Abortion
Before I turned twenty I had had two abortions.
It is not something I am ashamed of or have ever regretted, the medical procedure that absolutely was the right choice for me. I now speak openly about them with friends and family and when I was asked to write this article, I thought it would be quite a straight forward process. It turns out it was not.
Like all experiences, they are not the same for everyone. This is my story and this is me speaking my truth.
For the first abortion, the journey to get there is long, complicated and messy. The second, the beginning of the journey to heal.
I’m still 100% sure of the decisions I made, but I’m ashamed and quite frankly outraged at the circumstances that surrounded them. The heavy burden of shame, loneliness and trauma my teenage self endured.
I got my first period when I was nine years old, I had pubic hair and breasts well before I finished primary school. By my first year at college (year 7), I was years ahead of the other girls my age. I was bursting and ripe, I was vivacious but most importantly I was still an 11-year-old kid.
The boys paid me lots of attention and for this, I was labelled a “dirty slut” by the enraged and jealous older girls the second I walked onto school grounds.
At first I thought it was exciting, exhilarating to be noticed by the older girls (they knew my name!) and to be cornered and conspiringly asked about boys and blowjobs. (I came from a tiny farming primary school of just 130 kids - these words were not in my vocabulary) they were so cool, so grownup, so exotic.
I eagerly accepted, knowingly nodded in confirmation to a colourful (albeit fictional) sexual history that I was never able to shake. When I figured out what exactly they were accusing me of, I was horrified I tried to explain I didn’t do those things and I didn’t understand what I was admitting to. But there is no backtracking once you are branded, there is no shaking that stigma. Not only at the private girls’ school I attended but also for the parents of my peers, the private rich moms’ clubs and every school in town.
Abbey Looker: NOTORIOUS S.L.U.T.
I think I could have handled the bullying from my peers, but it was when the mothers that got on the bandwagon. Those who would sneer at me in the carpark, who openly wouldn’t let their children hang out with me after school because I was dangerous and dirty and fast and loose - and they would strongly recommend other mothers to follow suit.
Grown women who would look a child in the eye and tell them their “kind” isn’t welcome in their home, you disgust me most of all.
Their words and acts condemnation solidified my growing fear that everyone was right.
I hadn’t done these things that for which I was being persecuted for, but if even grown-ups saw this disgusting and dirty part of me it must be true, it must be who I am. It turned out to only be a matter of time until I affirmed their accusations.
Fast forward to a year later.
I am 12 years old and I have just been raped.
It has taken me a long time to be able to say this with any conviction and my hands still shake as I type.
I drank a bottle of vodka.
Unconscious, with my head in a bucket of my vomit, a 16-year-old boy had sex with me.
I have no recollection of this. Walking home in the morning I felt like something was fundamentally wrong with my body. When I noticed blood in my underwear, I had my first experience of deep and dark dread. As a child, I had no point of reference to even begin to understand what had happened to me, I couldn’t even begin to guess what these sensations and feelings meant?
I found out when I went back to school.
Everyone knew.
I asked the other girls that were there to explain what was going on. One of them told me she had walked in on him having sex with me when I was asleep in the bucket. I desperately tried to defend myself. But I was unconscious? But I strongly disliked the scabby lipped little shit I had actually fought with the evening before!
Serves you right was basically the rhetoric I received. You were asking for it and you deserve it.
When I got older and found the words (RAPE), then I was a liar and drama queen.
I was too young to do anything but accept this version of events. I was twelve years old.
I would dispute this every now and again over the years, but it was pointless. Once he showed up at a friends birthday, I begged the mother to ask him to leave - frantic, tearful and obviously afraid. But the other girls wanted him to stay so the mother asked me to calm down (she was a family friend, I had gone to kindergarten with her daughter). He would taunt me, call me a bitch. No one would believe me.
Disgusted in myself and now ashamed that I really was exactly what everyone said I was.
I become reckless and disconnected.
Fast forward 6 years and I’m 18.
I’ve grown up a lot, I’ve managed to somewhat outgrow my slut title - although it is permanently attached to my reputation. The only difference, is now I am wearing it more comfortably.
And of course, I am pregnant.
The guy responsible for exactly 50% percent of our situation, on finding out “thinks we shouldn’t kick it any more”.
Again, all of my friends have yet again turned on me, I’m not even kidding - ALL but one had some kind of group meeting to discuss their now mutual hate for me. I showed up to my best friends house to meet everyone else and was literally chased out the door. What it was that I did to deserve this treatment, I still have no explanation for, despite begging them for what ended up to be almost a decade - for some answers. I throw myself at their feet, revealing all, in the hope of getting some help. But of course not, now it is just common knowledge. But who’s surprised.
I am alone.
This is what I deserve.
It feels as though it was inevitable.
This is what makes me so fucking disgusted.
Although convoluted - it is all connected. My entire history, combined with the societal stigma and shame around women’s sexuality, led me to accept the abhorrent way I now saw myself.
Having the actual abortion was a total cluster fuck. My mom was at the natal unit visiting a workmates baby the day I went in to get my scans (of course). I couldn’t think of an excuse as to why I was there, so it all came tumbling out. She spent the entire procedure both before and after being both stern and horribly disappointed, crying that her first grant child had just been MURDERED.
I felt betrayed and set adrift, we never spoke of it again.
—
My second abortion and the lead up to it was drastically different.
My dad, who had noticed a massive change in my personality about a year after my first termination was worried about my mental health. Fearing something horrible had happened, he took a peep at my personal record at the hospital where he worked which showed my ding ding ding ABORTION.
Being the kind, gentle and intuitive man that he is, he took me for a lone drive. Gently he began to probe, not with judgement but with concern that his daughters light was fading before his very eyes. He admitted and apologised for the breach of confidentiality for looking into my private health records.
He assured me it was nothing to be ashamed of and told me that it can be something deeply traumatising for many women. He told me that he was there to support me, that it wasn’t something I should or had to carry alone. I was relieved but also mortified that he now knew how truly disgusting I was. But once I started talking I couldn’t stop, I told him all of it all. All of the things I had been carrying, the abortion, the rape, the ridicule, the loneliness and the isolation. And he believed me and he helped me to believe in myself, enough to begin the journey to where and who I am today.
A few months later, I hi de hooo got pregnant again. Just under 18 months after my first one - jeez Louise. But this time it wasn’t from being reckless with my body, it was just a genuine slip up combined with coming from a long line from extremely fertile baby machines. Despite using the pill religiously with my boyfriend, it somehow had happened.
This time around I had someone on my team, to turn to, someone to tell me it was okay. Someone who respected my privacy and made excuses, while I vomited for 6 weeks straight on our family holiday. Someone who told me that I wasn’t a horrible person and that not only was it my choice but that whatever I felt was the right decision, was the right decision.
Having someone to support you, even just one person makes a world of difference.
From experience, the whole weird process of organising and then getting an abortion is geared to humiliate and shame you, an experience where you need to prove you are mentally unfit to have a baby, where your choice alone is not enough. Having support makes the many judgemental comments you have to endure during the process somewhat bearable - my personal favourite “oh Abbey, I remember you! did you know I birthed you? in 30 years of delivering babies you are still the most beautiful baby I’ve ever brought into this world, have you ever thought about how beautiful your baby would be? Oh, it hurts me to think of killing such a beautiful baby”.
—
Abortion number two was simple and painless both psychologically and physically.
For that, I am forever grateful.
There is no moral to this story.
It is not an original story and to some extent, it echoes the experiences of almost every woman I know. Put a group of us in a room, the stats do not lie. What is truly exceptional about my story is that it is not unique.
Being a woman is hard and more than a bit fucked up.
I am so disgusted and ashamed of the way I was treated and that the behaviour from those around me was tolerated, how much was allowed to be brushed under the rug.
How as an adult can you look at a 12-year-old child and decide that what they are saying is fabricated, that it is a narrative that they had invented for their personal gratification - to not consider an alternative reality and context, or to consider that just because you might not like the truth that it is the truth - is beyond me.
I was made to feel like a liar my whole life and I now doubt my own memories, my own trauma and sometimes who I am, fundamentally.
To be convinced that there is something putrid and venal hiding within you - that others can see, or smell or taste and that even if you try to hide, it will eventually be exposed and that everyone will know. To fear that part of yourself so much follows you for the rest of your life.
I am ashamed of the young men who were there that knew what happened and who then fed like wolves on my remains. The men who knowingly, gently(or forcefully) took advantage of my insecurities and I am ashamed of the men who managed to do that without words, and with my body for the years that followed.
I need to feel this anger that I have put aside for so long.
I NEED to indulge in this punishing rage so tragically misdirected (inwards) so I can forgive myself.
I need to stand with that 12-year-old child, that lost young adult and plant my feet in the earth.
I need to brace my body, clench my fists and howl in disbelief when no one else did.
I have had two abortions and I don’t regret either of them.
It is not the surgery itself that was so abhorrent and traumatising, it is the way we are made to feel about our bodies and our choices around them, from day one.
—
We can do better by one another, we have a responsibility to make changes, to teach and to speak up and in doing so we can hope for more for our daughters and for more from our sons.
Words & Image — Abbey Looker
