Four Years Since the Fall of Roe
We are the majority. These are our stories.
344 Voices and Counting
You—or someone you love—has benefited from contraception, sex education, maternal care, assisted reproduction, miscarriage care or abortion. This isn't a privilege we ask permission for.
Our lives depend on this right. It's a right millions of us exercise every day—legal or not, restricted or not, named or not.
We are the majority. We're going on the record.
What have reproductive choices given you the freedom to do?
Gave me the freedom to live the life I wanted.
When I was 24 I got pregnant after already having 2 children, my uterus had ruptured with the second so when I got pregnant again the doctor said I would most likely die, as well as the baby because my uterus could not handle it, I had to stay alive for my little children so I opted to have an abortion and tubal ligation, if I didn’t have that option my kids would not have had a mom
I was 13 when my youngest brother was born. I remember taking him to the grocery store in a red metal wagon. I worried every time it went over a bump that he would tumble backwards and hit his head. But we needed milk and bread, and my parents weren’t home yet. Outside the grocery, a man tried to sell me a lottery ticket. I told him I wasn’t old enough, and he looked confused. I glanced at my brother riding in the wagon, leaning against a paper grocery bag as tall as him, and realized I looked like his parent. I have always deeply loved my siblings. But I’ve never wanted to be a parent. I joke with people that I’ve been there, done that, changed the diapers, done the time. But it’s not a joke. I have been able to travel the world, pursue a first class education, and explore different jobs, ending up in nonprofit work – art education for kids and adults. I love teaching, and I love being able to go home to rest and recharge, with my spouse and cats. That is my freedom. That is choice.
For us adoption was “Plan A”, not a last resort. Access to reproductive options gave us the choice to not birth children, but instead to adopt. Our girls were born into situations that limited their life options. By choosing to close down my personal reproduction, we were able to open doors for these little girls. It was our life calling to give girls a family, not create more children for a family. Now grown women of the next generation, our daughters understand the importance of women having control over their own body, of reproductive options. Reproductive choice means being able to control your own reproduction system: to choose if, when, and how to have children.
Access to freedom of intimacy without fear of pregnancy gave me the opportunity to experience the love of my life and our happiness and pleasure for 5 years before he left my life.
Pregnant at 26, unmarried and no desire to have a baby then. Roe had become law exactly six weeks prior. I was so fortunate to be able to get a legal abortion (back then they treated you like any maternity patient and did it in a hospital) and carry on with my life and career. Ten years later at age 36, married and settled, I had my daughter. So very grateful that access to reproductive choices and care were available to me. I want that for every woman.
It has allowed me to join the Navy and make some of the best and exciting memories of my life. Women were able to serve on subs before I left the Navy 4 yrs later!!!! I got to see the world and use the GI Bill on uncle Sam’s dime. I didnt have to work 2 jobs during college, I could focus more on my studies with less stress. I cherish my right to vote and be childfree. It has certainly been a blessing for me and other ladies.
Finish college and become a teacher.
I was already a single mother of a 4yr old when I had my abortion. It allowed me to go back to school, get a better job and get a better place to live. It allowed me to better take care of the one child I already had.
Be a productive and loving mother when the time was right .
Enjoy sex safely and responsively.
Allowed me to go to college in the 70s, grad school in the 80s, became an FNP then worked at Planned Parenthood, seeing teens thru their 1st exams & giving them choices that women did not have in the 60s.
I was able to lead the independent life I sought and to make my own choices related to work and family. I was lucky to choose the partner I wanted, and lucky to have a good job. And I could have kept both my partner and my job even if I had chosen to have children. But the most important thing was that I never wanted to have children at all. Not ever. I just was not interested in being a mother, though that is still a socially unpopular attitude. This could only have been enabled by access to contraception ever since college: there were free clinics in the 1970s, nonprofit groups promoting women’s self-help health, and there were abortion clinics that were (then) easy to find and not clouded in controversy. I drew on all of these resources. I had the independent life I wanted: I had a great extended family and several wonderful jobs across the country. Was it free from emotional, financial or medical problems? Of course not! But it was driven only by my decisions.
When I awoke to nonconsensual sex, I was not forced to carry and raise an unwanted child.
Get access to my needs and for my daughter’s also!
Having access to abortion allowed me to stop a pregnancy that I wasn’t ready for and I had no idea how to handle at 21 years old. When I told my mom I was pregnant, she said the perfect thing: “Lisa, even when you are ready, in love, married, and excited about having a child, it is so hard. And you are none of those things.” I have always felt so lucky for her and for living in a place where I could safely protect my future.
I was a young actress in New York City, living with a (later self-identified) narcissist in the early 2000’s. We were both actors, actually. I had been using the depo provera shot for birth control, but it was giving me severe headaches and was costly. We agreed to use the pull-out method because I was young and stupid, and trusted him. One day he just flat out came inside me, against my will. When I cried and asked him why, he said, “He wanted to see what would happen.” Well, what happened is that I got pregnant. And thank GOD that I was able to obtain an abortion, so that I wasn’t tied to him, or a single mother, I didn’t lose my career opportunity that I had been dreaming of and working for all my life, that I didn’t have to stop taking my very necessary medication because it would “hurt the baby”. I was able to have a D&C. This man assaulted me and took away my bodily autonomy just because he “wanted to see what would happen.”
Planned Parenthood. Rest on that statement for a minute. In 1985 I was not sexually active but KNEW I didn’t want an unplanned pregnancy—I knew way too many teen parents. I got on the pill, it regulated my period, I also learned about STDs and I shared the information with the adults that I knew. In 1993 when I wanted to have a baby I went off of the pill and had my planned child. In 2004 I was carrying a baby that was deformed, malformed, and who knows if it would have survived outside of utero. I had an abortion. Do you know how messed up it is for people to call you a murderer? Planned Parenthood was the best place for my teenage self! I never got an STD and I had my child when I wanted to. I think the real crime in America is the attack on abortion and Planned Parenthood.
As a teenager, I volunteered at Planned Parenthood because I believed in their work. There was much to understand about becoming a woman, past and present, including that my mother and I were not singular in our stories of sexual abuse. When I became sexually active, I didn’t want to marry or have children. I sought out birth control and therapy—despite society’s conditioning that both were shameful or wrong. Fast forward to a loving marriage and becoming pregnant. Most women would be ecstatic, yet I was horrified and felt my happy world had just taken an irreversible detour. Never before or since have I felt such abject fear. I didn’t want to pass onto a child the inherited and conditioned behaviors I had experienced. My husband understood my concerns; neither of us was ready to raise a child. Because of the courage and activism of women before me, I had a safe and legal abortion without fear for the choices I made for my body, my future.
It’s a human right to choose what you want to do with your own body. Even if you don’t agree with the choice that is being made it’s not you’re choice to make. Everyone is on a different path. If I wasn’t in the position I am in today and I got pregnant I’d probably get an abortion, because I wouldn’t meet the standards of a mother I want to be and it’s not even that sometimes it comes down to medical too, so for it to be taken away is unfair. It’s ungodly to put your opinion on other people’s lives. If your opinion is a religious one maybe you should read the bible more and support universal healthcare and free lunch and breakfast for all kids instead of worrying about the ones not born yet while majority are suffering out here. If you’re so pro-life maybe get into adoption and save the kids in the system who need to believe life is worth living and there is someone who cares about them. Not just the ones who haven’t taken their first breath yet only matter!
Be born. My mother had to have surgery to repair her filopian tubes after a tubinal pregnancy.
I am alive because I had safe access to an abortion. I’m physically disabled. I could get pregnant, but I could safely carry a child. Despite that, no doctor would tie my tubes in the 1990’s. I got pregnant despite two forms of birth control, and I am alive today because I had access to safe and legal care. I also had mandatory sex education in school, and my only wish is my prude parents had been more open to talk to me. I’m forever grateful for Planned Parenthood for providing those resources to me and educating me when my family could as well!
When I was in my 20s, I had PCOS but I hadn’t been diagnosed yet. So I was dealing with random periods, sometimes I would have a period for several months, and sometimes I would go several months without one. Well, I’d recently gone six months without one. And then all of a sudden, I had one and it was like everything was coming out at once. I was losing too much blood too fast and I ended up in the hospital. They said I lost a pint of blood before I got there. I had to have an emergency D&C. If I hadn’t, I would have died. If I were to need one today, I wouldn’t be able to get one.
Nearly 30 years ago, I lost my reproductive freedom when my abusive partner prevented me from accessing birth control. When I subsequently became pregnant, he also thwarted my attempts to have an abortion. At that time, I was experiencing poverty, housing insecurity, and financial abuse in addition to the domestic abuse and reproductive coercion. Vulnerable and lacking resources, I tragically relinquished my only child for adoption. When I was able to flee that relationship, I began piecing my life together, which included having full control over my reproductive decisions. With my reproductive freedom restored, I went on to earn my master’s degree, something that I never thought possible. I eventually began working in the field of reproductive healthcare and freedom. I am also an activist for first/birth parents who have been taken advantage of by the adoption industry. Having experienced the loss of my reproductive freedom fuels to fight to for reproductive rights, and justice.
My story is actually about a lack of reproductive freedom. In 1971, I was living in Paris. I met a man, and eventually we moved in together. I was a virgin at 21. He convinced me that his method wouldn’t result in any pregnancy. My parents found out I was living with him and my dad sent me an airline to come home. It wasn’t until I got back to Denver that I realized I was pregnant. I didn’t want to tell my parents. I wanted to get an abortion. A little research resulted in a lack of any eligibility. I didn’t know what to do. I shared the info with the young man who traveled to Denver to help decide what to do. It became apparent that I would have to tell my parents. They talked us into getting married; which I also didn’t want to do. Our son was born in March 1972. To this day, I am still angry that I was forced into motherhood by the state of Colorado. Thereafter, I worked very hard to help make abortion legal and further to try to get Medicaid funding for poor women.
Make my own choices about my own life.
When I was 16 years old I got pregnant and had to have an ethics committee allow me to have an abortion. My parents wanted me to have a future.i don’t regret it. Was able to Finish HS and go on to become an RN.
I am lucky to be alive. My mother had to undergo a “coat hanger abortion” before my birth in 1968. Blindfolded and led down back alleys, she underwent the painful and risky procedure at the hands of a medical student. My son is lucky to be alive. The father of my children and I both carry a gene for an autosomal recessive, life threatening disease. Had we not had the option to terminate the pregnancy depending on the health of the fetus, we certainly would not have risked pregnancy.
I have PMOS. I was able to access care to get my hormones under control when I was a teenager. I could not get this same treatment now.
Access to reproductive education, affordable ob/gyn care, and all forms of reproductive medication and procedures I needed — these ALL gave me the freedom to… Get my college degree, then MBA and have a career I enjoyed.
Explore my sexuality without fear of getting pregnant and being forever linked to the wrong man.
Take care of my health – treating UTIs, treating heavy periods with oblation, clearing out the debris of a miscarriage, and using different types of birth control during different periods of my life. (I am 70 and I have used the pill, a diaphram, emergency contraception pills, an IUD and then (after child #2) getting my tubes tied.
Wait to marry my husband who I love and who I am happy to have as the father of our children.
Get fertility treatment that allowed me to become a mother at ages 35 and 39.
Allowed me to survive breast cancer.
Helped me navigate the menopause journey.
HAVE THE LIFE THAT I WANT, NOT ONE THAT POLITICIANS WOULD DICTATE TO ME.
In love for the first time, a senior in high school, I went to the doctor to get started on the BC pill. I waited for my next period, so I could start the pill afterward. It never came. I went to college, started vomiting, no period, and it dawned on me that I was pregnant. The college health center confirmed it, and I found my way to an abortion provider in a small town; a woman volunteer drove me there and back. No one except my boyfriend, 300 miles away, knew. I remember him saying he’d sell his stereo to help pay, but I think it all happened via a county program, or Planned Parenthood. I went on in school to become a doctor and never had kids, although there was a time I tried to conceive, early in my marriage. 50 years later, no regrets. I see in other stories shared here, that late-teen, early 20’s time of life is pivotal. Women need these resources!
Have a medical doctor perform a D&C on me when I suffered a spontaneous abortion (aka miscarriage) — not once, but twice. Women around the USA are dying because doctors are afraid to help stop them from bleeding to death when they have had an ectopic pregnancy or spontaneous abortion.
Birth control and GNRH agonists saved my life. I was a happy kid until I got my first period at age 12. For about 3 weeks out of my cycle I was my normal self, but as I entered my luteal phase, I would experience debilitating physical symptoms and even worse mental symptoms; it starts with anxiety and paranoia, then debilitating depression and suicidal ideation. It would get so bad over the course of that week that I didn’t recognize myself; I would either become an active danger to myself or so depressed I could barely move or speak—like every cell in my body was pumped full of lead. At 13, I spent 2 months in inpatient psych, and the doctors were baffled that all the traditional meds—SSRIs, NDRIs, SNRIs, mood stabilizers—didn’t work. That was because I didn’t have a “traditional” mental illness. At 15 I was finally diagnosed with PMDD. It took years to find a treatment that worked. I had lost all hope for a career or a family, but thanks to BC and GNRHas, I can dream again.
Build a life that is meaningful and fulfilling.
I have two adult children now, but I had two abortions after having them. I was in school to get on a career path that would support my family since I was the responsible parent. Ironically, I got both my abortions in the late 1980s at Planned Parenthood in Norman, Oklahoma, an excellent, professional facility where I had no problems. I had two miscarriages before my two live pregnancies, and the second one required medical attention. The male doctor tried to shame me while giving a DNC (dilation & curettage) that was necessary to get everything out. I could have died from bleeding or infection if I did not have this procedure. Still angry at that doctor, but glad I got it done. Finally, to go back in time to when I was a teenager in 1972, there was a Planned Parenthood where I could get birth control without having to fight my parents for their permission. I was having sex and needed education and protection. I’m forever grateful to Planned Parenthood and for my freedom of choice!
I was born after my parents moved to a small town where my mother was required to have my father’s permission to obtain birth control. My two older sisters became pregnant in college and exercised choice: One chose abortion; one placed her daughter for adoption. I obtained birth control through Planned Parenthood. My brother’s girlfriend was the receptionist, but she kept her promise that my care at Planned Parenthood was confidential. I married at a young age to a man who supported my choices. A first-generation college student, I earned my PhD. Reproductive choice enabled my education, successful career, and eventual motherhood. After 17 years of marriage, we became parents through adoption. The losses in reproductive freedom undermine women’s autonomy and make me fear for my daughter’s ability to make choices about her future. I am pro-choice, for all of the choices.
Educate my children about the reality of having to navigate a life devoted to their children.
I have two stories involving good friends, one from the mid-fifties and one from 1970. In the mid-fifties I was living in San Francisco. My roommate became pregnant. There was no question of an abortion. In fact, in those days a single woman couldn’t even get contraception. We all shared one wedding ring for this purpose! Her parents insisted she go to the Florence Crittendon home for unwed mothers. She refused and we lived together throughout the pregnancy. She made her own arrangements for the adoption of her baby. She went on with life, but at what cost? In 1970, I was living in New York City. My friend from Colorado became pregnant. It was possible that her lover, an Asian man, was the father. She did not want to risk lying to her white husband. Luckily, NY State had just passed a bill legalizing abortion. She came to stay with me for a few days, had her abortion, and resumed her life.
Avoid being tied to an abusive, alcoholic, drug addict who threatened to kill me. I’ve been able to freely have adventures and live life on my terms without custody battles and further abuse and terror.
Reproduction has never interested me at any time in my life. I have spent most of my life resenting needing to ask permission to protect myself (affording a medical exam without having insurance to get a prescription) and being told repeatedly by doctors that I did not know my own mind (“you’re too young to be sterilized; you may change your mind). Therefore, I grew poisonous herbs in my garden for many years in case of accidental pregnancy. Although I took the pill faithfully, it is not 100% reliable, and I refused to take any chances. As an aside, being “child free” has allowed me to give to society in ways I would not have had time for.
Start on birth control when I wanted to. I never went to my parents about my sexual experiences because they would not have approved but I always did what I wanted to do so as soon as possible I went on my own to the doctor and got my prescription for birth control because I was going to have sex before marriage which is not something my parents approved of. They trusted me and rightly so because I was on birth control my entire life until I finally got married and I got married older at the age of 33. Since I am 70 this year there were not a lot of people doing what I did back in my day But I was always true to myself
Access to reproductive rights gave me the freedom to have an abortion when I found out my pregnancy was not viable. I had an ultrasound at 10 weeks and learned that my baby had no heartbeat. I was given the choice to wait and see if my body miscarried or have an abortion to remove the fetus. I chose to have the abortion and I was so relieved to not have the added trauma of waiting to see if my body miscarried and the trauma of going through actual process.
Access to reproductive services allowed me the freedom to find options to help with debilitating menstrual cycles by putting me on birth control that allowed me to live life normally again. I didn’t have to miss work or school because of the cramping anymore.
I saw my Mom get out my father’s metal contractors measuring tape and after dinner was over and my dad was about to get up, she undid the tape and she said to my dad, Frank, it is only 4 feet from the table to the sink and dishwasher, please, if you could just pick up your dishes and take them to the sink, it would be so helpful, my father just looked at her and said nothing, just walked away. I saw my Mom deflate, she just was humiliated, and she also worked outside the home, but had all the responsibility of the home and kids, and my dad just worked and that was all, I started to see the injustice of being a Mother and also marriage. I was married, and it was the same thing, I was slammed with all the housework, being the cook, laundress, groceries, etc, as well as totally redoing an 1800s house, with him taking all the credit. I divorced him, never remarried, never had kids. I just could not see giving up my life for any of that. I have never regretted it.
I’ve never been pregnant, never wanted kids, never been on birth control, outside of condoms (for a little while), until a couple months before I found out I probably had ovarian cancer. Two years after surgery and bare of sex organs, I’m still taking it, over $1800 a month, thanking God with every filled prescription, because I’ll die without it. I’ll pitch straight into darkness and the void, thrashing in the body’s shout at electrical chaos, and after enough days or hours of status epilepticus, something important will give out or break and that’s it. As ways to die go, it isn’t the worst, though I’d like to put it off. All through 26 years with one man, never wore a condom, never before or after did my body say Yes to a child: but my body can’t say No to birth control. Funny how things happen. Funny how we find freedom.
Having reproductive freedom enabled me to pursue a military career.
Our lives depend on this right.
Tell us what you built.
Published in Ms. · Be Part of the Record
