“Allison,” 15-years-old at the time, walked into a supermarket after school with one purpose in mind: to spend an afternoon with her friends. What she didn’t expect was to receive life-altering news in the form of a little pink plus sign.
“I was with a few friends and we actually thought it’d be funny to take pregnancy tests and see what happened,” Allison, a junior who wished to remain anonymous, said. “Now that I think about it, it’s not funny at all.”
Allison remembers her test taking the longest of all her friends to develop, but she thought nothing of it until she saw the positive sign.
“I could just feel my stomach drop inside of me,” Allison said. “I was in such a twisted situation and my mind was going absolutely crazy because it could have been a mistake, or maybe I did it wrong, or even worse, that it was right and I actually was pregnant.”
Allison said she didn’t know how to process the news at first, so she hid the test from her friends, saying she’d flushed it down the toilet, and then immediately rushed home.
“I hadn’t put two and two together when my period hadn’t come that month. I never really kept track anyways,” Allison said. “I had been having unprotected sex with my boyfriend for quite awhile and I never really thought I would get pregnant. I think that was the problem though: I wasn’t thinking.”
According to the Department of Human and Health Services (HHS), 82 percent of teenage pregnancies are unplanned.
Allison said both her guardian and her boyfriend wanted her to have the baby. However, she said she felt conflicting feelings on keeping it.
Soon after, she visited a pregnancy center and got an ultrasound, where it was determined she was less than five weeks pregnant, so she still had three weeks to make her decision, before the first trimester.
“I started detaching myself from the pregnancy and everything else really just seemed like a dream,” she said.
Allison said she ultimately made the decision to get an abortion because of the lack of readiness that she felt. “I was only 15 and I had my entire life ahead of me,” she said. “There was no way I could take care of another life.”
According to HHS, in 2008, 59 percent of pregnancies to 15- to 19-year-old females in the United States ended in a live birth, 14 percent ended in a miscarriage, and 26 percent ended in an abortion. The rate of abortions among adolescents is the lowest since abortion was legalized in 1973, and it is 59 percent lower than its peak in 1988.
According to the January Bark survey, Allison is one of a few female students at Redwood who have gotten an abortion. 2.5 percent of students report getting an abortion due to an unplanned pregnancy.
Allison said she doesn’t remember much of the actual procedure.
“It was actually really scary because all this time I’d been convincing myself that what happened was just a bad dream and all of a sudden it was time and I had to just close my eyes and get it over with,” she said. “Lying down on the flat bed was the last thing I remember. Honestly, the abortion isn’t the worst part. It was the thoughts that followed it.”
According to the survey, 54.4 percent of students would choose to get an abortion should the situation arise in which they or their partner got pregnant.
Though she deliberated for a while, Allison said she knew getting an abortion ultimately was the choice for her.
“Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had that baby, but at the same time I know I did what was right for me and I am okay with that,” she said. “I know that one day when I’m older and out of school with a job, I’ll be able and ready to have a baby, but I knew that this was just too soon.”
