I was 16 when I got pregnant with my 21 year old boyfriend, a day after my 17th birthday, my Mom told me I was getting an abortion and she took me to Wichita to Planned Parenthood.
To back up a bit, I was a promiscuous teenager, I think I was that way because I was sexually abused by my brother as a young girl. I’m not completely sure of that age, because I blocked that part out of my life until I was 19 years old. I feel like I sought out older male attention because of that childhood trauma. I was having sex a lot, so getting pregnant shouldn’t have been a surprise.
I didn’t know that I had a voice in what was going to happen to my pregnancy, because it all happened so fast. The abortion clinic had a room full of girls, we were quickly rushed through, I remember crying a lot, and getting no counseling or instructions about how it was going to go. When it was over, we went back home as if nothing had ever happened, forbidden to talk about it ever again. I tried several times, but would get shut down. It wasn’t until I had my own children 13 years later that I would come to realize what I had actually done. I am 59 years old, have 3 children, and the pain of the day I did that never goes away. It will never go away either. If only I had given the baby up for adoption, or the family could have kept and raised the baby, we were financially able to keep it, but it would have been an embarrassment to my parents to allow it to happen. I feel God has forgiven me, have I forgiven myself? I’m not totally sure. Getting pregnant changes your life, whether the choice is what I did, or the baby goes to another family, it will be a lifelong heartache when either of these choices are made.
I am a very strong woman today because of this and many other experiences, it taught me to have my own voice, use my own voice and stand up for what is not right. Girls and teenagers need education, from their parents, but if the parents are naive or too busy, there needs to be someplace available for girls to learn about how their actions are going to reshape the rest of their lives. I pray my message reaches someone and changes their minds about keeping their babies. I love my 3 children and I succeeded in my mission to keep them safe as young children and not getting pregnant as teenagers, I also talked to many of their friends when they were teenagers about not getting pregnant.
