When Catherine Adair discovered she was pregnant at just 19 years old, her initial reaction was one of joy. She thought about her baby as a miracle. But she also felt unsure of what to do and after a few weeks, turned to her pro-choice mother for help.
…[W]hen I told my mom she said, ‘Well abortion is legal now. It’s your right. Don’t worry about it.’ And right away I immediately, you know, all these ideas I’d had of, ya know, my boyfriend and I were gonna live in this basement and we were gonna raise our child and we were gonna work and go to college and this vision I had, I just realized, oh, you’re so stupid. How could you ever think you were gonna have a baby?
After an appointment with the family doctor, Adair was scheduled for an abortion.
She was about 11 weeks pregnant and was told that she was running out of time. “All of a sudden I felt like I had no choice,” she said in a speech to the Pro-Life Action League.
After the abortion, Adair burst into tears and made the decision to never talk about it or even think about it again. She said the experience felt surreal and she was scared and sad.
Adair says that, when you have an abortion, they tell you that you will feel relieved after. She says that in a sense, she did, because she had been so afraid to tell anyone she was pregnant and so scared of how things would work out. But that relief was momentary, and what they didn’t tell her was that she would also feel sadness, depression, and anxiety that trumped that brief relief.
I felt so empty. Not just the physical emptiness but the spiritual emptiness. Ya know, I really feel that I lost a piece of my soul that day. It was something you can’t change. You can’t fix it.
Adair still believed that abortion was a women’s rights issue, and in order to deal with her feelings of depression and anxiety, she decided to become active in fighting for the right to abortion. She changed her major to women’s studies and vowed to become the most radical feminist she could, marching in Washington, D.C. and even working at Planned Parenthood after college.
Eventually, Adair left Planned Parenthood, and after years of hiding her abortion from even herself, she came clean to a pro-life member of CareNet. Now, she is a pro-life activist, exposing the truth of what happens in abortion clinics, and the pain that abortion inflicts on women.
