In many cases, people who oppose abortion will never experience a life-altering event that immediately flips a mental switch. That kind of evolution on abortion is uncommon. “I went through two weeks of stress,” she recalls, “for a procedure that lasted like ten minutes.” Afterward, she “felt relief and for the first time, joy,” but never regret. She forged two absence excuses for her high school, three days apart, and terminated her pregnancy just before her senior prom. She kept the whole thing secret, scheduling an appointment at a clinic an hour and a half away, cobbling together about $300 from her McDonald’s wages and her sister’s tips from waitressing. It was just, I’m not having this child.”īecause her mother and grandmother would always stop to say a prayer when they drove by Planned Parenthood, Stephanie knew where to go. “I thought abortion was going to leave me infertile, and that I was going to have depression and breast cancer and I would never have sex again - so many bad things were going to happen, and it was irrelevant. “In that moment, there was no other thought,” she recalls. Sitting in the bathroom and watching the positive result materialize, she knew instantly that she wasn’t continuing the pregnancy. A high-school classmate, disbelieving she actually had a boyfriend, goaded her into taking a test in the middle of class. A woman who got an abortion would go to “hell for eternity and burn and there is nothing else.”īut when Stephanie was a senior in high school, she found out she was pregnant on a dare. “According to some people, God forgives all, but for the people that I was raised by, God does not forgive abortion,” she says. The message she received from her family, over and over again, was that ending a pregnancy amounted to “the murder of a child, the worst thing a woman can do.” Both her parents are refugees from El Salvador her father is Catholic and her mother is an Evangelical Christian. In the conservative Houston community where Stephanie grew up, abortion was a concept so heinous that adults almost never mentioned it by name. Photo-Illustration: Josiah Whitfield Photos: Getty
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