In 2018, when I was twenty-one years old, I had a medical abortion. I knew I wasn’t ready to be a mother, I knew the man I was pregnant to wasn’t ready to be a father. Neither of us were financially or emotionally equipped for that and I knew that an abortion was the only course of action that I could take at that point in my life.
If it were possible, I would have liked if someone could have prepared me for what I would feel afterwards, because even though my choice was definitive, my emotions were not. As each person’s experience is so unique, perhaps there is no way to truly prepare anyone for what they might go through, though I am going to try.
In no particular order and with no certainty of whether these words will ring true for all, here are the things I wish someone would have told me; that you can feel relieved and regretful at the same time, that your partner might not understand how you feel and you might resent them for that, that if you have supportive friends and family you should absolutely lean on them, that you don’t have to “push through” the pain and pretend everything is normal, that if you are uncomfortable seeing a male physician you can, and should, ask for a female, that the first time you get your period again you might cry, that your body might change quickly and that can feel disorienting, that your emotions are going to be all over the place, that truthfully you might always wonder about the other path you could have taken and that, in the end, you really are going to be okay.