Read a story. Share a story.
The healing is in the sharing. Both personally and politically.
Dare to bear witness. Dare to be heard.
The PVP Library
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"The job was botched. She bled to death in three, maybe four days. She was thirty-three years old. "
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"I would say it was almost a spiritual experience because I was honoring myself. This is the kind of abortion experience I want for other women."
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"I hemorrhaged and almost died in the emergency room I ultimately landed in - but they refused to do a D&C."
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"I would not be the woman, mother, sister, daughter, friend, and citizen I am today had my rights been stripped of me years ago."
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"I don't know if he ever told anyone, but I never did, except one boyfriend ten years later, who used it against me when we broke up a few months after we began. I never did that again. Not even my husband knows."
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"No one should have to have, or express, a 'good enough' reason to get an abortion."
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“She died after the procedure and her death certificate says that she died from ‘septicemia following after an abortion.’”
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"If my fallopian tube had been allowed to rupture, how much harder would my path to pregnancy be?"
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"There would be no escape with a baby."
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"I want to tell people because I am not the stereotype of a person who gets an abortion. And that's just it: There is no stereotype. We all get abortions."
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"When I learned I had become pregnant by someone who had an eye on my young girls, I did not hesitate to take advantage of legal abortion in 1973."
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"Pain is there and something else. Shame enters. It enters in the words of the nurse scolding me for having sex before marriage. Shame enters again as I had the doctor cash."
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"It was a lunch counter at a five and dime store in Tijuana. I was instructed to be there at a specific date and time and to wear a specific piece of clothing."
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"I tried to commit suicide to stop the pain and shame of having been molested and the consequences of it."
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"The radiation and chemo were almost certain to cause grave harm to the fetus."
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“One of my readers wrote about a friend's agony as she searched for a lead to a back-alley abortion.”
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"With no savings account, we were financially unprepared to bring a child into our lives."
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"He didn't offer to help pay for the abortion, question my decision, or offer any kind of emotional support. I learned later that he married within the year."
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"I never thought I'd be 40 when I had my first abortion, already a mother and happily married."
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"I screamed, I fought, I pleaded with him not to do it, but he did...he raped me and then left as quickly and silently as he had come."
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"Somehow I was pregnant, and I had exposed the one-week old embryo to a medication known to cause significant malformations of the heart and other essential organs."
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"It wasn't scary or traumatic or upsetting. In fact, I remember it as one of the most positive days of my life."
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"The next day I was very tired but also elated and enormously relieved. I was free. FREE!"
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"When I think of it, all I feel is gratitude."
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"I can’t imagine what could have happened if he found out I was pregnant. But I’m so glad I’ll never know."
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"All night I had slept curled around the plastic container that contained my blood, her blood, the blood that grew from an egg that formed in my body when I was still in my mother’s body."
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"We both had come from warm loving families and knew that we were not yet ready to do the same together."
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"I wasn’t pregnant, nor asking for an abortion, yet because of the very restrictive laws in Idaho, I have no gynecologist."
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"The reason is between me and my healthcare provider. Hard stop."
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"The clinic sent me home with a packet of birth control pills and a prescription for more. My mom insisted on filling the prescription at a pharmacy in the next town over from ours because our local pharmacist would know that I was sexually active, and we couldn’t have that."
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"For my lover and me, we each had an equal part in creating the pregnancy, but the impact was entirely on her."
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"I needed intervention, and trusted my OBGYN when she helped me in this very vulnerable and grief-stricken time in my life."
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"This was my penance, my prison sentence for taking the first life that I created."
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"The doctors leaving the area is about so much more than just abortions, or anything related to them. Women's healthcare can save lives."
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"Abortions happen on specific days at Planned Parenthood and the protesters know which days those are. Both times I entered the building they all stood outside holding up signs and yelling at me."
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“When I did start telling people, they were open and honest about their own experiences. I realized how common it is. Not just abortions and miscarriages, but all sorts of reproductive challenges.”
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“I had the opinion that if someone got pregnant, it was their responsibility. And I even debated in a classroom setting that abortion was wrong.”
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"When I called to make the appointment they told me there might be protesters outside. I'm really thankful there was nobody outside."
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“‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’ he tells me, clearly saying that nice girls don't get into this kind of trouble.”
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"I was on birth control pills and got pregnant anyway. Neither of us wanted or were capable of taking care of a child."