Abortion Story 009: Vicki

Vicki Cooper (England)

March 16, 2000

I can't speak for everyone else's experiences of abortion clinics but I can honestly say mine was fairly horrendous.

There were about 20 of us, all herded into this one room where we had to sit and just wait. It was totally white and it reminded me of the inside of a mental hospital. We had to sit and read ancient copies of women's magazines until we were called for various things like questions about our health and having cervix softening pessaries put inside us.

And the smell, Oh my God, I will never forget it. My sense of smell had heightened anyway, I'd found, during my pregnancy (I was 13 ¹/2 weeks gone at the time) which made the whole thing worse. It was all chemically and really nauseating.

At no point did anyone ask me 'are you OK with this? are you sure you want to go ahead with it?' Some of the nurses were verging on the hostile. One of them even told me how she had ovarian failure as if to say 'I can't have kids and look at you killing yours.'

It was just like a production line, passed on from person to person, finally wheeled into the operating theatre where I was knocked out. I wasn't treated as an individual at a highly emotional time in her life, but as just another nuisance girl in trouble. The whole experience has coloured how I feel about my abortion. I still feel as though I did something awful and wrong because that was the way I was treated.

Afterwards, there were 3 stages of recovery before I was allowed to go home. First, I was sat in my cubicle on the trolley I had gone in on and was given some water (I'd had a general so I hadn't been allowed to eat or drink from several hours before the op) and then I was allowed to come and sit with the other girls and drink some orange squash and eat a couple of biscuits.

This is when I got talking to a few of them. In some perverse way I was glad to be around girls who were going through the same thing. We were even laughing about things like how our boobs had grown during our pregnancy. I think we were still a little bit in shock. I remember feeling relieved, but it hadn't really all sunk in yet. Then the lines we'd had put into the backs of our hands were taken out as we were ready to progress to the next stage at various times. The next room was much smaller, we a TV and a a toilet next door. I had to go and see how much I was bleeding and whether or not I could pee OK.

After that I was allowed to go. An orderly carried my bag for me as I went out to meet my boyfriend. This was the only point when anyone treated me with any great kindness. She told me to take care and that my boyfriend was to do everything for me for the next 24 hours. And I left, no counselling, nothing.