I Was a Mom With a Failed IUD Who Chose Abortion

If not for Lindy West's #ShoutYourAbortion campaign, "I would not have written this." This is Kathryn Jezer-Morton's "Two Kids, An IUD, and Then, An Abortion," Jezer-Morton's own experience with having an abortion after learning that, "after two years of loyal service," her copper IUD "went and took a sick day." The mother-of-two and her husband had already talked about the possibility of being a family of five, she writes for Jezebel, and the decision had been made to wait another two or three years to make, well, that decision. At that point she'd be 35 and her two young kids would be 5 and 8. And so she made an appointment in her native Montreal, where abortions are performed for free. Except due to a long-planned road trip, that appointment had to be a month out.

She shared her news with some family members during the vacation, and they adjusted to it in their own way. "The older people I told ... tended to settle on a final justification that seemed to satisfy them: 'It’s better for the kids.' I would be better able to care for them if I weren’t saddled with a third, they said, consoling themselves more than me." After having the abortion at 10 weeks, Jezer-Morton settled on her own set of realizations: that "a woman’s feelings about childbearing don't swing on a pendulum between pride and grief. There is a world of ideas between those poles. ... The fact is, my body was working on something, and I put a stop to it. I never took that choice lightly. No regrets is not the same thing as no questions, or no struggle, or no mute minutes lost in thought while riding the metro home." Read her piece in full here. (More abortion stories.)