I’ve had seven abortions over the course of seventeen years.
None of them were the result of rape. None were due to a medical emergency. None came with a moment where I thought, I have no choice.
I had choices. I made them. Repeatedly.
And none of those decisions felt like a tragedy.
That’s the part people don’t know what to do with.
We’ve built a cultural script around abortion that only makes room for certain kinds of stories. The “acceptable” ones. The ones where something went wrong. Where a woman is backed into a corner by circumstances she didn’t ask for. Where the abortion is framed as unfortunate, but necessary.
Those stories are real. They matter. But they are not the only stories.
Mine doesn’t fit that mold.
I did not want to be a parent at 20. I did not want to be a parent at 25. I did not want to be a parent at 30. That didn’t change just because I got pregnant. Pregnancy didn’t transform me into someone who suddenly felt called to motherhood. It didn’t reveal a hidden desire. It didn’t create a moral dilemma.
It presented a decision. And I made the same one each time.
Not because I was confused. Not because I was careless. Not because I was in crisis.
Because I knew what I wanted my life to be, and I knew what I did not want it to be.
There’s an expectation that if you have more than one abortion, something must be wrong. That it signals irresponsibility, denial, or dysfunction. That eventually, you’re supposed to learn some kind of lesson that leads you to a different outcome.
But what if the “lesson” is simply clarity?
What if the consistency is the point?
I didn’t experience my abortions as interruptions to some imagined future where I would become a mother. I experienced them as a way of protecting the life I was already living.
That distinction matters.
Because when abortion is only framed as a response to crisis, it strips it of agency. It turns it into something reactive instead of something deliberate. It suggests that the only valid reason to end a pregnancy is because you were left with no other option.
I was not out of options.
I just didn’t choose parenthood.
And I never have.
There’s also a quiet pressure to assign emotional weight to abortion—to describe it as painful, or complicated, or something that leaves a lasting mark. For some people, that’s true. I’m not interested in arguing with that.
But it wasn’t true for me.
I didn’t feel grief. I didn’t feel regret. I didn’t feel like I had lost something. What I felt, consistently, was relief.
Relief that I was still in control of my life. Relief that I wasn’t going to be tied to a future I never wanted. Relief that I could continue as I was, without having to reshape everything around a role I never chose.
Relief is not a dramatic emotion. It doesn’t make for compelling storytelling. It doesn’t invite sympathy. But it is honest.
And honesty is what’s missing from most conversations about abortion.
There is a narrow range of acceptable feelings, acceptable reasons, acceptable narratives. Step outside of that, and people become uncomfortable. Not because the experience is rare, but because it challenges the framework they rely on to make sense of it.
If abortion can be a neutral or even positive choice—if it can be made calmly, repeatedly, and without regret—then it stops being something that can be neatly contained within moral exceptions.
It becomes something else entirely.
Something closer to autonomy.
Something closer to control.
Something that doesn’t require justification beyond this is not the life I want.
I don’t expect everyone to understand my decisions. I don’t expect everyone to agree with them.
But I’m not interested in reshaping my story to make it more palatable.
I had seven abortions.
They were not tragedies.
They were choices.
And they made the life I have now possible.