In early December of 2006, a confluence of events caused a long-held dam to burst around my and my closest friend’s experience with our abortions (mine being 23 years earlier, in 1983, when I was 19).

Barbara's story.

I was with my now husband, then boyfriend. I went back and forth between a diaphragm and spermicide. I was very faithful about using birth control.Still, I wound up pregnant.

In the 1920s, my maternal great grandmother became pregnant for the third time. She did not want to raise a third child,  so she went to her ob/ gyn, who performed an abortion after my great grandmother promised to never tell anybody else.

I think I am like many thousands of women who have had abortion and it was a normal part of their life. There are many of us who are just not going to have big dramatic stories.

And that is how it should be.

I have known at least two other women in my life who had hard decision to make. One chose to have an abortion and the other gave her second child up for adoption. Each woman had a story and had a reason for their decisions and they did the right thing in both.