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.

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.

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.

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 hand the doctor cash.

I tried to commit suicide to stop the pain and shame of having been molested and the consequences of it.

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.

I never thought I'd be 40 when I had my first abortion, already a mother and happily married. But life rarely pans out as pictured.

It's not a huge part of my life, it is just a part of my life. I didn’t settle. I chose.

With no savings account, we were financially unprepared to bring a child into our lives.

There would be no escape with a baby.

If my fallopian tube had been allowed to rupture, how much harder would my path to pregnancy be?

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.

I was on birth control pills and got pregnant anyway. Neither of us wanted or were capable of taking care of a child.

I can’t imagine what could have happened if he found out I was pregnant. But I’m so glad I’ll never know.