This story is published at Shout Your Abortion.

I thank God for Abortion. I spend my youth lost to addiction, mental illness, and the sex trade. As often is the case, I got pregnant a few times. I had multiple abortions.

After getting free of my addictions, I had two children when I had the stability to care for them and to be a mother. I am proud of myself for knowing when that time was.

In the 1980s and 1990s, abortions were perfectly accepted socially with only a few prolifers protesting outside clinics. Providers and clinics could do their job without political pressure against them. They were great.

It often seems like I woke up from that land of unjudgemental care into a strange and hateful world that wants to blame, shame and hate me and women for having and needing abortions.

I knew like no one else can that I had no ability to be a mother as I could hardly function or even think like an adult. In fact the only time I acted with self care in my youth was when I got myself to clinics to get my abortions.

I can’t imagine a world that would refuse a young women in my position the right to have an abortion. We need this service. We need many other things for vulnerable women, like free birth control, reproductive support and services and affordable mental health support and importantly, equally, affordable and easily accessible abortion.

Abortion saved my life. It gave me the time I needed to grow up and fix myself. It told me that I and my life mattered when nothing else did. I am a true pro life person and banning abortion and other reproductive services is the true opposite of that.