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[myabortionstory]

Story 52

I would like to ask you not to write my story down. In fact, I will not record it, this is what I can tell you. I am a writer, I wrote my story and would like you to read it. Read just as I wrote it, please.

It was 12 pm and she was still sleeping, maybe dreaming. She dresses up to go out and look for a job. The smell of coffee wakes her up. She stretches her arms, her back, and she yawns. The bed still invites her to stay, her body has been strange for days now, she gets out of bed to pee, to take a shower, to go to college; it was not just another day, she felt her body was someone else’s.

On the bus, she felt like everyone was watching. In the classroom, someone talked about bodies and she had to leave. She did not understand why or what for, but she had to, and she did. Once she got back home, she wrote a text on her phone, but did not have the courage to press “send” at that moment, so she decided to go to sleep, woke up an hour later and sent the message: “Go to the drugstore, please.” As if he did not understand, but at the same time did, he answered: “Ok, the drugstore?” She could not say anything else, but he went to the drugstore and he bought what had to be bought.

It happened, it was happening. No, we were always so careful, it was not possible, no! She knew it, her body knew it, no! As the days went by, she felt like everybody owned her body except for her. It hurt. She felt the pain, her breasts hurt, feeling it was painful, the pain hurt. Her body was not hers anymore, she had to get it back.

Looks and talks mixed up with the guilt and the pain, saturating that body that she was rejecting. She was resisting. There was a cost to get her life back; listening to the pastor of the local church on Sunday made her mad, it fed the guilt that she was avoiding.

A suitcase and lots of fear. Courage. They traveled. In her country, she found the warmth of women, the warmth that she needed, women and sisters she did not know in an embrace of bellies, wombs, pussies, fallopian tubes, ovaries, souls who had experienced what she felt. To reach a certain calmness. To listen to her own language made her feel safer, but she was not home. She felt like calling her mother, like hearing her father’s voice, like hugging her sisters.

She decided to write her father a message while she was at the drugstore: “I miss you, daddy. I have a question to get out of my chest: is there anything that could make you stop loving me if I did it?”. She knew she would probably have to wait for his answer because he worked a lot and usually took a long time to text her back, but this time he answered immediately. “Noooo! My love, you are the love of my life, remember your dad’s hugs now. Is the young lady doing well?”. She sighed, crying, feeling something between anxiety and relief. She needed those words from her father.

He was paying for the pills while telling her that they should buy fruit and water before going to the hotel. A tight hug on a sidewalk of San Telmo warmed up the cold autumn and released the next step. Only the two of them, together as accomplices, overcoming fate, clandestinely. They paid for the best hotel they could afford and made love.

The procedure had been studied, hospitals, addresses; people they could trust were aware; the moment arrived. While her memories came up like a movie, the pain got to her whole body. Calls and words embraced her. The coldness of her country invited her to stay between blankets while she was feeling pain, pain unknown to her so far. Pain not only in the body. Pain from the guilt, from the clandestinity, from fear in all its forms. Fears she had never felt before. All kinds of images and colors were invading her mind and stealing her indetermined and complex will.

It happened. It was happening. It was intense. As the hours passed by, she felt her body coming back to her, she was slowly recovering it. Along with her intuition, she felt happiness. I made it, we made it! Intense. If she had felt as if her life wasn’t hers, now she felt changed, affected, and like she owned it. She had some barbecue and dulce de leche, they went out to see a tango show. Dance, movement, life.

Listening to her body and giving it life was what she did, as she grew with that experience. Untamed intuition guided her. An intense experience that marks us, makes us stop, take our life in our hands, resist, move forward. Plane and inspiration. Going back to the place where she had chosen to live during a cycle of her life. That same place where she was almost locked up while they were looking for the drugstore to buy the pills; she felt inspired to talk about the unbearable. Inspiration that came from that experience that pushed her to produce thoughts about it. It was her present in action.

It was Thursday and she had class. Self-writing. To live and to write. She is not worried about writing a book or a dissertation. She is busy with the writing. She feels that she has to do it. She needs to write. She feels that her experience does not stop inviting her to write. She reads a book before she goes to sleep and sees this: “We don’t know anything about a body until we know what it can do.” Reflective, but very sleepy, she falls asleep smiling and not knowing exactly why. She was never the same.

New life, new day. It was 12 pm and she was still sleeping.

[myabortionstory]

Story 51

 I had a child when I was 15, and the one who raised him was my dad. I used to live with him. He had a very troubled relationship with my mom. I was raped by my stepfather when I was 5, then I went through almost 3 years of violence. I had no one to talk to, there was no way to tell anyone about it. So, when I was turning 18 years old, I was trying to rebuild my life after having had the baby whom my father was raising for me. I met a guy at a party who became my boyfriend. He was older. I thought that maybe an older man would understand my whole story.

 When I found out that I was pregnant, I ended up telling this boyfriend. I had an ultrasound and found out that I was already a bit more than 3 months pregnant at that point. That was when I lost it. Considering the time, it wasn’t his baby, it was probably from some casual thing I had before. How was I supposed to tell my parents that I was pregnant again? And that it wasn’t my boyfriend’s baby, and I probably got pregnant from a casual thing? My boyfriend, he told his mother, so I decided to tell them both that, you know, the baby was probably not his child. He said he would support me, but that he wouldn’t raise a kid that wasn’t his.

 His mother came to me. She said I should have an abortion, that I was going to be ok, that this child would be a burden in my life, and I wouldn’t be able to keep studying if I had the baby. She said that I should think of my dad, of all the disappointment I had caused him, and that I should not cause him any more disappointment. She even said it wasn’t illegal, that it was my choice. She spent an hour talking to me. I had the abortion and ended up in a hospital, bleeding. At the hospital, I couldn’t hide it any longer, so I told the truth. I guess they didn’t write it down in my chart. Maybe, if they had mentioned it, I would have been arrested, because I was told that the doctor had to report the woman to the police if he found out the truth.

 I was at there for a week. I was surrounded by women with their newborns, it was horrible. My boyfriend went there to visit and told me how careless I was for not having noticed I was 3 months pregnant, a bit more than 3 months. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel sick, I felt nothing at all. What I’ll never forget is the moment when they sent me out. The moment when the abortion was really done. When the contractions started, I was there at the maternity area of the hospital. I was walking down the halls when everything came out. All the blood came out. I just stood there staring at the floor in the middle of the hospital. People took a while to help me out. Everyone saw it; it wasn’t just me there. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stop staring at what was on the floor, between my feet.

[myabortionstory]

Story 50

I remember that day very clearly. A boyfriend of mine got me pregnant about a month after he had broken up with me. He realized he still loved his ex-girlfriend and left me. Actually, he was seeing both of us for a while, and I was in love with him. If I told him I was pregnant, he would say I had done it on purpose just to make him stay. He would say it was someone else’s baby, because we were not dating anymore. He would say it in my face: “Whose baby is it? Because it can’t be mine”. I asked a friend to go talk to him, and that is what he told her: “I don’t even know if it’s mine.”

So, I was alone, wasn’t I? With two kids, an ex-husband, a boyfriend who was also an ex-boyfriend, and pregnant. A friend knew a guy who sold cytotec. He worked at a drugstore. I waited for my paycheck and bought four pills. I took two and put two. At the time, they cost me R$ 300, almost my whole salary. I don’t know how much that would be today. I wouldn’t have any more money in case it all went wrong, and it did. The pills were fake. I had to go to the drugstore, face the guy, threaten him that I would tell the owner if he didn’t give me new pills. He gave me new ones and they didn’t work either.

A week later it started to come out. A smelly liquid came out, and I had a high fever. I will never forget that moment. I was at the bank, waiting in line, and a friend saw me sitting on the floor, almost fainting and bleeding a lot. I couldn't go to a hospital and say what I had done, so she sent me to a nurse who was a trusted friend of hers and who said that he would finish what had to be done.

I went to a moneylender to pay this guy. And it was in some backyard, you know. I did the curettage without anesthesia. He told me that the infection was already in such a serious condition that my life was at risk. The fetus had been dead for some time, when I was trying with the drugs in the previous weeks. He gave me antibiotics and I decided not to take it; I don't even know if I wanted to end up dying at that moment, with all the suffering I was going through. I don't even know what hurt the most, if it was the curettage in the backyard, the days I spent without being able to say anything, or if it was all this fear of the law and the sin around me.

[myabortionstory]

Story 49

I am curious about the stories that people have been telling you. Sometimes, I wonder if they are just like mine, especially if they are stories about young teenagers. I know that we are all different somehow, and each person will bring out different details. But I imagine that most of them are stories more or less of the same kind. About young teenagers. Yes, I was 15 and I had just begun my sex life. It was my second day doing it with him. He refused to use wear a condom and said that he could ‘control’ himself. I wasn’t on the pill; I couldn’t, because I was 15 and lived with my mother. If I came home with anything, she would know. If I came home with birth control pills, she would find out very soon.

Well, but he didn’t do as he had promised. He didn’t pull out. At that moment, he even laughed and said nothing would happen, telling me to go shower and to put vinegar in my vagina. And that was what I did. I put vinegar in my vagina, tried to put it even near the womb, I don’t know, but I did it, didn’t I?at least I guess I did. AMe, at that moment, I started to freak out. In less than 15 days, I took some money from my parents at home. I went out to buy a pregnancy test from the drugstore. It came out positive. I couldn’t even keep it at home, couldn’t throw it out in the trash at home if I didn’t want my mother to know, right? Just for you to have an idea, I couldn’t do it any differentlyI don’t think I could do it any differently. All I knew was that I wouldn’t have that child.

My parents are very catholic. They used to go to church every Sunday. My mother was one of those people who could go to another church, in another neighborhood, far away, just to hear a specific priest or a specific church choir. They used to say I had an uncle who was a priest. One of my sisters used to say she wanted to be a nun. At my house, what they used to say about couples who would live together without getting married,  (they called it “to get friendly”,) was that they were people who lived like prostitutes. They said that women who had sex before marriage were ‘lost’, wasted.

So, I didn’t want to be any of that. Not lost, notor a prostitute, or someone who “got friendly” with someone else, as they used to talk about it in my house. I mean, if my boyfriend wanted to be with me. This was another thing that they used to talk about in my house. I talked to my boyfriend first, and his reaction was to doubt it was true. He said that I was a virgin before I met him and so I wouldn’t get pregnant so fast. He said that girls who had just lost their virginity did not get pregnant with a few sexual relations. I have to say, that it was horrible to hear all this. It was horrible to hear this in addition to everything I was going through. I was very lonely, I felt very embarrassed. I didn't know who to talk to, who I was going to talk to at school. I thought that I was the only one who was going through something like that. And I kept thinking that everyone would end up talking to my parents, they would end up telling them.

I had a math teacher whom I liked a lot, you know. I built up the courage and went to talk to her. I know it was very risky, but she welcomed me. She told me to go to her house, so we didn’t have to talk about it there, at school. I was very good at math, I participated went to somein competitions, so I could tell my mother that I was going to study mathematics at the teacher's house. When I got there, we talked a lot. Her husband was a doctor. , Tthey were the ones who helped me. Nobody ever knew, I never brought up this subject with this math teacher again. It all went very, very smooth. Today, I am mature, and I am a math researcher. Every year, I bring flowers to the cemetery, to remind myself of the teacher who helped me to be who I am today.

[myabortionstory]

Story 48

I was still just a teenager when I became a mother. The father was a music teacher from my school. He was much older than me. He already had kids; after me, he kept doing the same thing over and over, getting other students pregnant. He’s still a musician now, and it seems like none of it stained his career as a teacher.

I had just started college. My son wasn’t even 1 year old yet, and I had to struggle with everything I had to do: studying, cleaning up the house, taking care of him, and looking for a job. I lived with my mother at the time, who always provided and made sure we had everything we needed. But she never changed my son’s diapers, never tried to help me, you know? I’m grateful to her, but that was the reality in my life. I had to do everything by myself. I was feeling my youth passing me by, both during pregnancy and my son’s first year of life. His dad never visited and never provided any support. Years later, I even had to file a lawsuit. And I had to come to terms with it all, you know? Keeping in mind that child support was my son’s right.

I met a new guy. He was very nice and went to college with me. We were studying the same thing, and he liked my son. He used to spend hours talking to him, telling him stories, you know, doing everything that was so important for me. The role of someone that is always there, so we can share things and think about his education together. Slowly, he started to show me another side. He started to show a violent side; he changed whenever he drank. I never liked drinking and didn’t want that for me. I tried to slowly distance myself from him. I could notice that a sudden break up would not end well. But his violence got worse and worse as he felt we had no future together.

Then, he started to stalk me and threaten me. He went to pick up my son from school without my permission and spent two days with him. I had to go to the police, and I had to revoke his permission to take my son with him from school. And what I heard from the police and the school were questions like, isn’t he your boyfriend, someone you brought home? Things were getting worse. And I have to say this: we didn’t have the Maria da Penha Act at the time, did we? We just had to go to a normal police station.

Once, I was arriving home from work, and he was waiting for me with a gun. He tried to kill me. He shot me in the lung. I went to the hospital and had to have surgery. All I could think of was my son, all by himself. The bullet wasn’t inside my body, it went through me. At the hospital, when I got there, the doctors and the nurses at the emergency room asked me: “He caught you with another man, didn’t he? That’s why he did it.” No. I have to tell them and you what I didn’t answer at the time: no, I didn’t have anyone else. All I wanted was to get away from that man.

To make my situation even worse, I found out I was pregnant. I’ve always dreamed about having another kid. I have to be honest, I used to dream about having a daughter. But not at that time, with that man. Not after all I had gone through, after being shot. I needed an abortion soon. Without risking my life and without him knowing about it. I heard about a clinic in another city. I took a plane, which cost me a fortune, and took my son with me. I don’t have many memories of that trip or of the procedure. I have no marks on my body; this is not a story I have to tell. I just remember that, when I left there, I was feeling sure that my life would be just me and my son.

[myabortionstory]

Story 47

This story happened about 15 years ago. I was 13, my boyfriend was a little bit older than me. I think he was around 18, I’m not sure; he was my first boyfriend. I had irregular periods, maybe because I was still young. I had just become a grown girl, right? As soon as I found out I was pregnant, he got me the medicine. It was Cytotec. He gave it to me and told me how to use it. And I did everything as he told me to. Not long after I took it, that same night, I started feeling sick. Very, very sick. I’m not exaggerating. I was throwing up and bleeding non-stop. I was going to the bathroom all the time. I was, you know, almost losing consciousness. I didn’t really know what was going on.

He went to see me the next morning, and I was even worse. It never crossed our minds that it was time or that it would be good to go to a hospital. He went to school, I stayed home. I stayed home by myself, because my mother used to work as a housekeeper and left very early in the morning. I kept getting worse during the day. In the afternoon, I walked to his school. I was alone. Just left my house and walked there. I needed help. I needed someone to go to the hospital with me. When I got there, I talked to him. I don’t remember why anymore, but he couldn’t come with me. I had to go by myself. I went from his school to the emergency room — walking, stopping, sitting on the curb, almost passing out. I was bleeding too much already. That’s how I got to the emergency room.

At the hospital, people said right away that it was an abortion, that they knew everything, that it was all my fault, and that they didn’t like women who had abortions. Remember this: I was 13. They didn’t like women who had abortions, I had it coming, it was my fault, and they couldn’t do anything to help me. They didn’t even give me anything for pain and sent me back home. I walked back home bleeding, dropping the remains that were still inside me, you know? Really having an abortion. I thought I was going to die, because I was bleeding and bleeding, and I had never been to a doctor before. I didn’t know how it was. I had never been to a gynecologist in my life. In fact, I was already 20 years old the first time I went to a gynecologist. It was when I got pregnant with my first daughter.

[myabortionstory]

Story 46

I have two abortion stories. I can imagine some people will hear this and say “two!”. I don’t know if any other woman has told you more than one story, or if I am the only one to tell two different stories here. Yes, two stories. I will talk to you about only one of them today, and I will tell you why. I am from a middle-class family, I had access to information, to contraception. I knew everything a young woman could know about protection, about sexuality.

I was beginning my sex life, only starting to have sexual relationships. This was not the first one, though. He used to wear condoms, you know? And it broke, but he didn’t tell me right away. As soon as I knew I was pregnant, as soon as I took the test and found out, I looked for a group in town that offered teenagers some information about sexuality. It was a very nice group. I went there with my boyfriend and told the truth. They advised me and told me an abortion would be illegal. But they also said I could have options and told me where I could talk to a doctor about an abortion.

I went to this doctor. He was a very rude man, and he was very hard on me. I don’t remember my gestational age at the time, but he was emphatic when he said: “if you don’t come back tomorrow, I won’t do it anymore”. I left feeling very scared, and decided to tell my mother. She used to work, so I went to her clinic with my boyfriend and we told her everything. My family didn’t really approve of my relationship, so she said she would talk to me later at home. She hugged me, supported me, and told me to calm down. When she got home, she said that, ok, it was my decision and she would be there anyway, but first she wanted me to go to the family gynecologist, the one she trusted. And he was a very conservative man, you know? Just imagine how it was at that time. He was very conservative. But he surprised me, because he said: “look, I don’t do it, but I know where you can get the medicine and I can guide you over the phone”.

My boyfriend went to where he said we could buy the medicine. It was a street fair. He bought it, I took some and put some inside, following the doctor’s instructions over the phone. A few days later, nothing happened. My family had planned a short trip with. During the trip, in the car, I started losing blood. There were huge blood clots all over the car seat. My family took me to our family doctor, who prescribed me some tea. They talked to him in a corner. I don’t remember, and I didn’t really hear them talking, but they told me to go see the other doctor the next day, the doctor who was helping me. I went there. He did an ultrasound and saw that my uterus was clean, I didn’t even need curettage.

It didn’t take long for me to end this relationship. It was a teenager thing. I had his support, that I can say, and also my mother’s. It was only after everything had passed that my mother told me she wanted to talk. She said she was against abortion, and she would never decide to have one. But she also told me that she would support me, as my mother, support me in whatever decision I thought was best for me. I kept thinking about it. About how it is to be a mother, a mother able to support her daughter and her decisions, even if her daughter was just a teenager… decisions that are different from what she believes. And she didn’t judge at the time, did she? She didn't impose on me what she thought. That's why I decided that I was going to solve it all on my own when I went through the second experience of abortion. And that's what I did. I never told her, because I wasn't going to impose my decision on her once again.

[myabortionstory]

Story 45

I was young and had been dating this guy for a while. I got pregnant, and we ended up having a fight. So the best decision was to have an abortion. I talked to him, and not only he pushed me away, he even disappeared when I went to have the abortion. He didn’t run away because he didn’t want me to do it; he ran away just because he didn’t want to be there, not even at that moment. The problem was all mine. I was in London at the time. I was 35, it was 1992.

It has been a long time, so it might be different now. But at that time, when I got to the health center, I had to see many psychologists. I had to make appointments. I also had to be admitted to the hospital one night before the procedure, because I had asthma and needed special care. At the night of the abortion, I stayed at the hospital. They left me in a room with two beds, mine right next to the other, which was empty. Maybe it was meant for a guest, for someone to be there with me. At the back of my bedroom, almost out in the hallway, I saw a little crib.

When I saw that crib and the empty bedroom, I started crying. There was another woman in the hospital for the same procedure. She heard me crying and saw the crib. She probably imagined I was crying because of it and came to calm me down. Actually, not only did she come to calm me down, she made a scene. Psychologists, nurses, and doctors arrived immediately. They took the crib away and came in to apologize. It took me a while to explain that I was crying because I had just ended a relationship and was alone there with a bed beside me. It wasn't the crib that was making me suffer so much.

Well, I explained it. But they calmed me down anyway. If I was already being well taken care of up to that moment, it only got better. After the abortion, I woke up in a yellow room with some flowers, a very peaceful environment. I woke up with the nurse holding my hand and asking me how I was. The whole environment was very welcoming. It even looked like a house more than a hospital, you know.

I know my story is very simple, isn’t it? You must have heard some other stories that are very different from mine. Stories of women who have abortions in clinics, using medicine, women who have to do it in secret in Brazil, women who are younger than me. I just wanted to tell you my story to show that it is possible to have the whole procedure with security, with care, with dignity, just like I did. And being cared for makes everything much easier, doesn’t it?

[myabortionstory]

Story 44

I think I will talk to you the way I talk to my friends, to women in my family. I don’t know if that is how people are talking to you, is it? I have told this story before. I have told my story to women who had told me theirs, to women who needed to know how to do it, and to help other women in my family. This is not the first time. I just never did it like this, on WhatsApp. But here we go.

I already had two kids. Financially, it was tight, as it still is. My youngest daughter had just turned 1 year old. I had two young kids at home and got pregnant again — I panicked. My husband was a flirt, he was a player and was always partying. He had children outside of our marriage, and I knew it. He couldn’t care less about me. He would leave me with our two kids. He didn’t care about them either. He only wanted to party and seemed to forget that he was a married man.

It was all totally normal for him. He used to tell me, “if we can raise one, we can raise two or five.” But I was the one doing it, wasn’t I? It didn’t matter if I was sick, I still had to wake up at night to feed them, because he was out. The boys had school in the morning, and I’d be the one who was up all night feeding my daughter while he was partying. It shouldn’t be like that, or should it? Some weekends, he would go out to party and not come back for two or three days. When he finally did come back, he would be acting aggressively. He was not calm when he arrived, he was drunk. So, I decided to have the abortion. You have no idea how much he said he was against it. He just kept repeating, “if we can feed one, we can feed two or five.” I kept saying, “I don’t want to.” I had already made up my mind. I asked him for help, and he answered, “I’d rather see you die than see you have an abortion.”

He told his whole family, and they all turned against me. I kept thinking, “Why would I have another child with this man?”. I had two children and was already suffering so much. So, I started to act: from that day on, every day, when he came home, I got a little bit of money. I was saving it all, but the weeks were going by. My sister had arrived from the city and I asked her for Cytotec. I put two. I did it while he was out, partying for the whole weekend. At the time, it was a lot of money. I’ll repeat this: I had to save money little by little until I could afford it.

You know, nowadays, my husband is a bit better. He got calmer as he got older. But he was terrible to women, terrible. So terrible that I knew I could wait for him to go party so I could have an abortion by myself. And everyone, even his family, who turned against me, everyone kept telling me, “leave that man, leave him, you have no future with him.”

Well, I put two with a straw and took two more. At 2 am, I started bleeding. Can you believe that my daughter started crying for her baby bottle? He was out having fun, I was bleeding and feeding our daughter. The next day, I took our son to school. I was still bleeding. I kept bleeding like that for 10 days. And it was thick blood, you know? As time went by, it started to smell different.

After almost 15 days of waiting and bleeding, I didn’t know what else to do. I started taking shots of contraceptive injections to stop bleeding. I had a fever, and he kept telling me that I should die. After 15 days, after contraceptive injections, with a fever and bleeding… I was bleeding more and more, so I went to the hospital. There I found out I had generalized infection. Only then, at that time, he got closer and took care of me, but he kept calling me names. My whole family went to the hospital, and there were people who even called me a murderer. I was wrong, I won’t deny it. But who hasn’t been wrong before?

Well, then I needed curettage. No one mistreated me at the hospital, because I was almost dying, I think. But they asked me if I had provoked the abortion. I’m not dumb, am I? I said no. And they told me, “we refuse to treat women who decide to have an abortion”. Can you believe it? I had to hear this: “we refuse to treat women who decide to have an abortion.”

I didn’t regret a thing, that I can assure you. Actually, there is something I regret: having taken so long. That’s why I spent 10, 15 days bleeding, because I took too long. I should have done it earlier. And I shouldn’t have told him. If I think about what I regret, what I did wrong, I regret both of these things. For a long time, he would come home drunk and throw it in my face: “look what you’ve done.” You know what I say to him and to everyone else when I tell this story? I say that I didn’t forget and won’t forget, and only God can judge me.

[myabortionstory]

Story 43

“I work with babies”

I am 32, I’m a physiotherapist and I work with babies. I think there is a bit of cosmic irony in that, but I don’t know if there is such a thing as fate or if it is just about our actions, right? I don’t know if the story is the same for each of us. My son is at home now, so I wanted to tell you that I will speak, and I’ll be back. But I have to speak with you while I’m not with him. I got pregnant with my son at 13, from a boy who was 16. We had been dating for some time. I know this was all very premature, and you might think it’s all strange from the very beginning. How does a 13-year-old have a sexual life? It’s true. I stopped from 14 to 21 years old and then got pregnant again from the same boyfriend, who was already my husband. We had almost 10 years of relationship and no maturity at all — as you can imagine of a relationship that started when I was 13.

I already knew what his reaction would be when I told him. I knew that he was going to say no. I had no support from the person I trusted the most in case I wanted that pregnancy, and I did want it. I had to take care of it by myself. I asked a neighbor for help. As strange as it sounds, she had told me that she had an abortion once, when we were talking in the elevator. She knew a doctor. I asked my husband to make the appointment and I went there. I didn’t want an ultrasound. I wouldn’t stand listening to the heartbeat. I didn’t want the abortion, and I suffered so much. I have to be honest with you: I had dreams of that baby calling for my help. It all grieved me and killed me.

At the day of the procedure, we didn’t have anyone to take care of our son, who was seven years old. You won’t believe it, but we had to take him with us. The clinic was in a fancy building in my town. The doctor charged us a lot of money, a lot; today, I’d say something like five thousand. I don’t even know how my husband got that money. The truth is that it was the most painful day of my life. I have no doubt about it when I say it. It was the worst, most painful day in my entire life. I had so much pain I lost consciousness. I threw up during the procedure. They had to carry me out of there. All I could think of was that I was going to die. I kept thinking: “I am dying, and my son will be an orphan”.

It was the worst feeling, physically and emotionally, I have ever experienced. It took me a long time to recover, it wasn’t easy. I felt guilty for not being able to face my husband. I felt guilty for not having the baby, for not making a different decision. For many years, I carried this guilt. The only person who once heard me talk about it was a friend of mine. I went to her house and we had a couple of drinks. I wasn’t drunk, but I put everything out of me, all at once. I was crying so much; she could not help me. Until today, she was the only person I had told. And now you are the second one.

I can tell you now that I carry on with my life. I take care of all the children in the world. It’s my job. And they are children the world doesn’t want, or sometimes it seems like the mothers don’t want them. I am a child development specialist. I take care of children with disabilities. And you know what is the biggest fear I have? It’s that my family will find out. I still live with my husband, the man I started dating at 13. We didn’t have more children. We don’t talk about it and my biggest fear is that my family will know everything.

[myabortionstory]

Story n. 42

“She was very Catholic”

 I know you want one story. A story of our own, right? But let me tell you this second one, too. I don’t know if you remember that I talked about this very close friend who had helped me. And I told you that I’d lost someone very important for me. And this is the story of this friend of mine. She died, because of an abortion. I think her story should be told. I have to tell this. Let me tell you this second story, please. It is also mine, isn’t it?

I wasn’t there during her abortion. We were in a fight; we weren’t even talking. You know how it is when families fight. But I had a dream about her. You might not believe me, but I did. So, I decided to call her, even if we were in a fight. I insisted, and I called her while she was taking the Cytotec. I didn’t know, but she was already bleeding. And she didn’t tell me a thing. I insisted; I even tried to go see her the following days. She wasn’t in a good mood when she picked up the phone. She was very Catholic. She was one of those people who even had a bumper sticker, you know. A pro-life sticker. I think it said, “Brazil without abortion”; it was a big one. She had helped me before. Then she turned more and more to that side of the Church. I have to highlight: all our families are Catholic, but this friend of mine was the most Catholic of us.

What happened is that, on the day I reached out to her, she was already bleeding. The Cytotec was already working and I can only imagine her pain. It was painful for everything she believed in, along with the physical pain, and she was all alone. She went to the hospital to the curettage and then went back. I didn’t know anything. Everything I’m telling you, I only found out later on at the time. She was my son’s godmother and I’m her son’s godmother.

Two days after she got back home, she had a fever and then went back to the hospital. In a week, she was dead. Dead. Can you believe it? She died because of an abortion. During her funeral, no one talked about it. The family asked for the cause of death to be pneumonia and sepsis. During the funeral we talked about... nothing. We communicated with one another using gestures.

[myabortionstory]

story 41

“There are four stories that I’d like to tell you. Some of them are mine, some of them are about women I’ve helped. I will tell you one of them today, but, first, I want to say what made me talk about it. I’ve just lost a very important person for me, someone I loved and who was part of all those stories.

I was pregnant. The father was the same man who is now the father of my two kids. The person who helped me was this friend of mine. I bought some Cytotec. I took some pills and put some others inside, and it didn’t work. Then I bought it a second time, from another source, at a local street market. My friend helped me again and it didn’t work either. I took a higher dose the second time and it still didn’t work. In the end, I looked for a doctor and told him I had taken Cytotec twice. He instantly changed his facial expression. I remember he stayed there with his arms crossed. He didn’t want to talk to me and said he wouldn’t help me at all. When I was leaving, almost at the door, he told me he had the number of someone who could help. But he couldn’t help me, he said.

I didn’t know where I was going or who was going to see me. When I got there, a woman just gave me an injection with a syringe, you know? It was a very big one, with a yellow liquid. It was a sticky, dark yellow liquid. The second she injected that liquid in my vagina, or my uterus, I started bleeding. I was in a lot, a lot of pain. I was very scared. This woman shouted at me, “you can’t go to the hospital, you have to cope with the pain.” Of course, I didn’t do what she said. I went to the hospital right away.

It was all over after I went to the hospital. They sorted it out, you can imagine how. What I wanted to tell you is this: many years later, I went to the same public hospital that I’d gone to at that time. I went to see an otolaryngologist. He was reading my medical record and said, “oh, you’ve done an abortion”. That left me speechless. That was a huge surprise for me. It was shocking for me to see that it was written there, years later. That record about my past still exists.”

[myabortionstory]

story 40

“I am 56. I have decided to record my story for you. I just need some privacy, because I haven’t told this to my daughters yet. I will. I’d just prefer to do this first and tell them afterwards. Telling them is something else; it’s different from talking to you today. It happened in 1979. I was 18. I met a guy from Rio de Janeiro. He was in my town for a short period. I was very needy back then, so I would think of anything I had with anyone as a serious relationship.

Suddenly, I was pregnant. I made a long-distance call to talk to him. I don’t know if you remember, but those were very expensive and difficult to make. He went straight to the point. I talked to him and he answered: “if you want to have it, it’s our problem...” no, no, no. This is not how it was. You know what he said? It looks like I’m getting confused here, right? He said: “if you want an abortion, the problem is ours; if you want to have it, it’s only yours”. I know it can be appalling. We would imagine men saying, “I’ll take on this child,” but no, no, no. No wonder I was mistaken... after three daughters and now having a good husband. That’s right, in fact, he said the exact opposite. “If you want an abortion, the problem is ours; if you want to have it, it’s only yours.”

I think I had never thought about abortion before. It had never even crossed my mind. As I said, I was very young, but I also knew that I couldn’t have that child by myself. I spoke to a friend of the family who was 14 years older than me — another long-distance call. She said: “look, you have a choice, it’s this: it has been done here in my town, you can come, I’ll help you.” These two conversations I had on the phone were different: one of them was supportive and the other was supporting me while abandoning me at the same time. But they made me decide: the pregnancy was a problem. I was about to take university entrance exams, so I waited until I was approved and then I went to my friend’s town. I was happy; I keep thinking about those feelings I had, that euphoria. Later on, when I was pregnant with my daughters, I studied about it and understood the hormonal process I was going through. I was going through a difficult situation, but I was still happy about it.

Well, the guy gave me the money and this friend took me to the clinic. The place was named after a saint. I’m not kidding, it really was. We even got a keychain on our way out that said “come back anytime.” It sounds like a joke, right? The clinic was neat. It even had a sign, it wasn’t hidden. Everyone knew what happened in there. There were a lot of women. My friend stayed in the waiting room as I got in. I took off my clothes to put on the surgical clothing in a place where other women were waiting too. I recognized some women I knew from the beach where I used to vacation and from places I used to visit. One woman was very emotional, crying. I calmed her down. I don’t even know if those women remember each other from that moment.

I kept seeing those women coming and going. Some who had arrived after me went in before I did. I was very calm and just waited there. Then they finally called my name. I remember seeing a very tall doctor and another one, I think he was the anesthetist. There were other people in the room, all of them wearing masks — medical, surgical masks. I woke up in a bigger room, lying down on a mat on the floor. There were many other women like this. As soon as I woke up, I saw someone being carried and then put beside me, on another mat. One of them woke up very agitated. I saw a little bit of everything there. Then I put my clothes back on and I was told that I had a tampon in my vagina. They gave me the keychain and I left.

My friend had to travel somewhere, so I was alone in her apartment. That was when I took the tampon out. I was frightened by what came from inside of me. No one had told me that it was a 1-meter tampon. While I was taking it out, it seemed like it was never over. I was desperate in that moment. I thought about it a lot afterwards. I worked it out using daime*, I had other children — my daughters — and I moved on. Today, I describe myself as someone who turned into a girl with a secret. I still am this girl with a secret. I think I forgave myself, even if I don’t believe in sinning. But I think that this cycle will only close after I tell my daughters this story.”

*Santo Daime is a religious movement that has its origin in the Amazon Forest of Brazil, in the first decades of the 20th century by Professor Irineu. The doctrine is Christian and eclectic, bringing together Catholic, Spiritist, esoteric, African and indigenous traditions and uses ayahuasca tea from its rites.

[myabortionstory]

story 39

“I was 15 when I had my first abortion. It was the beginning of a relationship and I didn’t want any children. Even then, I already knew I didn’t want to be a mother. I still don’t. He was much older, and he had two kids. Our relationship was complicated, but I was very much in love with him. When I found out I was pregnant, I told him right away. He was quick to tell me that he didn’t want more children; that he didn’t have a job; that he couldn’t even afford child support for his other kids. Actually, he had always told me that he did pay for it. Later I heard about the fact that he didn’t even do that. He didn’t even pay child support for the kids from his previous relationship.

I was the one who mentioned abortion first, and he just called me a slut. He said no; at the same time, he kept saying he didn’t want to have that child with me. A few days later, he showed up at my place with some Cytotec pills. I lived with my mother. He gave me the pills. Before that, I didn’t eat or drink anything for two days, not even water. I can’t remember if it was him or if it was some other people, but someone told me that I should be very weak for the pills to work well.

So, I took three pills and put three more in my vagina. Right after that, I felt very sleepy. Then I woke up bleeding a lot. He was with me in the bedroom. It was hard for me to go to the bathroom and pee. I kept going and I couldn’t do it. I started to feel a lot of pain. It started in the afternoon. In the evening, I couldn’t stand the pain and I still couldn’t pee. So, I decided to put my hand inside my vagina. I felt like it was swollen, like there was something in it. I took something out with my own hand, like a golf ball. I didn’t know what that was. I squatted and I pushed until I could get it out. I put it in a plastic bag and then threw it on a wasteland.

I thought it was ok. I thought it had ended, I admit. Then I started to feel something that I think was guilt. I kept thinking about it. I had nightmares of deformed children calling me mom, mommy, or asking me why I did that. I was still in my relationship. It was an abusive one, really. He used to beat me. We had violent fights and he was jealous of everything and everyone. He told me to stop taking contraceptives. He said that, as long as I was on the pill, I could cheat on him whenever he wasn’t there with me.

One day, while I wasn’t on the pill, I knew I was fertile. I didn’t want a relationship with him anymore. He threatened to beat me and made me have sex with him. That was when I got pregnant for the second time. I was 18 and I knew there was no future for us, considering everything I had lived and was living with this violent man. The nightmares were gone. I knew I didn’t want a child with him.

I took a loan in my mother's name and bought the pills again. Unlike that first time, I didn’t feel guilty. And I did it all by myself. You know, now that I am telling you all of this, I’d say I didn’t feel guilty that first time either. I had those horrible nightmares and it seems like I was trying to settle in the middle of everything. But it wasn’t guilt. Maybe it was the burden of everything I had lived and was living with that guy. And fear of violence. I didn’t want a man like that to be the father of my children. We broke up and he never found out about the second abortion.”

[myabortionstory]

story 38

“I don’t know how I should do it — If I should record it or write it. You will have to be patient with the way I write on WhatsApp, line by line. I would like you to tell my story line by line, too, as I write it. It was 1992. I can’t send a voice message, because I don’t want anyone to hear this. I really want to participate. But this is my condition. I want you to tell my story line by line.

When I was 18, I had a child. It was my first pregnancy. I hadn’t planned it and I didn’t want it. But I couldn’t have na abortion. Although I had thought about it, I didn’t have the chance. I suffered retaliation for being young and single at the time I got pregnant. I struggled, it wasn’t easy. In 2 years, I got pregnant again. I didn’t know anything. I was dating a guy who was helping me raise my first child. We had no stability, neither financial nor emotional. My menstruation was late, but that was normal. I’d go days without taking the pill. In this mess, I got pregnant.

It was my second pregnancy. No one would forgive me. I was still a student. My partner told his mother. She helped us by giving me some teas. She had already had abortions and she knew where to begin. There are beliefs involving teas and bitter drinks. She said it would work, but it didn’t. Then I took some medicine from the drugstore, I don’t know its name. I got it at the neighborhood drugstore, from a man. It didn’t work either. My mother-in-law took me to a lady who performed abortions. The woman was a retired nursing assistant. She had worked with a doctor who performed abortions. She introduced a kind of rubber band in my vagina and told me to come back in 24 hours or whenever I started to bleed.

It was a very modest house. There were other women, probably for the same reason as me. I went to a bedroom to lay down. She did the procedure with that rubber inside of me. I didn’t even pay attention if she washed her hands. We went home by bus and that thing started to hurt. Her job was to start the abortion. I had to go somewhere else to finish it. The cramps were getting worse, but there was no bleeding.

At night, in the bathroom, a viscous liquid came out. I thought it was over and I never went back to the woman. I started to have a lot of fever and bleeding. My sister and my mother started to suspect. I was taken to the maternity hospital. I was very badly treated there. I kept lying, as my mother-in-law and the nurse had told me. The hospital looked like a police station. I stayed there for several days; four, I think. All the cases were passing in front of me. They wanted to punish me. There was this liquid, as dark as coffee, that stank a lot. One of the people at the hospital said: “this one is an abortionist; she will get here every year”. I freaked out and cried compulsively. I asked to die at home. They couldn't discharge me, because I was there without having eaten anything for an entire day. They asked me to be patient and said the medical team had more urgent cases than mine. They told me my case was mild, but If I left, I could die.

I was hungry, humiliated and upset. I left the next day. They did the procedure and I walked away. I didn't tell anyone that. It was self-punishment for killing. Do you believe that? I assimilated the lesson. I only managed to talk about it 12 years later, during my son's prenatal care. Then I met other women with the same story as mine. Now, more women are going to know my story, which can be just like theirs.”

[myabortionstory]

story 37

“I was 27 and I had a daughter who was 4. I was in a relationship with a guy who was very kind, he was nice. We were friends before we started dating. I can guarantee you we did everything right. I am living proof that contraception can fail.

I got pregnant. We quickly looked for one of the well-known abortion clinics, but it was closed. The police had been there, so it was shut down. They recommended us another clinic, one that I knew nothing about besides a friend having told me it was an option. She said something about a cousin and that things could work out fine if I went there. I got a bit insecure, but I could not have another child at that moment, when I already had a 4-year-old. I decided to give it a try. But I have to say I was very, very scared.

We saved money — I don’t even know how — and scheduled the procedure. They treated me well. I felt no pain during it or afterwards. Then I went home. It looked like everything had worked out fine. I was resting for two days and then got back to normal. Exactly a month later, I started to have some kind of bleeding, more or less like menstruation, but different. It quickly turned into hemorrhage. There was blood everywhere. If I was standing up, a pool of blood would appear on the floor. I went to the shower, and blood clots were coming out. It was a lot of blood.

They did not do curettage at the clinic I had gone to. And they had this one rule: you could not go back there. It was different from the other clinics, where you’d go out with the doctor’s number or with some guidelines of what to do if something went wrong. I was on my own. My boyfriend at the time knew a nurse who worked at a university hospital and she got me an appointment. No tampon was enough to hold my bleeding at that moment. I was afraid I would die. I was afraid I would be arrested. I saw myself disappearing with that bleeding.

I can tell you I had three feelings: fear, fear, and fear. I trembled. I started to feel pain, so much worse than menstrual cramps. There was no emergency room, so my bed was at the corner of the hallway. A forgotten corner. It was strategic. No one would see me or take care of me, so I was forgotten. I gave them my personal information and that was the first of three nights I was hospitalized.

During the first three days, no one had me examined, no one talked to me, no one got close to me. The resident doctors would pass through me, and I heard them speaking, referring to me as “the abortionist”. Those were very difficult times, and I even heard this dialog: a woman was asking another one “who’s that in the corner?”. “She had an abortion. She is there to think of what she’s done, to erase what she’s done.” It was a woman’s voice judging me, you know. Hearing it from another woman was particularly painful. That is when I started to panic.

At the end of the fourth day, they examined me and then did the curettage. Only after that, I was discharged. I got out of the hospital walking that day. At that moment, I became a feminist. Now I fight for abortion rights. And do you know who turned me into this person?They did this to me. I was lucky I  survived. But I learned what it means to resist. And that is what I have been doing ever since. It is what I am doing here, once again.”

[myabortionstory]

story 36

When I was 15, I started dating someone. I used to live in a small town. My father had just died, and I came from a very conservative family, even more than that, I would say, my mother was a very authoritarian woman. I hate to say this, but, with my father’s death, it was like I was able to know the world and begin to live.

I think I liked the boy, it’s very hard to go back in time and say what was all that, because now it all seems like a teenage fascination. I had all that excitement of someone discovering life. We had been dating for a while when I lost my virginity. At 16, I got pregnant, but before that we had a memorable talk, even before I knew I was pregnant and went to talk to him, and I kept thinking about it. One day, he had asked me, “what do you think about abortions? Would you do it?”. I had never thought about it before, I’m 41 years old now, a much more mature woman, and I’ve lived more and I’ve known women, abortion stories. But at that time, at 16, it was all very new to me.

When I got pregnant, I didn’t even have to ask his opinion, it had been already settled in that talk we had had and that I couldn’t forget. He made me take a urine analysis, he took my urine to the lab, he took my sister-in-law’s document to have access to health insurance. We did everything in secret. When the result came and it was positive, he didn’t even ask my opinion, there was no discussion. He said “I can’t take this responsibility, I won’t, I have no conditions, you will have the abortion”. I would say it was not a choice at that moment, it was an order. I didn’t have his support or society’s support to say I would be a single mother in a small town, at 16, and without a father. He even said, like he was threatening me, that my mother and my brother would leave me, would kick me out — I wouldn’t have anyone’s help, only judging, that is.

This created a lot of internal conflict, of course, I had no one to talk to. I talked to a cousin, but she was kind of silly, she was my age and didn’t really help me. The guy gave me some kinds of tea, he gave me pills and nothing, then he got Cytotec, he spent a lot of money to get it and settled the time and date for us to meet and have the abortion. I can’t lie, while I waited him to sort it all out, I was already dreaming about the baby. You know when you start daydreaming? It was me. I thought he was going to change his mind, would appear in front of me as a hero and say, “we will take this responsibility together, it will be alright”.

I went to his place, took the pills, and he was beside me, watching the whole abortion process. It hurt, it hurt a lot. The beliefs and the taboo around me, it was a pain that I could say I felt in my soul. It was a lot of bleeding and I did not go to the hospital. For some time, I blamed myself, I punished myself, I thought I was the one and only person responsible for that. I couldn’t open up with anyone, how could I tell someone that I am a criminal? I didn’t want to go to jail. I have tried to talk about this before, two or three times, but the disapproving looks made me quail and not say anything.

At 21 I got married, and it was only in my second pregnancy that I could put things in their places in this story, during my prenatal care exams, talking to a nurse. I understood that it was something I had to go through, or that I let myself go through. When I told this story and when I talk about it again now, I can tell you that I do not regret it. People ask right away “do you regret it?”. It seems to be the first question that arises. No, I do not have any regrets, that’s not it. What I still have is the feeling of loneliness that I had, and that’s why today I'm empathic with all women who go through this. You know, it’s very ironic, this empathy came into my house so I could be empathic with my daughter.

My oldest daughter, 16, got pregnant and the father’s family is very religious, evangelical. She came to ask me, I told my story, she was surprised. I told her I would be there for her whatever her decision was, either to have the abortion or the child. She decided to keep it. Now I have a grandson, 2 years and 10 months old. We are a wonderful family, my daughter, my grandson, my other daughter, we are four and at that time I also told my youngest daughter. Both of them are, like their father, very evangelical, but I think they look at the subject of abortion in a different way nowadays, different from what the Church says. It says it’s a sin and that women should go to jail. When this is spoken about, I am sure they remember me, their mother.