that somehow there are divine plans in the works that are orchestrated for my growth and my good. Even if the current circumstances are causing me pain, I believe that “all things work together for good” in the end (Romans 8:28).
The three stories in this chapter are filled with pain and joy, grief and growth. What ties them together is a shared commitment to caring for others who have abortions and offering them the loving, nonjudgmental support that they wish they’d had. Together these incredible women are shifting the culture of abortion one compassionate conversation at a time.
“After I had an abortion, it sparked so much change in my life. It made me stop and take inventory of everything happening in my life. I felt so out of control. It made me go inward and try to figure out what I wanted my life to look like. A lot of my healing has been taking active steps toward that.”
Adriana was on a two-week work trip in New York City when she started having what felt like severe PMS symptoms. Her face had broken out, and her breasts were sore. At first, she was too caught up in the busyness of her trip to realize that her period was late. Later when she took a pregnancy test and it was positive, she felt like the ground had been ripped out from under her. “I could see my future chosen for me should I go through with the pregnancy,” she recounted. She cut her trip short and booked a flight back home to San Francisco. Before boarding the plane, Adriana knew what she would do. When she got home, she would call to schedule an abortion as soon as possible.
Picturing that six-hour trip home, I asked what was going through her head during the flight. She said that she felt relief that abortion was an option for her, that she didn’t have to continue the pregnancy, and that this moment wasn’t going to determine her future. She also felt guilty by how relieved she felt. She wondered if she was supposed to be feeling worse about her decision. Over the next several months, Adriana would cycle through a range of emotions: relief, guilt, sadness, and shame. Sometimes these tough feelings would creep out of nowhere and surprise her. But of course, the healing process is never as linear as we would like it to be. “Just because abortion is common doesn’t mean it’s easy to go through,” she said.
Adriana talked about the messages she got about sexuality as a child. She and her sister grew up in a culturally Catholic family with parents who had immigrated to the United States from El Salvador when they were in their twenties. When they had their daughters, they enrolled them in Catholic school, where the message about sex was clear: sex for pleasure was dirty, and only procreative sex within marriage was acceptable. At home, there wasn’t much conversation about sex at all. In her household, she said the unspoken rule was “You don’t talk about sex, because it doesn’t exist.” But she does remember an odd explanation her mother gave her about where babies came from, an anecdote that would later become a family joke: when you get married, the priest asks if you want to have a baby. If you say yes, he gives you a seed that you swallow, and that’s how the baby grows. Adriana laughed as she told me about going to school and repeating this to her classmates, insistent that it was true. Later, when Adriana was in high school and dating her first serious boyfriend, her mother did mention birth control briefly, and she also informed Adriana that if she got pregnant, having an abortion “would not be a choice” because “it’s a sin,” and their family would work together to help raise her child. Adriana shared that her mother had been pregnant and unmarried, which had been difficult. Understandably, Adriana has never shared about her decision to have an abortion with her parents.
Thankfully, Adriana had other support. She confided in a friend who’d had an abortion years earlier and her sister, who initially was shocked when she learned about the pregnancy but then went on to help Adriana navigate the health care end of things, doing research on abortion providers and collecting information regarding options. Compared to many, Adriana had quite a bit of support, yet she still felt completely isolated. She reflected, “I had what you’d consider ‘support’—my best friend, only sister, and partner were present and there for me. I had the resources, money, and access to the care I needed. If that was my experience and I still felt isolated and alone—how must others feel who don’t have anyone? How can we be failing people over a clear health matter?” There is so much to be done in providing holistic care and resources for people who have abortions. As Adriana researched her options, she kept stumbling across websites and online forums that disguised themselves as supportive of all reproductive decisions but were sponsored by antiabortion Christian ministries. The posts were full of misinformation about abortion. “I couldn’t trust those stories,” she said.
The time between Adriana discovering her pregnancy and having her abortion was around two weeks. She went to the University of California San Francisco hospital, where the process was straightforward, and she felt welcomed and cared for by the staff. They explained all of her options and asked how she was doing emotionally with her decision to end the pregnancy. As Adriana described it, “They were very normalizing of the experience but also supportive in not minimizing it.” This reflected my own experience volunteering in a clinic that offered abortion. In the end, Adriana opted for the medication abortion and went home. The abortion process was physically painful. Adriana’s cramps were intense and lasted several days. Her partner was with her, but he didn’t know how to care for her through this. She felt like she was going through the experience completely on her own.
After her abortion, Adriana embarked on an inner journey of soul searching and healing. She wanted clarity about the direction of her life. Now that she had made this decision to end her pregnancy, she wanted to make something of her life so that when she looked back, she would see that that choice had been worth the pain. She began to make major changes: she quit her job, moved to New York, and trained to be a doula.
Today Adriana continues to find healing by helping others. She volunteers for Exhale, an organization that provides nonjudgmental afterabortion emotional support and offers loving support to those who need it. She reflected, “It’s been so healing to normalize the conversation around abortion and talk with people who have had the same experience, though each story is unique and different. Helping others has helped me come to acceptance of my own experience.” While there is still so much work to be done in providing support to people who have abortions, she is grateful to play her small part in helping others feel less alone.
“For my whole life, I thought I believed in abortion for other people, but I would never do it. And then I did.”
Ashley had just turned twenty-four when she started dating a former coworker seventeen years her senior. They’d only been together a few months when he invited her to France. As soon as they arrived, though, she began to question their relationship. “We were in such different stages of life,” she told me. She decided to break it off. A few days later, she discovered that she was pregnant. She called him to figure out what to do, and he promised to support whatever decision she made.
Ashley vacillated. She made two appointments to have an abortion and didn’t go either time. “I just wasn’t ready to make that final choice,” she said. The pregnancy did mean something to her, and she knew that he would make an amazing father. She began educating herself about pregnancy and childbirth.
As Ashley debated what to do, she reflected a lot on her own childhood. She’d grown up in a broken family. Her parents had separated for the final time when she was seven years old. “They had a rough relationship,” she said. “I never want that for my children. It’s absolutely OK to coparent with someone, but I didn’t want to stay together for the kid.” She couldn’t see herself having a baby with someone who wouldn’t be part of her life for the long term. She called the clinic a third time to make an appointment, and at seventeen weeks, Ashley had an abortion. “I’m grateful that I live in a time when I can decide when I want to be a parent,” she shared.
A few weeks before that, she had a fainting spell and took herself to the emergency room to get checked out. Because they were running tests, she needed to disclose that she was pregnant. The hospital staff responded with heartfelt congratulations. “Are you going to give birth here?” they asked. They assumed that she was happy about the pregnancy. When they did an ultrasound, no one asked if she wanted to look at it; they just showed it to her. She captured a short video on her phone, a memory she still keeps.
Since Ashley was in her second trimester, before her procedure, she first needed to have her cervix dilated, a step that would set the abortion process in motion. Afterward she was given pain medication and told to go home. She would return the following day for the abortion. The cervical dilation had been the first step of her process, and the surgical procedure would complete it. The time between leaving the clinic and returning the next day was the hardest part for her. “I couldn’t back out if I wanted to,” she said. She just wanted the waiting to be over.
The next day, Ashley prepared herself for the protesters she would face. Even though there were supportive clinic escorts available to walk with her to the door, she didn’t need them and calmly made her way inside unbothered by the protesters’ yelling. Inside the clinic walls, Ashley felt nothing but kindness and compassion. The staff explained everything to her and assured her complete confidentiality. As she sat in the waiting room, she experienced a mixture of emotions. She saw people from all walks of life waiting right alongside her. “The statistics about abortion are right,” she said. Until then she had felt like the stereotype of the “young irresponsible person who gets an abortion,” as she put it. But seeing people of all ages and backgrounds there gave her a lot of comfort.
Reflecting on her abortion experience now, Ashley knows how privileged and fortunate she was to live in Massachusetts, where there aren’t the kind of restrictions and barriers people face elsewhere. “I wasn’t forced to look at an ultrasound and sit with that for days before having access to a procedure,” she said. “I didn’t have to travel to another state.” For months after her abortion, Ashley waited for the day when a bill would arrive in the mail, but it never did. Eventually, she looked up the details of her insurance coverage, and she was surprised and grateful to learn that abortion was covered. “When I learned that it was taken care of, there was almost an equal weight lifted off my chest,” she told me. She was barely making ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck in a shared house with roommates at the time. Having to pay for an expensive medical procedure would have been incredibly difficult.
While the logistics of the abortion were simple to navigate, the emotional part of her journey was difficult. Other than her former partner, Ashley told no one about her abortion. “I felt like I was carrying this deep, dark secret,” she told me. Shortly after the abortion, her best friend got pregnant. Even though they were close, Ashley didn’t feel like she could be forthcoming about her own pregnancy. She watched her friend become a parent, all the while wondering what might have been.
Not long after her abortion, Ashley’s father died after a tragic car accident. The grieving process was painful, but it made her more compassionate toward anyone going through a loss. She took classes about bereavement and realized how often we encounter hurting people without any idea of what they are going through. Years later, when a coworker got pregnant and needed an abortion, Ashley finally decided to share her story. She could see that this woman needed someone to say, “Me too. I’ve been there.” When she realized how much it helped when she shared, she started being more open about it with people when it felt right to do so. The more people she told, the more people opened up about their own abortion stories. She joined a Facebook support group for people going through abortion experiences, not so much for her to share her own story, but to support others. She also volunteers with Exhale. “The biggest thing that heals me is helping other people through similar experiences,” she told me.
Ashley knows that she would not be the empathetic and caring person she is today were it not for her abortion. She hopes to change the narrative for people like her who experience abortion as a loss, knowing now how beauty and grief often go hand in hand. Ashley, who is now a trained birth doula, shared about the first time she witnessed a birth. She likened that experience to the passing of her father. “I’ve seen death, and now I’ve seen birth,” she said. The two are inextricably linked. There are times when she feels sad about her pregnancy, but she knows that is just how grief works.
“I don’t need to make it go away,” she said. “Just like the loss of my father, my abortion will always be there. I will always be sad about it, and that’s OK.”
“I didn’t touch you, but I felt you. I didn’t know you, but I loved you. I loved you, my first, my only.”
Imagine this sequence of events. First, you learn you’ve earned a coveted spot in a teacher training program. You’re absolutely elated because this has been a dream for years. The next day, you receive even more life-changing news: you have been accepted into a graduate program in education. You feel like you’re on top of the world. Then, the following day, you wake up early to get ready for work, and when you come downstairs, you find your boyfriend of five years drunk on the couch and smoking cigarettes at six in the morning. You’re beyond fed up, and as much as you love him, you tell him he has to leave. The relationship is over. A few hours later, you take a pregnancy test, a routine measure for someone with an irregular menstrual cycle. For the first time, it’s positive. You call the boyfriend you just kicked out of your apartment and tell him that he needs to turn around and come back. The two of you need to talk.
This was Jocelyn’s complicated life in 2015. She told me the whole story over the phone while she was on a hike near her home in San Francisco. “I’d rather not have my roommates hear me,” she said. At the time of her pregnancy, Jocelyn was working in the toddler classroom at a local preschool. She loved her job, but she had dreams of becoming a certified teacher. Now the opportunity was right in front of her. Everything that she’d worked so hard for was at her fingertips. But she was pregnant. There was no chance of a long-term future with her partner, even though they loved each other. He was an alcoholic who struggled with depression and couldn’t hold down a job.
Jocelyn did not want to have an abortion. She loves children and has wanted to be a mother for as long as she can remember. Having an abortion was something that she simply needed to do. In the preschool bathroom, she made the call to Planned Parenthood to schedule a medication abortion. Ten days later, on the morning of her appointment, she was a wreck. Everyone at the clinic told her that she didn’t have to do this now, that she could come back another day if and when she felt better about her decision. Jocelyn knew that if she left that day, she would never come back. She swallowed the dose of mifepristone and went home.
The abortion was excruciating. She was in so much pain that she thought something was wrong. She called the clinic, and they assured her that what was going on was within the wide range of normal. They told her to expect heavy bleeding for a couple of days, and after that, it should taper off. But five weeks after she’d taken the pills, Jocelyn was still bleeding. “It was this constant reminder of what I had done,” she said. She went in for a follow-up appointment at the clinic, where they did an ultrasound, which showed that her uterine lining was a little thicker than it should be, but they were confident that it would resolve on its own. If the bleeding continued longer than a week, she should come back and get checked out again.
The day after that follow-up appointment, Jocelyn was in the shower when she started to pass large blood clots. She was bleeding so heavily that she had to change her tampon every ten minutes. Scared and unsure of what to do, she called the clinic about what was happening, and they urged her to go to the emergency room immediately. By the time she arrived at the University of San Francisco hospital, her pants were soaked in blood down to the knees.
The doctors ran a series of tests and concluded that she was among the 1 percent of people who have a rare complication after taking mifepristone. Her cervix had not dilated enough to pass the tissue completely, so her body was continuing to send blood to the uterus as if the pregnancy were continuing normally. This was why she was hemorrhaging. They treated her immediate symptoms and slowed the bleeding, but when they suggested that she take another round of mifepristone, she adamantly refused. She was not about to go through that ordeal again. She wanted a surgical abortion, but the hospital could not provide her one that day. If she wanted a surgical procedure, she would have to go to another campus.
I was confused as to why the hospital, a major medical facility in a city like San Francisco, could not have treated her that day. The surgical procedure Jocelyn needed is common and uncomplicated, one that many people need in the wake of a miscarriage as well. Why did they not have the equipment to provide her one there that day? This speaks volumes about the state of reproductive health care in this country and the lack of access to care even when a person is in desperate need of medical attention.
Jocelyn fought with her insurance company over the need for a surgical abortion. She actually had to delay the date of her procedure because she wasn’t sure it would be covered. The insurance company was arguing that a surgical procedure wasn’t necessary because she had been offered a second dose of mifepristone, even though that was the medication that had led to her complications in the first place. Jocelyn lucked out: she spoke with a sympathetic employee who advocated for her, and in the end, the surgical procedure was covered. If she had spoken with another insurance agent that day, who knows what would have happened?
After the procedure, Jocelyn had to come to terms with everything that she had been through physically before she could begin healing emotionally. She continued to work at the preschool, and each morning as she watched parents drop off their little ones, she felt both a sense of guilt and longing. She worried what these parents would think of her if they knew that she’d been pregnant and then ended it. I assured her that statistically, some of them had their own abortion experiences as well.
Similar to what Adriana shared with me, Jocelyn considers herself lucky to have had so much support in her life from her family and friends. Even with that circle of support, though, she found the entire abortion experience isolating. I could hear her choke up a little when she thought of all the people who have no one to turn to and how alone they must feel. We talked about all of the unnecessary suffering that people endure because of this isolation. That’s why Jocelyn makes time to volunteer on the Exhale talk line. Helping others feel less alone is healing, even though being someone’s support person can be difficult at times. Sometimes she doubts if she is making any difference at all, but then she remembers, “Every time I called the talk line, I felt helped. Hopefully that person feels helped too.”
To help make peace with her decision, Jocelyn put together a box to honor her pregnancy. She included the pregnancy test, a sonogram picture, and a letter she wrote expressing appreciation and thanks for “this thing that was and this thing that wasn’t.” Jocelyn started making big changes in her life. She ended things with her boyfriend for good, and he entered a rehab program for his addiction. She enrolled in both the teacher training and the graduate program she had been accepted into days before she discovered her pregnancy. Rather than getting pulled into feelings of guilt and shame, she actively chooses to feel gratitude because of the positive changes she has made in her life since her abortion. Jocelyn plans to continue talking about her experience and helping others going through something similar. “It brings me into a community of people who know what having an abortion feels like, and I no longer feel alone,” she told me.
Throughout our sacred texts, we receive the divine promise that we are never alone, that God is always with us. As human beings, we share a basic need to be seen, known, heard, and held in love. No one should have to go through an abortion alone, but the fear of judgment and shame keeps many from reaching out for what they need. Even when friends and family appear supportive, they often don’t know what to say or do to help.
A good friend whose mother died unexpectedly years ago shared with me that part of the grieving process was having some of her dearest friends pull away emotionally while others unexpectedly stepped in to offer their love and support. They weren’t her closest friends, but they knew grief intimately. They understood what it felt like to lose someone. The women in this chapter know the pain of isolation and secrecy, and they have made a conscious decision to draw strength from their experiences and offer the love and care that they wish they’d had. Because of their willingness to heal and grow, others don’t have to feel so alone.