Women are often told that abortion access means reproductive freedom, but when Toni McFadden walked into a Planned Parenthood clinic at the age of 18, she didn’t feel free. She felt cornered.
After learning she was pregnant, Ms. McFadden said she was “terrified and looking for someone, anyone, to tell me it would be OK.” Instead, her boyfriend encouraged her to have an abortion.
“I shared the news with my boyfriend hoping he would be supportive. He said, ‘You don’t want to keep it, do you?’” she recalled. “I felt trapped. I immediately thought, ‘If I don’t have this abortion, my boyfriend would leave me.’ I did the only thing I thought I could do. I ended the life of my child through abortion.”
Her boyfriend dropped her off at the abortion clinic in Pennsylvania, then “walked out of my life,” she said.
Ms. McFadden was one of a half-dozen women who shared their stories Wednesday about how easy access to abortion left them vulnerable to pressure to end their pregnancies against their will by boyfriends, husbands and even medical providers.
“Most women with unplanned pregnancies said that they would not have gotten abortions if they had had the emotional or financial support,” said Emily Erin Davis, spokesperson for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which hosted the virtual press conference. “A sizable number of these women did not have that freedom, whether forced, coerced, or pushed to an unwanted abortion.”…
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, our movement was given a historic opportunity. But the battle for life became much more difficult.
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