As told to Rebecca Reid
By the time I was in my mid-twenties I’d had a lot of experience of abortion. I’d sat with friends as they took tests, celebrated when they came back negative and helped call Marie Stopes when they showed two terrifying pink lines. But until my late twenties, I’d managed to escape the whole reproductive roulette thing personally unscathed.
But when I was 27, having been married for a few months, I found myself standing at the self check out of the supermarket. I looked up and in my eye line was a pregnancy test, reminding me that my period was late.
Assuming that it would be fine, I took the test home, peed on it, left it on the sink and forgot about it for a few minutes. Later, I picked it up to throw it away and realised to my horror that it was positive.
I did not want a baby. I was not ready to have a baby. I was too young, too busy, too completely tangled in trying to build a career. I could barely afford to survive to the end of each month, let alone provide for a child.
My partner and I were keeping our heads above water, but only just. And apart from anything else, we didn’t want to be parents. We wanted to enjoy each other, to try and stabilise our careers.
So I booked an abortion. I did it quickly and neatly, and while the process wasn’t pleasant, it was bearable. But the part that really shocked me was the reaction to my news.
I didn’t tell many people. It’s not exactly the kind of news you shout about - I didn’t really feel like tagging myself at Marie Stopes on my Instagram story. But those I did tell were - to be totally honest - shocked. And not especially nice about it.
So many times I’ve sat with friends who are pregnant and talked them through their decision, never feeling the tiniest hint of judgement. And I firmly believe that if I had been unmarried, I’d have got the same reaction. But instead, because I was married (even though it had only been a couple of months since we got hitched) people asked: why?
‘But you’re married?’ one of my friends said. ‘You want kids eventually, right? So wouldn’t it make sense to do just do it now?’
The comments from people who thought I should stick with the pregnancy because I wasn’t that young, and because I was with my husband, really hurt. They hurt because they echoed what I felt.
There was a voice inside my head which said it was wrong to abort a pregnancy created by love, a pregnancy with a person I one day wanted to start a family with. But there was another much louder voice which was screaming ‘I am not ready and I cannot do this’.
Maybe on paper it would have been practical to have the baby, but the visceral rejection I felt of the entire pregnancy overrode my sense of pragmatism. I needed to not be pregnantand I needed it as soon as humanly possible.
When we talk about abortion, we tend to focus on the extremes. The very young. The women who were raped. But the majority of the 1 in 4 women who have an abortion in their lifetime are already parents and are in relationships.
Women of all ages have abortions for all sorts of reasons. There is no right or wrong reason to do so. But because we so rarely hear older women in relationships talking about it, there is a perception that abortions are predominantly experienced by very young, single women.
The waiting room at Marie Stopes was filled with women and their partners, women in their twenties, thirties and forties, all grim faced and holding hands with their other halves. I was actually one of the younger women there.
It's been years since my abortion, and now I feel ready for children. I can't put my finger on what has changed since they - maybe it's just that I'm older and more established in my career, or perhaps I'm more emotionally healthy. But whatever the change is, I'm hopeful and excited about the future.
My only real regret is that the people I told about my abortion were unable to support me in a time when I badly needed their support.
If you have a friend who tells you that she is having an abortion, please don't ask her to justify it, and please don't act as if she's making a mistake just because she's in a relationship, or because she's not a teenager.
Being single or being young are not the only two reasons that a person might seek and abortion, and when you're going through the process of deciding to have one, you're already asking yourself agonising questions. You don't need your friends doing the same.