Eight Other Women's Stories

Debbie Stone, 27, New Hampshire factory worker (earning $14,000 a year) and single mother of one:

I got pregnant when I was in the eighth grade. I had dated the guy for a long time and he was my first sexual encounter. I used no contraception. I don’t even remember hearing about the Pill back then. I hid my pregnancy from my family for six months, and by then it was too late for an abortion, but I’d never really thought of it anyway.

David was born in May 1972. My boyfriend denied all responsibility for him, so I quit school, and we went on welfare. I got about $38 a month, which didn’t even pay for David’s formula. I ran away from home several times and was thrown out of the house. I argued a lot with my parents because they wanted to raise David as my brother, not my son. Finally, when I was 15, I got my own apartment. It cost $32 a week. It was small and dingy and full of cockroaches, but it was all I could afford. I put David in day care, lied about my age and got a job as a stitcher in a men’s coat factory. I worked 12 hours a day for $1.60 an hour.

David’s father started coming around again. We began dating, and five months later I discovered I was pregnant. I had stopped using contraceptives. Earlier my mother had found my birth control pills and she forbade me to use them. At first I was ecstatic. I thought, “Wow, it’s gonna work. We’re going to be a family.” But when my boyfriend found out I was pregnant, he left.

I fell apart. I kept thinking, “How am I going to get by with two kids? How do you split nothing?” I knew what it was like on welfare. You paid your rent, bought your groceries with food stamps and paid your utilities. You couldn’t buy your kid a pair of sneakers without telling the gas company you’d only be paying half this month. I was always being threatened by somebody that something was going to be shut off. If I wanted to buy David a gift or any clothes, it was either at a yard sale or a rummage sale. There was nothing left to give another kid, and David was the one who was going to lose.

When I was in my fourth month, a social worker friend suggested an abortion. It was something I wanted to do, but I thought it was too late. My father was morally opposed to it. He was raised in a Catholic orphanage. Nevertheless, he went with me to the hospital. We both talked to the doctor, and then I had several more counseling sessions before I was admitted. The doctor injected me with a saline solution. It didn’t work, and he had to give me a second injection that night. I went into heavy labor. I had a male nurse who was great. He explained everything. But when I gave birth the next morning the nurses had changed and I had an elderly woman. When the baby came out she just picked it up, cut the cord and dropped it into a bucket like a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I could see it was a boy. She said, “I hope you’ve learned something from this,” and walked out.

I fell apart, not from the abortion but from dealing with that nurse. I woke up in the middle of the night and could see this crib. Of course, there was no crib in that room, but I saw an empty crib. I started crying. It was my way of saying it was final. I never felt bad about my abortion again. I have no regrets or guilt about what I did. I don’t feel that I murdered anything. I would have destroyed David’s and my chances if that pregnancy became a child. That way, I would have been a killer.

Lorijo Nerad, 28, Michigan-based national president of Women Exploited by Abortion (WEBA), an organization that claims 30,000 supporters. Nerad has been married 12 years and has two children, 11 and 10:

If I knew what I know now, I never would have had my abortion. I thought it was the only way out. I was 18 years old, married, and I already had two children. I got pregnant a third time three weeks after my second child was born. My husband was unemployed [he is currently an electrician’s apprentice] and we were on welfare. The caseworker thought I was irresponsible. She called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment for me to have an abortion. I was scared to death they were going to cut off our payments. I talked it over with my husband and he said, “Choose. It’s either me or the baby.” I felt trapped, scared and alone.

I was almost three months pregnant when I had the abortion. I was given a pamphlet that showed a drawing of a little blob of jelly inside of a womb and I thought, “Oh great, that’s what it looks like. I’ll go for that.” They didn’t inform me of the development of the child, and there was no discussion about the emotional or psychological problems.

My obstetrician did the abortion in the hospital. I had no anesthesia, no local, no tranquilizers. I lay there on the table and cried. A sheet was draped across me, and the doctor wiped pieces of the baby on it. Two weeks later I was in severe pain, just horrible. I went to the bathroom and there, in the toilet paper in my hand was my baby’s head—a little bit smaller than a golf ball and all black and tarry. They hadn’t removed it during the abortion. I called the doctor, and he said it was normal, throw it away, no big deal. Afterward I felt empty and guilty that I did something wrong, but I kept that inside of me for a long time.

Three years after the abortion, I became a Christian, and that’s when I felt severe guilt and depression. I realized the truth was that I killed my baby. I was ignorant at the time, but I still hold myself accountable. I couldn’t sleep at night, and I gained an enormous amount of weight. I didn’t care about myself at all.

In the fall of 1982 I saw the founder of WEBA tell about her abortion on the 700 Club television show. Knowing that somebody else felt the same way I did made all the difference. I decided I had enough of the pity party. It was time to get on with my life. I contacted the WEBA lady and two weeks later she asked me to be Michigan director. By year’s end I was national president.

I think a lot of women need to be more educated. People say make an informed choice. Fine, educate them. I picket abortion clinics. I think it’s very noble. It’s also important to do street counseling, passing out literature in front of the clinics. A lot of people call it harassment, but I call it education. To me bombing a clinic is less disastrous than killing children. I don’t lose any sleep over it. You wouldn’t catch me blowing up one because I don’t know anything about explosives. If I didn’t have responsibilities, I might.

A 32-year-old Los Angeles corporate executive:

I was married and wanted a child very much. But do you go ahead and have a baby when your husband doesn’t want one?

We had been married for four years and had talked about kids and their names. The time seemed right. I got very excited when I found out I was pregnant. But my joy was colored by a remark my husband had made earlier. When my period was one week late he said, “So when are you getting your period?” I said, “What if I don’t?” He said very matter-of-factly, “Well, you’ll just have an abortion.”

I thought that he was just scared. Finally he said, “If you want to have this baby that’s okay, I’ll be here for you. But I don’t know if I can be here for the kid.” He made it clear he was not ready for the responsibility of having a child. He said it was my decision.

It was a decision I wouldn’t wish on anybody. I thought about how much work it takes to raise a child, and that I didn’t want to bring an unwanted child into the world. I had no idea what it was like to take care of somebody. I kept thinking that if I was single, the abortion wouldn’t seem like a crime. Since I was married and badly wanted a baby, it seemed like a horrible crime. But I had no choice. I was so scared to have a baby without any support that fear overwhelmed any rational decision I could have made.

I was about 10 weeks pregnant when I had the abortion. Even when I went in for my blood test, I was hysterical. I sat in the hospital lobby and sobbed. A social worker finally came over and put her arm around me. When I finally got into the operating room I really flipped out. I remember thinking, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Afterward I felt empty inside. It was like a dull ache. I just wanted to embrace something. I cried for days. Every time I got my period I would think, “There’s another chance gone by.”

A few months later my husband and i separated. I think the divorce would have happened anyway; the abortion only hurried it along. I later remarried and we are both eager to start a family.

Abortion is a very personal choice, but it’s not an easy one. It is not a form of birth control. You don’t just go in and—poof—it’s gone. You feel a huge loss. And you mourn.

Shira Stern, 29, and husband Donald Weber, 32, rabbis from New Jersey:

Shira: Having a family was something we both had dreamed about, so when I became pregnant in October 1983, we were ecstatic. There wasn’t a clue that something was wrong until the third month when the doctors didn’t hear a heartbeat. After several sonograms we were told that the fetus had many anomalies, including spina bifida, organs that were developing outside the body and amnionic bands that had wrapped around the head—precluding any brain growth.

Don: We weren’t afraid of coping with a handicapped child but that wasn’t an option. The doctor said that there was no chance the baby would survive birth, and also very little chance that it would miscarry naturally. We had to decide whether to abort or face five more months of watching Shira’s belly grow with death.

Shira: Some people say, of course, that in our case there was no choice. But there was, and making that choice was the most difficult process we had ever gone through. While my physical life may not have been in danger, our emotional life was. We finally decided that it was our responsibility to abort this baby and have a chance to try again.

Don: We told the doctor we wanted a genetic work-up done on the fetus, in case the problem might affect our future children. That meant he couldn’t do a D&E [dilatation and evacuation], which would have dismembered the fetus, and Shira was not far enough along for a saline solution abortion. So what he did was induce labor. It was crucial that Shira was in a medical facility, but had it been 15 years earlier, we wouldn’t have had that choice. During the procedure Shira lost four pints of blood. Labor lasted 37 hours. Somewhere during that time we turned on the television to distract ourselves and saw President Reagan addressing the Christian Broadcasters Convention, pledging himself, in so many words, to stopping abortion and the callous murder of millions of babies each year. The two of us just fell apart. It was the biggest insult. It denied the decision process we went through with our families, friends and rabbis. We’ve both always been pro-choice, but the impetus for becoming political activists came while Shira was lying in that labor room.

Shira: We both held the baby afterward. That’s the image that keeps coming back to mind. We sought psychological help to work out our feelings. There was never any question that we wanted to have more children, but the time it took us to get to the point to try again would have been a lot longer if we had carried that baby five more months.

Don: Our son Noah was born this July 7. He’s a wonderful, healthy baby but that hasn’t made what we’d gone through go away. In fact, the abortion made this more meaningful. Somehow, there is a special appreciation.

A 38-year-old marketing manager of a Southern California newspaper:

Before women have an abortion, I think they should be counseled by someone like me. They should be told about the other side of the coin; that they might not be able to have a child when they want to. [Medical experts say that having an abortion should not affect a woman’s ability to conceive.]

I had my first abortion when I was 20. I didn’t take sex seriously. I didn’t even use a contraceptive, and I got caught. To get an abortion I had to leave the country. My brother found the name of some doctor in Puerto Rico. I went with a girlfriend. My boyfriend gave me very little support and didn’t even accompany me. Eventually we broke up. I felt humiliated and scared to death. Here I was in a foreign country at the mercy of a strange man. I didn’t know if he was a butcher or what. The abortion cost $1,000. I had a local anesthetic. I was in pain and yelling, and I remember him patting me on the shoulder saying I’d survive. When I left he said, “You’ll be back.” I said, “No, I won’t.” And he said, “They always say that.”

I didn’t resume sexual relations for two years after the abortion. Then in 1980 I found myself pregnant. I was shocked because I had used a diaphragm the whole time. I was engaged to my husband, but neither of us was ready to have a child. Our careers were on the verge of success. I was able to handle having an abortion remarkably well this time. I was cool. It was legal and easy. I did feel sorry for myself. After all, it was the second time, and I wanted to have a child, only later.

Two years after we married, I got pregnant. I was overjoyed because I felt it was right this time. Then in my 25th week I gave birth prematurely. It was a little girl—what I had wanted. She was perfect except that her lungs were underdeveloped. The nurses asked me if I wanted to hold her, but it would have been too hard; she was dead after all.

I’ve been pregnant five more times since then. Over the last two years I’ve been pregnant a total of 14 months. Each time I miscarried. I’ve gone to nine different doctors to try to find out what’s wrong with me, but in order to do that I have to keep getting pregnant. Unconsciously I think my husband is very angry at me for putting him through all this turmoil.

Knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have had the second abortion. I comfort myself with the rationale that there’s no way of knowing if it would have been a miscarriage or if it would have come to full term.

I look at abortion as I do God: I don’t know the truth about either. I believe it’s a fundamental right for a woman to decide for herself, but I believe it’s too easy to get an abortion, and that along with a right to have one there should be mandatory counseling.

I regret deeply what I have been through. What hurts most is to see someone else pregnant. I want to run over and hug their huge stomachs. ?

A 25-year-old divorced mother of three, who runs a day-care facility in her home in the Midwest. She has chosen to become a surrogate mother and is two months pregnant:

My feelings about abortion are mixed even though I’ve had three. I guess you could say I’m pro-choice. Everybody’s got a right to make up her own mind. Those who believe abortion should be illegal—let them carry that baby for nine months and raise it. I could see me now with six kids to support. Where would I be?

I got pregnant for the first time when I was 12. I didn’t have any idea about birth control. I wasn’t devastated. At 12, how can you even begin to comprehend the vastness of the situation? When my mother found out she went through the ceiling. She helped me make my decision. I remember her words, “I want what you want as long as what you want is what I want. And what I want is an abortion.”

We went to a nearby hospital. I had a minor amount of counseling, not enough, and then I had a D&C where they put you to sleep. I don’t remember anything. It wasn’t a bad experience and there really wasn’t an alternative. Can you imagine a 12-year-old with a kid of her own?

My second abortion was three and a half years ago. I had two children and was separated from my husband. I became pregnant by my boyfriend. I had been using birth control pills but I must have missed a day. I’m fertile Myrtle the Turtle. I was also on the Pill when I got pregnant with my first two kids. I miss a day, and that’s it. I realized I could never marry this guy. He was possessive and jealous and we had had some bad arguments. I knew it would be a bad decision for my life to have a baby with someone like that. I felt abortion was the best decision, but I don’t think there is sufficient counseling. I have seen a number of people who have had abortions who wouldn’t have if they had better counseling.

For this one I went to a different hospital in another city. It was like a factory. In the bed next to me was a 12-year-old girl. That brought back memories. She was having an abortion in her sixth month. It was a saline abortion where she went through 10 hours of labor. She was screaming and sucking her thumb. It was awful. Why didn’t they make her make up her mind sooner? I was put to sleep and was a little lightheaded when I came out, but there were no problems.

As long as you don’t have many abortions in succession, you don’t hurt your chances to have children. My husband and I reconciled and we had a third child but then I filed for divorce. I found out I was pregnant after that. We were using a spermicide and I guess it didn’t work. I talked it over with my ex-husband and he said, “That’s all I need—higher support payments.” I was eight weeks pregnant when I went to a women’s clinic. They just gave me Valium and vacuumed. I could feel my insides being pulled out. I felt extreme pain. Afterward I couldn’t stop shaking. I went into shock. They may have done a similar procedure with the other abortions, but I was asleep.

I felt really bad—more like I was a murderer. Even though I wasn’t doing it, I was the one who signed the paper. It was a bad experience but the right decision. Still, I wish that I didn’t have to have any of the abortions. In a sense that has led to my decision to become a surrogate mother. I can’t undo my abortions but the couple whose baby I am carrying understand that this is my way to try to make up for the past, my way of saying, “I’m sorry.”

Constance Robertson, 37, an Illinois housewife, mother of one:

In 1978 I had a traumatic childbirth after which I nearly lost my life. Our daughter was planned and wanted, and we were delighted when she was born. I had 30 hours of labor, culminating in a cesarean section. Three days after that, an infection set in and my fever went up to 106°F. For five days I was near death. I didn’t recognize my husband. I couldn’t hold my baby. I began hallucinating, seeing grinning faces everywhere. I started screaming and finally my husband had to practically force them to release me from the hospital because he felt the environment was so bad for me.

For a year after that I was emotionally disturbed and physically wrecked. I was afraid to go out, afraid of life. The only contact I had with the outside world was going to 24-hour supermarkets late at night. I was obsessed with taking care of the baby, but I was unable to do other meaningful work. I would find myself jolted out of bed with nightmares. The days passed in a blur, and the nights were an eternity.

Gradually, with the help of my husband and spiritual classes, I have gotten over these fears and I am just now starting to recover my health.

I refused to go back to the hospital for sterilization. We were extremely responsible and confident that we could control our fertility. The birth control we used had always been effective. But in 1981 it failed, and I became pregnant.

There was no question either for my husband or me about my ever undergoing childbirth again, risking my sanity or my life. I am convinced that abortion is absolutely moral. The only life within an embryo is a woman’s life circulating through it until it can sustain a separate life. I’m pro-choice, yet I’m also pro-life. My life is a sacred life.

After a night of unaided sleep I went to the National Health Care Services of Peoria. I felt grateful that the abortion was available in the clean, clear light of day for a reasonable price. The abortion was physically very painful, but afterward I felt wonderful. I was emotionally relieved, physically restored.

A 25-year-old West Coast graphic designer:

It was no big deal; I just don’t take a very sentimental view of abortion. I had no moral qualms about getting one. Basically it was a very practical decision. The pregnancy was just a horrible inconvenience. It wasn’t the right time, my husband and I weren’t married yet, and neither of us knew if we even wanted children. Under the circumstances, it was really the only sensible thing to do. Luckily my insurance covered it.

I had gotten pregnant once before when I was 20 and had an abortion then. I had been careless about inserting my diaphragm. Both times I wasn’t clear about the time of the month either, although generally speaking I am not careless. The father the first time was someone I knew casually. He was not at all the kind of man I would have married. It would never have worked.

For the second abortion I felt a little pain in the doctor’s office, so they gave me the anesthetic, and I was out like a light. I’m chicken about pain—I can barely stand the prick of a pin. I was glad I was out, but when I woke up 20 minutes later I was extremely dizzy and disoriented. Anyway afterward we went to a doughnut shop, then to a nightclub. Three days later I felt some bad cramps and called the doctor, but when he didn’t call back right away, I just forgot about it and took some Tylenol.

The Jesse Helmses of the world are the ones who are worried about too many abortions. If scientists can’t decide when life begins, how can Jesse Helms know? When the embryo is the size of a penny, how can that influence me? If I was forced to have a child I’d deeply resent it. If they get rid of legal abortions, that won’t eliminate them. It will just create a black market and make them more risky.

Updated by Julie Greenwalt,

Eleanor Hoover,

Toby Kahn,

Irene Kubota Neves,

and Debbie Zahn

Close