I was a married mother of two

Here's my story:

When I had my abortion in 1988, I'm pretty sure I wasn't what most people, at least at the time, envisioned when they pictured the kind of woman who wants to "get rid of" a pregnancy.

I wasn't a teenager. I wasn't a single woman. I was married, 35 years old, and the mother of two boys, one 7 years old, the other not quite a year. I loved being their mom. But I knew, in every fiber of my being, that two children were all I could handle, emotionally and physically.

Both babies had been delivered by emergency C-sections, and the recoveries weren't exactly a day at the beach. Looking back, I believe that I suffered from mild to moderate postnatal depression after the birth of my first. Mothering young ones, as much as I treasured the role, did not come easily to me.

My husband at the time agreed that our two boys were enough for us, but he wouldn't hear of getting a vasectomy, and condoms were out of the question as far as he was concerned. I was still weaning my youngest, so I didn't want to use hormonal birth control or the IUDs that were available at the time. So I (since it seemed to be my sole responsibility) relied on a diaphragm and foam.

Which, as they sometimes do, failed. I'd been thrilled when finding I was pregnant with my first two. This time, I was devastated. And my marriage, which had gone through a major crisis just before we'd had the second baby, was still in tenuous shape.

I was torn by the decision. My husband was supportive of my getting an abortion. But he also made it clear that if I chose to go ahead with the pregnancy, the consequences were mine to deal with.

A month into my pregnancy, I told my ob/gyn, a genteel older gentleman who'd delivered my sons, that this was a pregnancy I couldn't keep. Medication abortion wasn't a thing back then, so surgical abortion was the only option. He was kind, but insisted on waiting two weeks before he'd do the procedure. His explanation: It would be easier to remove all the "products of conception."  I've wondered since if his real intent was to see if I'd change my mind, get over my female hysteria, and accept the pregnancy.

I didn't change my mind. But those two weeks were mental torture.

The abortion itself was straightforward and fairly untraumatic. I felt great relief, as though I'd dodged a fatal prognosis. But I was also susceptible to the messages of the anti-abortion movement, which would certainly see me as a baby killer, a woman who, as one right-wing radio shrink at the time described it, "had her kid sucked down a sink."

And yet I didn't regret my abortion; I knew I'd done what I had to for my family — and most of all, for me. Thirteen years later, my husband suddenly died, leaving me with his struggling small business, a house he'd remodeled himself but never quite finished, one son in college and another in high school. Amid my shock and grief was gratitude that I didn't also have a third child to raise alone.

But it wasn't until decades later, when I saw real images of 6 and 8 week pregnancies, washed of blood — tiny, pale tissuey sacs rather than the grisly dismembered fetuses that the anti-choice zealots loved to parade — that I finally felt free of the condemnation I'd internalized.

I wish I could go back and put my arms around that frightened young mom and tell her she had every right to make that choice.