Over the weekend, I was so happy to take a road trip to Atlanta with my best friend and my daughter to listen to Nadia Bolz-Weber speak on her Shameless book tour. In her book, she is addressing all manner of issues — sex abuse, true love waits (the “saving virginity” for marriage program some churches promote), abortion, mistreatment of the LGBTQ community in the church. . . It’s really opening up a much needed conversation.
It was a wonderful trip.
At one point, she asked audience members to write something that had been shaming them that they wanted to release on a card and then to place it in the offering plate. Of course, they were anonymous. She later read a few aloud.
One of the them has really stayed with me: “I want to release the shame of the abortion I had when I was 16. I’m over 30 now.”
And I so understand.
I’ve never written or spoken about this publicly — but it is time. May it be of service.
See, I had my children when I was in my early twenties. At the time, I was in a bad — no, terrible — marriage and I felt SO trapped. My then husband did not work — but did gamble and drink so so much — and I was struggling to feed three small children and work and keep the lights on. And I desperately wanted to leave.
And I learned that I was pregnant.
I was devastated.
(As an aside, I was at my own OB/GYN’s office then and I was crying. His nurse grabbed my arm and shamed me, saying, “Children are a gift from the Lord.” So effing inappropriate. I was in abusive situation and struggling to care for my three small children who were HERE. That was NOT her place. I never returned to that office. I found a new doctor.)
Despite a desperate desire NOT to have to go through with an abortion, there was no way I could afford another child at the time or take any more time off work or be further bound to my ex-husband who I was trying so hard to leave.
I prayed and cried and prayed and cried.
And I scheduled my appointments. Plural.
In my state, there is a punitive system where a woman has to go one day to see the baby’s heartbeat on ultrasound and be “educated” and then come back the next day for the procedure — to add to her misery.
There are also VERY limited options for anesthesia and medication — the procedure is literally done with an Ativan and 2 Tylenol — and then antibiotics are prescribed afterwards. This is also by state law to ensure that is as unpleasant as possible — as if it weren’t terrible enough already.
To make matters more horrific for me personally, when I arrived the second day for the procedure, and made my way through the protesters outside, I checked in and went to get my medications. At that time I was a working nurse in a local hospital. The nurse practitioner who greeted me to administer my medications was also my house supervisor at work.
I will never forget making eye contact with her in that moment.
She gave me the Ativan, 2 Tylenol, and something to open my cervix.
I took my medications from her and was sent to a small room to wait for them to “work” and to be called to a “procedure room.”
When I was called to the procedure room, I was immediately helped onto a GYN exam table. The OB/GYN in the room, a woman in her thirties with long braids — who I would later run into delivering babies at a local hospital — didn’t speak and placed my legs in stirrups. She then said to the staff in the room, “Oh good, she’s already bleeding.”
She immediately turned on a loud machine and very quickly performed the D&C procedure.
I quietly cried — and she said to a nurse, “Get her something for her eyes.”
She then said to another nurse, “Make sure we have everything” — and I wanted to vomit. That has never left me. This was all in 2004.
They quickly got me off the table and into the “recovery room” — which was a big room with a bunch of recliners — and the same nurse practitioner I worked with monitoring everyone.
It was just shit.
I was finally discharged home, where I slept for several hours, and bleed heavily for several, several days.
When I finally did get myself and my children away from my ex-husband, he felt free to “weaponize” my abortion — and call me all manner of evil things — murderer, whore — for not being able to afford a fourth child in addition to supporting him and his addictions. It was hell.
And it does still haunt me in many ways.
I wish terribly there had been ANY other way.
But honestly?
In the same exact situation?
I believe I would have had to do the same exact thing.
I am just so so grateful to have survived and to have been blessed with a whole new life now.
And I tell my story and release my shame to let anyone who is walking through something similar know that there is hope, of a way out of a nightmare situation, of surviving awful things, of getting through things you have to do that you REALLY don’t want to.
We can get through the hardest of hard things.
Sometimes we just have to.
Sometimes being strong and carrying on is the only way.
