8. Reframing Abortion Regret

In this episode we tackle the myth that abortion regret is common, learn about the dignity of risk, and make space for complicated feelings.

Guests:

• Layidua and Sarah, We Testify abortion storytellers

• Corinne Rocca, PhD, epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco and researcher on the Turnaway Study

• Northwestern Professor Katie Watson, lawyer, bioethicist, and author of Scarlet A

Special thanks to Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify. Logo by Kate Ryan, music by Lily Sloane.

Layidua [00:00:00] I hold a lot of conflict with the language around choice, because I don't feel like there was a choice or a thought process. I think I went into survival mode and immediately decided that I could not deal with a pending deportation and a pregnancy. 

Sarah [00:00:18] I know the decision was the decision that I was meant to make. Both decisions were wrong, and I chose the one that was most right for me. And when I say wrong, I don't mean it from like a religious perspective or a moral perspective or legal perspective. I just mean, like, you know, neither of them felt like the right thing at the time. Like, it really, truly felt like I was making a decision about something that I was I was going to be sad about, regardless of which way that I just moved forward. And I think that was the first time in my life where I've really felt like no matter what I did, it wouldn't feel that great. 

[intro music plays]

Garnet Henderson [00:01:27] Welcome to ACCESS, a podcast about abortion, I'm your host, Garnet Henderson. One of the most pervasive cultural narratives we have about abortion is that it's an inherently difficult and sad decision that many people will come to regret. And this idea, specifically the concern about regret, is used to justify a lot of laws that make abortion less accessible. But if you've listened to this podcast, you know that most people don't regret their abortions. For many people, the decision to have an abortion is very straightforward. They might have all kinds of emotions about the abortion itself or the circumstances in their lives at the time, but they're confident about the decision they made. This narrative about regret doesn't reflect their reality. However, it is true that some people have complicated feelings about their abortions, even including regret. But the thing is, this obsession with abortion regret doesn't serve them either. It actually makes it harder for them to speak honestly about their experiences for fear that what they say will be politicized or misconstrued. So today we're going to try and find some nuance. 

Corinne Rocca [00:02:49] There's this perception in the public and in general discourse about abortion, that abortion is somehow emotionally harmful to women. And this is an idea and an argument and a claim that is made to forward legislation. So. Right. We saw, for example, at the Supreme Court level in the Gonzalez versus Carhart case, we saw Justice Kennedy arguing that even though we don't have any data to support it, it is highly possible that women come to regret the abortions that they choose to have. And in fact, a type of later abortion procedure was banned in part based on that rationale. And then since 2007, we've seen waiting period laws be passed at the state level, counseling scripts that mandate that providers inform women who are seeking an abortion that they may experience regret, all based on this belief. But the truth is that we've never had data to support those claims, right? So there had been some small research studies looking at short term emotions after an abortion. So how women feel maybe in the week or the month after an abortion or small studies in small geographic areas, often in Europe, where there is a completely different sociocultural context around abortion. But we really haven't known what women's emotions are over the long term. 

Garnet [00:04:09] That's Dr. Corinne Rocca. She's an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and she was part of the team that worked on the Turnaway Study, which you heard about in our last episode. 

Corinne [00:04:21] So the Turnaway Study, as your listeners learned from Diana Foster, was a large scale longitudinal study where we recruited almost a thousand women through 30 facilities across the United States who were seeking an abortion. And some of the women received their wanted abortion, some were denied the abortion because they presented beyond the gestational limit of the clinic. We followed all women over five years and we interviewed them every six months. And for the women who had abortions, we asked them a set of questions about their emotions about the abortion. So first we asked about four negative emotions: sadness, regret, anger, and guilt. We asked them the degree to which they had felt these emotions over the last two weeks about their abortion. We also asked about two positive emotions, relief and happiness, because we understand that women may feel a mix of both positive and negative emotions after an abortion. So we wanted to make sure to ask about both. And then third, we asked about decision rightness. So given the information that you had at the time, was the decision to have an abortion the right decision for you? What we found is that just after the abortion, women expressed a real range of emotions about the abortion. So women expressed a mix of sadness, anger, guilt, regret, but also relief and happiness. And actually relief really predominated, especially right, a week after the abortion. Over time, the intensity of all these emotions declined pretty precipitously, particularly between baseline and over the first six months or a year. Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, relief remains the most important emotion that women felt over the entire study. Out through five years, over 95 percent of women felt the abortion was the right decision for them at all times over five years. So we really saw no evidence of this sort of emerging decision regret, someone who felt that abortion was the right decision for them in the short term and then came to regret it over time. I think it's really important to distinguish sort of decision rightness or decisional regret from sort of having negative emotions or even the emotion of regret. Abortion for some people is a very straightforward and clear decision. For other people it is a highly personal, very difficult decision. But what we find is that individuals can feel negative emotions about their abortion and nevertheless feel that it was the right decision for them. And they can even feel the emotion of regret, and nevertheless, 90 percent of the people who said they felt at least some regret about the abortion at baseline also said they felt it was the right decision. 

Garnet [00:07:04] So a person might regret the circumstances of their abortion or feel sad about it, but still feel that it was the right decision. Could their feelings change over time? 

Corinne [00:07:14] People who argue that individuals will experience emerging regret are never able to really identify a causal mechanism or a reason why suddenly, after three years or five years, regret would sort of suddenly come come about. And so I wanted to look at actually over time, what what are people's patterns of responses? And what I found is that the people who reported over time that abortion was either not the right decision for them, or they said they didn't know if it was the right decision for them, they tended to report it all along, or they sort of reported it at one time, and then said actually it was the right decision, actually it wasn't the right decision, then it was the right decision. So they kind of came in and out of it. But rarely was there a person who said it was the right decision for them over long periods of time and then suddenly, persistently said it was not the right decision. 

Garnet [00:08:08] And there are plenty of other factors that affect people's feelings about the abortions. 

Corinne [00:08:12] For some people, from the moment they discover a pregnancy, they know exactly what they want to do and they pursue an abortion. For other people, they are weighing the circumstances of their lives and trying to figure out what is going to be the best decision for them given that they are pregnant. We had found that individuals, these women who have greater decision difficulty at baseline, who report it was a hard decision for them to make to seek the abortion, we wanted to see how that was associated with their emotions and decision rightness over time. And what we found is that even though at enrollment, the women who said they had a harder time deciding to seek the abortion were less likely to say that they felt the abortion was the right decision for them, over time, their levels of decision rightness converged with other women's. In other words, by the time, by five years out, over 95 percent of women felt abortion was the right decision, regardless of whether they had had difficulty making it. I really just want to emphasize this point that we found no evidence of emerging decision regret over time on the population level. That doesn't mean that individuals in their own circumstances might come to feel that the abortion wasn't the right decision for them. But on the population level, we really do not find that. What we find guides both persistent negative emotions among the few people who had them, and feeling that an abortion decision was not the right decision, are sort of these social and contextual variables. Right. So we've talked a lot about decision difficulty. Individuals who had more intended pregnancies were less likely to say the abortion was the right decision for them. And then community abortion stigma really did play a role. So people who live in environments, in states where abortion is stigmatized, where people feel like if they told, if members of their community knew that they had had an abortion, that they would look down on them, those individuals were less likely to believe they had made the right decision and experienced more persistent negative emotions. Having lower social support was associated with negative emotions as well. I would say another finding that we had that was sort of surprising, at least to me, was we tend to think that people who are seeking abortions later in their pregnancy are going to experience more negative emotions, perhaps because the procedure is a more involved procedure. So we actually did directly compare women who sought abortions in the first trimester versus women who were seeking later abortions closer to the gestational age limits. And what we find is that they actually, although at baseline the emotions are more extreme among the women seeking later abortions, over time, their emotions are remarkably similar, which I think surprises even people who are in the abortion community. We also found that, we asked women over time how often they thought about their abortion over the last two weeks, and it's sort of a funny story that we, our interviewers reported to us that several women said, the only time I think about my abortion is when you guys call me every six months and ask me about my abortion. 

Garnet [00:11:20] We hear a lot about certainty and regret in the context of abortion. But is having an abortion really that different from other medical decisions that people make? What about the decision to have a child? Dr. Rocca actually investigated this in a different study. 

Corinne [00:11:38] It was called the ADAPT Study, Attitudes and Decisions after Pregnancy Testing. And in that study, we wanted to look at what factors were associated with decision certainty, or a person feeling that they made the right decision about their pregnancy, comparing two circumstances: one, among individuals who are seeking an abortion, and two, among individuals who had decided to give birth and were seeking prenatal care. And what we found is that levels of decision certainty, so feeling that they were certain about the decision they had made, were similar between the two groups. In other words, decision conflict or decision uncertainty exists also among women who are choosing to continue a pregnancy. But what really did seem to be important in driving decision uncertainty was having an unintended pregnancy. So ultimately, in that study, what we conclude, it's an exploratory study, but what we conclude is that women who are faced with an unintended pregnancy or becoming pregnant under circumstances in which they didn't necessarily plan or want to become pregnant, that is what causes uncertainty, not the decision to seek an abortion. 

Katie Watson [00:12:48] What I have found so fascinating is my lens is really to think through and often challenge abortion exceptionalism. We have this idea that abortion is different from every other medical procedure and patients and people who have abortions are different from all of their patients and people. And this moment is different from every other moment. And there are many things that are unique about it, and I am in no way dismissing those. But there are other things that are not so different about it. 

Garnet [00:13:19] That second voice you heard was Katie Watson. 

Katie [00:13:22] I am a professor at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. I'm a bioethicist, and I am a lawyer who focuses on constitutional law as well. I work in a program that focuses on the medical humanities and bioethics, and from my perspective, also law in medicine. 

Garnet [00:13:42] I wanted to speak with Katie because of an article she wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in which she applies a framework known as the dignity of risk to this question of abortion regret. 

Katie [00:13:54] There's this first piece about blank number of women regret their abortions. The second, and sometimes implied, sometimes explicit piece, is therefore we should regulate in order to reduce regret. Regret is bad and regulation of abortion could address this problem. My response was conceptual, and to say, OK, let me grant your premise. Let's say some women regret their abortion decisions. That doesn't seem like a shocking statement to me, given that almost a million women a year have an abortion. If a million people have a knee surgery, or fill in the blank, I would think some of them would not be happy. I mean, it's just a numbers game, right? But so the conceptual response for me was, so what? And I mean that not dismissively, but sincerely. So what? Therefore, what? I was addressing the second piece of the argument that there should be a policy response if there is regret. And so in that JAMA piece, I applied a concept that was familiar to me from disability ethics. There's this concept in disability rights called the dignity of risk, and it was first introduced in the literature in 1974, and it referred to a paternalistic impulse to not allow people with disabilities, cognitive or physical, to take a risk unless success was guaranteed. So imagine a person with a disability who wants to live independentl,y and the medical or social support people say, it might not work out, so therefore you can't. And it was this empowering framework that acknowledged that there's no possibility of success without the risk of failure, right? And that taking a risk, there's a dignity, and that's kind of the definition of being an autonomous adult with capacity. The second piece is, what do we do with failure? Does failure prove that the person should not that that was a mistake to, quote, 'let' them take the risk. And the point of that was, well, again, that's part of being an autonomous adult. That's how you learn. That's how you develop resilience. There's kind of this uncomfortable thing that the risk of regret runs through all medical procedures. I thought that there was a paternalism that becomes more evident when you apply this dignity of risk analysis. There's two things going on. One is either the paternalism that says, oh, these poor ladies don't really know what they're doing, so we have to protect them from themselves. No, thank you, say adult women in response. Right? But the second piece is that that smuggles in a philosophical stance on the moral value of embryos. Because, is it worse to regret about abortion decision than a knee replacement? Well, I think a lot of us intuitively think, well, yeah, like an abortion is a bigger deal. And I am again respectful of that. But I think we have to step back and say, wow, there's a there's a spectrum of opinions about that. I also wanted to illuminate the way in which the 'some people regret their abortions' argument also smuggles in, I think, an assertion about what a grave moral transgression abortion is. And so if you transgress in this way and then later wish you hadn't, like, it's so much worse. That, again, someone could hold that feeling or that thought or that opinion. But let's be transparent about what this claim is. 

Garnet [00:17:40] So why is this concern about regret so pervasive despite its rarity in the real world? 

Katie [00:17:47] In my book, I talk about this concept of master plots. Literary scholars talk about those, and a master plot is the skeletal story that you see in a culture over and over. And so in my book, I look at master plots of abortion, and one of them is abortion is always a difficult decision. And in my book, I unpack the idea. What I came to realize is in the abortion world, master plots are opinions disguised as stories. So when the master plot doesn't match the data, ask yourself, why do we have a master cplot that's not representative of most people's experience, right? So abortion is always a difficult decision, translates to abortion should always be a difficult decision. And I came to understand that 'women regret their abortions' is like a subplot of the 'abortion is always a difficult decision.' It's so difficult that if even though you feel very clear and confident now, you might feel otherwise later. Like, think what a sophisticated way to undermine confident women. You feel very clear now, but you might feel badly later. The underlying opinion that it's smuggling in is women ought to regret their abortion decisions. It's interesting, there's writing that sometimes says these laws are passed in order to protect women. Well, here's the social science saying they don't protect women. And I don't mean to be disrespectful, but those sentences make me giggle a little bit, like, is that why those laws were passed? No, it wasn't. That was how those laws were sold. The Trojan horse is, we want to protect women. What's inside it is, we want to ban abortion. And this is just the argument du jour that we think will make us seem nice and might be appealing to a few people who we wouldn't have caught if we just said, you know, whatever, embryos are the same as you and me and women who empty their uterus of them should be on death row. I think we have to get comfortable saying abortion experience happens on a spectrum. But if you bring a moral position that says abortion is never morally permissible, you don't care where people scatter. 

Katie [00:20:13] Abortion experience does indeed happen on a spectrum. And to learn more about that, we're going to return to the two storytellers whose voices you heard at the very top of this episode. 

Layidua [00:20:25] My name is Layidua and I grew up in the Bay Area. I migrated with my family to the United States when I was five, and I've been in the United States without documentation since the age of five. So I actually, being undocumented is a major part of my abortion story. So I was in the middle of a status adjustment with my then-husband and our process was rejected. And I received a deportation letter. And I don't think I was ready to digest it. I, you know, I just told myself it's part of the process. I emailed my lawyer to make an appointment. And just went about. A day later, I had a scheduled annual appointment, and I was sitting in the doctor's office in that super flattering paper gown that they give you, waiting for the doctor to come in. And the nurse comes in to let me know that they would be unable to perform my pap smear because I was pregnant. And I was like, no, that's, no, I'm not pregnant. I'm sure you got the wrong room. You should double check. And the nurse who knew me, that was my, Planned Parenthood at the time was my primary health care provider, said, no, I know you're on birth control. So I ran the test three times. You are, in fact, pregnant. So I will give you some time to get dressed and the doctor will come back to talk to you about your options. She closed the door and immediately I just broke down sobbing. I think that in that very instance, the letter became real, that deportation order was like. Holy shit, this is this is this is happening. This is real and in what felt like forever while the nurse was gone, actual time maybe tops three minutes, I decided that I needed to have an abortion. I didn't consult with anyone. As soon as the doctor came in, I told them that that's what I wanted to do and scheduled my appointment immediately. Like probably like seven minutes after finding out I was pregnant, I scheduled the abortion appointment. An immigration process is it's really heavy on a relationship. And so we weren't in the best place in our relationship and had actually been fighting leading up to me receiving the deportation letter and finding out I was pregnant. And so I didn't even know how to tell him, like, it didn't feel necessarily the like, most welcoming space. So I, I actually, which probably wasn't the best way to bombard him with the information, but I just sent him a text and I said, I apologize for my behavior, I'm definitely not myself right now, I am apparently really hormonal because I'm pregnant, but we'll fix that in a couple of days. That was my approach. Now, in retrospect, not my best moment in that relationship, but I didn't know what to do. I own that I made a decision, but I almost it almost felt like it wasn't a thought process, but rather a fight or flight type of moment. I think there were two main things driving what led to the to the decision, if you can call it that, was one a genuine fear of like not having the capacity to go through a pregnancy. And then two, actually three major things, two being the,being fully aware that if I were to go through a pregnancy and end up deported, given where my relationship was, not really knowing what that would mean for a child. And I think finally, like my need to feel like I controlled any aspect of my life in that moment, I I'm like, OK, I can't control my documentation status, I can't control if I'll be in a country for a year from now, but I can control this. This is something I have autonomy over. I initially felt at peace initially when it happened. I don't think that the wave of of doubt, and in some ways, I don't want to say regret, regret isn't the word that I'm looking for, but remorse maybe is is closer to what I felt. That wave didn't hit until a year after the procedure. My my deportation proceedings took about a year before my case was finally closed. And then once my case was closed, I was like, oh shit, I didn't get deported. Like, I could have actually made a different decision. It was it was in that moment where all of a sudden my, my options expanded and then I felt like in that moment, I actually could have made a, I actually could have thought through this and thought what would have been the best thing for me? And so that I was hit with a wave of, like, really complicated feelings around what I did, specifically because I was alone through the process. My, my spouse really wasn't particularly supportive. I called my younger sibling, who I have always been super supportive of and their immediate reaction was like, oh, well, that's irresponsible of you. And and and then I remember, like, I did grow up in a house with my mother is a Jehovah's Witness, and she's very anti-abortion, or rather was until recent years, very anti-abortion. I actually remember reading novels that my mom would make us read when we were teens around, like the horrible psychological and spiritual trauma that abortion creates in both men and women. And so, like, I didn't even, I don't even think I thought of those things. But those things really did like plague how I felt about having had an abortion. And so I felt alone. I felt that I might have rushed into a decision. I felt that given the outcome of my immigration case, maybe it was actually wrong of me to have made that choice. And I think also like really holding on to standard narratives of what abortion looks like. Like, so I grew up really thinking people who have abortions are young people who have no access to birth control, no support system, and just have to have an abortion. And I was twenty-eight at the time, so not a child. I was on birth control. So that also complicated how, I didn't, like clearly I wasn't intending to get pregnant. And despite the fact that my spouse wasn't particularly supportive, I do have a family who would have been there for me had I made a different decision. And so I think I just sat with all that and and there was a solid year of my life where I felt genuinely depressed around, I don't, it wasn't just the abortion. It was like, I think I didn't pause to process my deportation. So after the case was closed, everything, all of these things I was processing and I did not I didn't know how to feel, actually. And I felt, I felt, I honestly felt cornered about having had an abortion, and I felt like I didn't have a choice in the matter. And that also felt in that moment like once the deportation case was closed, I felt disempowered by that. Because I felt like I reacted to something I had no control over. I think my my reaction to realizing I was, I felt complicated and depressed, was I started doing abortion work. I joined a board of my local abortion fund. Really because as complicated as I felt about my decision, I acknowledge that I was so blessed to be in the Bay Area where there's access to abortion and funding for abortion, like all of these things that I'm like, all of the horrible things that I could have possibly been facing at that moment. The fact that I had access to abortion made me feel in some ways in control of a situation that I had absolutely no control over. For me, being able to support other folks in that decision has made me feel more at peace with having had an abortion. I think also more importantly, realizing that, you know, hindsight is 20/20, I'm allowed to feel complicated about it and still acknowledge that I made the best decision in that moment. You're allowed to have complicated decisions about major life choices, right? And you're allowed to look back and and in hindsight, think you could have made a different decision. And that doesn't mean you regret your choices or or that even if you regret it that you aren't happy with your life as it is in this moment. I have a childless life and I am extremely happy. Like sometimes my dog is too much for me. Like I don't know that I could parent and be like fully there for another human in this point in my life. So obviously I made the right decision. I look back and would I have made a different decision if I wasn't in a deportation proceeding? I don't know if I would have gotten married if I wasn't undocumented. And do I regret my marriage? Eh, probably a little bit more than my abortion. Yeah, definitely. But both of those choices were largely driven by my documentation status. You know, like maybe if the government wasn't limiting my ability to have a meaningful, happy life, I would have made a vast of different... I wouldn't have gotten pregnant because I wouldn't have been married. Like these, all of these things that kind of came out of my immigration situation, the least regretful portion of it is literally my abortion. 

Sarah [00:30:10] My name is Sarah, I live in California in the Bay Area, I'm in my mid-thirties and work in a recruiting capacity. In June of this year, I had been with a partner and we'd broken up, and didn't actually realize that I was until about two months into the process. So it was much later than I ever expected would happen to me, which put a lot of pressure, especially given the timing of covid. And the night itself was like a very anxiety-ridden experience for for both me and my previous partner. To be really honest, I didn't realize in California there were laws around how far along you could be in order to access an at-home abortion. So it wasn't until I had passed the time and opportunity to actually do something at home where I was informed that that was no longer a possibility for me. So the situation itself actually entailed like an in-hospital abortion, which was in San Francisco, and the process for that was really unknown. Each day we were getting different information in terms of like who could come in and at what at what point they would be allowed into the hospital itself. The day that I ended up going in was the very first day they allowed a visitor to accompany you, but only into the waiting room. So beyond that, I was alone for about four or five hours until I was, exited. So I was glad to have someone partially there. But it was incredibly challenging, discouraging to try to like, advocate for myself as a patient, given what was happening and being alone without being able to rely on someone to to be there with me that day. I kept the group of people incredibly small in terms of who I spoke to about the situation, one being that I had up until that point thought that that was something I would never be open to myself and didn't really want to be told what to do or how to do it. I wanted to, like, dig deep into my own self and figure out, like, how I wanted to think about this without, like, the crowded opinions of lots of other people. I had two very close friends who were involved, one of which used to be an employee at Planned Parenthood. So she was incredibly supportive to help me make decisions and thoughtful around what information she was able to give me to make me feel more prepared. And then I talked with my own rabbi. That was a big part of the kind of entering into my faith based practice and figuring out like what the interpretation of it was based on my religious views. And then during the process, me and my partner also did get a couples therapist to try to help us mitigate some of the challenges and issues because we disagreed in terms of what we wanted and how we wanted to deal with it. And that became a pretty big problem. My rabbi was probably the person who provided me with the most support in terms of the way that I needed it during that time. He first spoke to me as a person trying to kind of understand what type of support I would need and how he could get that to me later on conversations. I wanted to get more technical in terms of like what the law said. And one of the things that I appreciate about Judaism and his opinions on each of the things that we discussed is every time I ask him a question, he would answer with a question. And so I just truly felt like it was a discussion that we were having between the two of us in terms of like making a decision that was really right for me and interpreting and thinking about like my ancestors and the laws in which that were created, but based on a way that felt really into into my own moral system and values within the religion. When I finally did make the decision itself, he set me like a beautiful prayer that he shared with me to bring with me into the hospital that day. And so I just felt like I was really at one with my religious community and with God as a component of the process, and that he understood the complications of the decision and supported me in whatever I decided to do for myself. The way in which it's always been kind of communicated through me, through my own family's heritage and in Judaism, is that the health and well-being of the woman always comes first. And people have different interpretations about what that means in Judaism. But some people will very much say that, like, if it's not the right time or the place in your life, or there's a financial difficulty, or would put you in a place where your mental health might be at risk, even, then the woman's, you know, body and mind come first in those situations. And that was definitely the way that I felt. I felt like it was completely the support and love that I could give to myself in making something that was right for me was was shown to me and like my faith in God. I think, too, one of the surprising situations of like going to talk to a rabbi, too, and then having my partner go, given that we had different ideas of what that meant to each of us, the rabbi was very keen to share his interpretation that it was really my decision, and I think, like you rarely hear that in something like therapy. I was very, it was a very difficult decision for me to make. It was filled with a lot of complexity because of both my age and what I wanted my own life right now. And from the moment he found out, he was very much in the mindset of like, I do not want to move forward with us and put a lot of pressure on me to not. I, I certainly have had a lot of complex thoughts around, like where I should have made that decision. I grew up on the East Coast, and there was, there's still a large part of me that wishes I had gone home to be with, like, family and had the distance from him in order to make that decision for myself. I know I would have landed on the same situation. The thing that got really complicated for us and for me is I come from a family of lawyers. And so I needed to really understand what the situation would be to be coparenting with someone I was no longer in a relationship with in the state of California, and through that process learned that I wouldn't be able to leave California if that had been my home when he and I were together with a child, which was very upsetting to me at the time because I had always planned to go back East. And then the shared custodial responsibility that we would have from day one as a woman was just very, very upsetting. And as he became more insistent on moving forward with the termination of the pregnancy, he was like, I will take, you know, my custodial obligation from the beginning. We will be moving a child from house to house each and every night or, you know, three or four days a week you won't have your child. So things like that that kind of came up in those conversations really upset me in a way that I am still kind of trying and struggling to. But I think I never really understood that it wasn't just my decision that, like, regardless of involving him or not, I was going to be involving him for the rest of my life and it was going to determine where I could live and how I was going to parent. A huge part of my process, actually, was also involving my doctor to really understand, like, would this be the last opportunity for me? Like, what could this mean for my future? I got incredibly good advice and felt really supported by my doctor as well in terms of like making sure I understood the ramifications of making this decision and what this could potentially do to like my future to be a mother, which is something I did not want to give up as a result of this. I never felt like I was going to feel good about either way of moving forward. And that was a really difficult thing to kind of understand. And now just I feel really strongly about people kind of understanding the complexities of these situations because I wish I had known more from the beginning myself. Like, I hated that in a time when I was already felt like I was pressed up against a clock and having to make a decision and in an emotional state of mind that I was having to like consult lawyers and figure out, like, how my life would be changed. So I was a little bit angry that that wasn't anyone's story or that anyone else seemed to be just as as morally enraged at that. Like, you have to make a decision not just for yourself, but how you're going to, like, cooperate and raise a kid for the next eighteen years. And yeah, that wasn't something I felt like there was a lot of resources of support on. I think nothing was easy about the situation. I think the thing that made it easiest was the fact that given the complexity and the challenges that I was facing, I had a medical professional and a religious leader who was completely in support of like giving me the time and space to do what I needed, and knowing that California supported my decision and that, you know, I didn't have to to rush any more than I needed to or wanted to was the only saving grace in this. It was a hard situation. I feel regret because that's, either way there would have been regrets. But I do know what I did was completely right for me and right for my partner and right for the child that we didn't bring into this world. The thing that I think most about is just how lucky I was to be living in a state where there weren't laws that specifically stated how long I had. I couldn't imagine if I had to make a decision in a week or two weeks, like it took me a month and that felt fast. So I do face regret, but I don't face regret in knowing I made the wrong decision. I face regret in knowing there wasn't a right decision to be made. 

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Garnet [00:39:42] That's all for today's show. Many thanks to all our guests. Very special thanks to Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify, who connected me to Sarah and Layidua and who suggested the topic for this episode. Thank you, Renee. 

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Garnet [00:40:15] ACCESS is produced by me, Garnet Henderson. Our logo is by Kate Ryan and our theme music is by Lily Sloane. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, the very best thing you can do is share the show with a friend. You can also donate by visiting glow.fm/apodcastaboutabortion. That's in the show notes too. You can also help people find us by leaving a rating or a review. Don't forget to subscribe to ACCESS wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @accesspod. I am always interested in hearing from you if you want to share a story on the show. You can reach me at accesspodcast@protonmail.com, and that's in the show notes as well. A full transcript of this episode is available on our website, apodcastaboutabortion.com. 

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