“Let Live”. A psychologist’s story about women on the brink of abortion.

I have been working for many years with women who are faced with the choice of having a baby or having an abortion. Any reason a woman decides to have an abortion is very scary to me. But perhaps the most shocking were the stories where women decided to have an abortion for….. vacation. And in my practice there were several such cases.

I remember, for example, a couple came to see me, they had planned their vacation for several months, they had already bought plane tickets and booked a hotel. And then the wife got pregnant unexpectedly. They calculated that by the time they went on vacation, she would already have a visible belly, which is shameful. Therefore, it is necessary to abort now, because the woman will not feel very well, she will be nauseous and will have to limit food and drink (as if after having an abortion the woman will feel normal!).

Thank God, this couple managed to realize that vacation is not the meaning of life and that choosing the death of a child in favor of even the most wonderful vacation at sea is simply unthinkable. They decided not to go on vacation. But a year later, the three of them went to the sea, along with their baby.

– “How was the vacation?” I ask.

– “It was the best vacation of our lives. Everyone helped us, let us move on without queuing up, smiled….”.

Here’s another story. A man forces his wife to have an abortion because she wanted a boy, but an ultrasound showed it was a girl. Or vice versa.

Sometimes mothers decide for their daughters to have an abortion and take them almost by the hand. And then we have to counsel not only the young pregnant woman, but also her mother. I remember talking to one such mother for so long that the office had long since closed and the guard had to let us out for the night. As a result, we managed to save the life of her future grandchild?

What, in my opinion, is the most common real reason for abortion? Not wanting to lose comfort. I see it as selfishness and pseudo self-care.

A difficult economic situation is, of course, serious, but it is absolutely no reason to deprive your child or grandchild of life. Moreover, it often happens that women who have practically no means of subsistence, no support, give birth against all odds. And most abortions are performed by well-to-do women who have husbands and money. Statistics confirm this.

There was a case of a woman who went for a pre-abortion consultation and stated the reason for her abortion as follows: “My husband told me to choose: either the car or the baby.” The woman chose the car…. And there are women who don’t even tell their husbands that they are pregnant and go straight to abortion. And it seems to me that hiding the fact of the birth of a progeny, an abortion that a woman had without telling her husband, is a fatal double mistake

Of course, a child makes certain adjustments in life, but it will never make the situation worse in an overall sense. With clear life attitudes, problems will definitely be solved, studies will be completed, housing, work and livelihood will be found. When life and love prevail, when a mother decides to have a child, everyone wins and, in one way or another, becomes happy. However difficult it may be, life works out miraculously. Neither I nor my colleagues know of a single case where a woman has given birth and regretted it.

On the contrary, there are many cases. In my practice there was, for example, the following story. A beautiful girl, tall and slender, like a fashion model, became pregnant by her young man, and he told her to have an abortion because she did not need the child at that time.

She had doubts for a long time, a real internal struggle was going on inside her. She came to me several times for advice, she suffered and could not make a decision; it seemed that her intuition told her that she did not need to take that step.

But one day she made up her mind and, in order not to torture herself any more, she went straight to the doctor and took the terrible abortion pill.

She was leaving the clinic when a young man came out to meet her: “You know, I thought, we’re going to give birth after all!”. And she had already done it all, there was no going back….

Nothing justifies the boy’s behavior, but apparently, the delay of the abortion, the girl’s doubts and suffering affected him in some way. Unfortunately, he, like many other young people today, was not sure if that was the girl with whom he wanted to start a family…. The frivolous attitude to intimacy with the opposite sex that society promotes ruins lives.

Probably, in the end, he still believed, thought about his responsibility and took a step forward. But it came too late.

The girl almost committed suicide the day after the abortion. She broke up with her boyfriend, of course, and soon left our city, because everything here reminded her of that terrible decision….

Olena Shabalina, psychologist of the Pokrov Maternity Protection Center