Guest Post - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

This is a guest post from a woman who has suffered extremely from having to be awake during her abortion, an experience that haunts any woman who goes through it. I was lucky in that my disability status meant that Medicare paid for my sedation - not a full general anesthetic, but enough to put my overly-sensitive system into La-la Land.

Pro-choice and child-free - that's always been me.

My partner and I had been together nearly 12 years, had both agreed we didn't want children. We planned our lives together accordingly. So when I discovered last year, at the ripe old age of 35, that I was pregnant I wasted no time making an appointment at the clinic for the following day. There was no room for any debate in my mind not only because of my lifestyle choice, but because I had been taking a prescription for a health condition that was pretty well guaranteed to cause severe abnormalities in a developing fetus. Even if I had wanted a child it simply couldn't be from this pregnancy.

I had thought I was only about six weeks along and could take the pills to terminate my pregnancy, thought it wouldn't be so bad, maybe like a really bad period. I was surprised when the nurse said I was nine weeks and needed to prep for surgery. I just needed to decide whether I was going to pay an extra $80 for the sedation or go through the procedure with nothing but an ibuprofen tablet. I opted for the sedation, but oh how I wish I had looked for a clinic that offered general anesthesia!

The sedative they gave me was a joke. I was wide awake, aware of every single thing that was happening and felt absolutely everything during the whole procedure. After it was over it was several minutes before I could stand because my belly hurt so bad. But by the time I walked out of the clinic I was so utterly relieved not to be pregnant anymore that I was almost elated that day. It actually took several weeks for the PTSD symptoms to manifest.

First I found myself crying a lot. Almost daily. I couldn't sleep, or else I was sleepy all day. Nightmares. Awful, terrifying dreams about violation and violence that woke me up in the night clutching a tear soaked pillow. I was a nervous wreck. Any sudden loud noise would send my heart racing. An ambulance siren on the road made me shake so badly I had to pull my car off the road and stop. Any violence on tv would trigger near panic and force me to leave the room or change the channel.

Then came the flashbacks, the horror movie that was stuck on repeat and played out over my whole body over and over. Everything. The pain, the sounds - all of it - would just overwhelm me and twist my daily reality into a kind of bad dream I couldn't wake up from. I lost focus at work and my performance deteriorated. I stopped going out or returning friends' phone calls.

I became depressed. My sex drive was utterly gone. The thought of physical intimacy made me nauseous and paralyzed with fear of another pregnancy. I started hypervigilantly recording every detail of my menstrual cycles and stockpiling herbs, pills and spermicides.

My previously peaceful relationship with the man I love took a steep nose dive. We fought and we were on eggshells around each other when we weren't fighting. I insisted I could not resume our physical relationship unless one of us had permanent surgical sterilization. I told him I'd rather die than be pregnant again, such was the terror I felt at the possibility of going through another abortion.

Now, 8 months, many therapy sessions, a pile of anti-depressants and a vasectomy later, my boyfriend and I have worked through our disagreements and re-committed to each other and to our relationship. My PTSD symptoms are getting better. Life is getting back to normal. But I had no idea that it would get so bad, that a 2 to 3 minute procedure could cause such lasting trauma to my psyche. I would never have suspected because I had been through it once before when I was 16. Even though I had an abusive mother and manipulative boyfriend at the time, the abortion I had nearly 20 years ago was less traumatic because I was put under for it. I have no memories of the procedure and that seems to have made all the difference.

Despite the psychological distress I have had as a result I do no regret my decisions to abort. I can only imagine how much more traumatic it would have been to go through nine months of an unwanted pregnancy and give birth to a child that would likely have severe birth defects if it survived at all. I am glad I had a choice. I just wish it had not been so unnecessarily hurtful.

It is absolutely barbaric that the medical community makes general anesthesia the exception and not the rule for this procedure. The fact that women are expected to tolerate so many painful violations of their most private parts by doctors throughout their whole lives is unnecessarily cruel. I call upon any doctor reading this to stop the torture and offer real, compassionate, less painful and less traumatic options for women wishing to end their pregnancies. I ask you that when a young woman says she never wants children and seeks a permanent solution to her unwanted fertility that you take her seriously instead of assuming she will change her mind. I call upon the medical community to find us safer and more effective forms of birth control. I call upon you to work to educate women (and men) about their birth control options and to warn them of the physical, emotional and psychological cost not just of abortion, but of pregnancy in general BEFORE it happens to them, before they have to make the heavy choice. I call upon women to demand better from their healthcare providers.

The trauma I experienced did not have to happen. It could have been avoided if there were more people like the author of this blog, women who are not afraid to speak out and tell their story. Too many women have been silenced by political agendas on both sides of the abortion debate - the lifers wanting to guilt trip and vilify women who have made a hard life decision and the choicers seeking to shush any mention of abortion causing a woman any grief at all. If more of us speak up and speak out, demand better care and the right to whatever birth control we choose, then maybe no more women will have to suffer like I have suffered.