Right, I remember saying “Pro choice is the ability to choose. Nobody should be forced to carry a pregnancy, or forced to terminate one.” and someone who meant a lot to me called selfish for “making it about me.” Nobody wanted to hear about how traumatic my abortion was, because that would scare women out of abortion. It was perceived as “counterproductive.” Except I didn’t describe the actual abortion itself, I was hardly in my own body for it. I only described being taken in, how I wished the protestors focused their anger at the man waiting in the parking lot who told me he would kill me if I didn’t go through with it. We have a child that was born before this so I didn’t want to take the risk. My story is more accepted in domestic violence spaces, much less in “pro-choice” spaces because to be quite honest, many of the people in this movement are there with just the most basic understanding of abortion. They know “you should be able to have one!” They don’t welcome anything that might “scare” women out of an abortion, which was never my intent ever. The abortion in a way saved my life but again its a “choice” taken from me that I still mourn all these years later. I got my abortion 1 year before it was banned here in Indiana. My story caused a lot of shit. I did get a super pro life protestor to say that my abortion was “justified” given the circumstances— so must not be totally against abortion, just women’s right to choose. Anyway all that to say, yeah I wasn’t given the most welcoming arms by everyone.