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They did neither. The counsellor and nurse made me feel like I was just another reckless teenager. They encouraged me to agree for them to schedule an abortion. They didn’t discuss any other options with me. The next few days were a blur. I don’t remember dwelling on it much, other than one night I burst out crying to my brother and didn’t know why. I lied and said I had fallen out with a friend at school. I look back at that moment as my conscience crying out for me to make a different choice. I didn’t listen to it. On Saturday the 15th of December 2007, after telling my parents I was going to a friend’s house, I took two buses to Marie Stopes to have a termination.
It was busy inside and there were all different types of people, most of whom were older than me. That gave me some comfort. I thought if people like that had abortions, then it must be okay. |
After a while, through a friendship I made, I would find myself in conversations about abortion. I was so closed off to the experience that I would just sit there silently, numb and unaffected by what was going on around me. Around the same time, a friend told me about the abortion she’d had when she was 15. I knew about it at the time, but she had never mentioned it again, so I thought that it didn’t bother her. When she started talking to our group of friends, she broke down. I had never seen anything like her grief before. I hurt so much for her and wanted to take her pain away. I’d had no idea she had been carrying so much guilt around for those years. A couple of weeks later, I heard a pro-life talk. It was all things I had heard before, but somehow it hit me in a new way. I had to leave because I felt like I was going to break, just like I had seen my friend break weeks before. I cried from depths I never knew I possessed and shared my story with a friend. That was the beginning of a long, painful, and beautiful journey of healing.
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