There was only one problem: I live in Texas, where abortion is now illegal. To have another baby, I knew my two wonderful children would suffer and I couldn’t do that to them. Plus, we can’t afford it: before my youngest went to school, childcare was costing us around $1,400 (£1,100) a month. My career is finally on an upward trajectory again. We already have two children, aged seven and five, so we’re not long out of those years of sleepless nights and nappies. My first reaction was that I couldn’t have another baby.
That isn’t unusual for me – since having my youngest, they’ve been pretty irregular – but I took a pregnancy test just to be sure. Then I realised that I hadn’t had my period for a while. At first, I put it down to working too hard – I’m a medic and my job is non-stop pressure – but as the days went by, I struggled to figure out what was wrong. My concerns started this spring, when I began to feel nauseous and tired.
Scrolling through the endless, confusing links, I honestly couldn’t believe that I, a happily married woman and mother-of-two, was about to do something incredibly difficult – and also be forced to commit a crime. If there’s one thing I never expected to be doing at the age of 41, it was sitting in front of my laptop, taking deep breaths, as I typed the words into a search engine: ‘where can I get an abortion?’
