Life Stories

The CHOICE

I was still 19 when I got pregnant living with a boyfriend (who is soon to be my ex-husband) in Detroit. Suddenly I was faced with "the CHOICE". How I'd wished I could've been like the wholesome looking mother-to-be on the T.V. commercials. The one with a cute maternity dress and a nursery all made up ready and waiting and a warm protective husband coming home, putting his arms around her saying, "Honey, I can hardly wait."

My boyfriend wanted nothing to do with a future with me. A baby implied a future, commitment. He had already gotten the cow for free--why raise the calf?

It was so easy to be swayed, despite vague moral convictions that abortion was murder. For I felt so immature, selfish and unready to have a child.

My boyfriend and my family insisted that there was no way out but to choose abortion. I chose to be verbally manipulated to carry out their point of view, rather than thinking through the choice. I was given no alternatives. A clinic was quickly found to take care of our little "problem."

In the weeks, months, and years following the abortion, I fell in and out of depression, which was only masked at times by bursts of desperate hyperactivity. The sadness over what happened hangs about me like the hovering scent of funeral flowers that linger in a room after the funeral has come and gone.