It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. The second hardest decision was to make this info public. Literally my anesthetic just wore off completely this morning at the time of writing this, so it’s a great time to share my story – it’s raw and I’m feeling it.
Do you want to learn how to make solid decisions, move past regret, or going through a similar journey yourself? Then this blog post and podcast episode is for you.
This blog post is inspired by and an extension of my podcast found here: https://anchor.fm/duckit
Come into my world, as I bring you through my journey of finding out I was pregnant, battling with the decision, going through depression, feeling guilt, making the decision, then finally going through with the termination, and the grief period the next few days after.
Thank you so much for sharing in my journey at this very momentous, painful, tough point in my life, and I hope this shifts your own self-awareness. I’m all about moving towards being a calm confidence centered (CCC) individual and making decisions to align with being a CCC and my goals. I’m about to tell you a very hard story – the story about how I decided to get an abortion and follow through with it on January 14, 2020.
My story starts in November 2019, when I started noticing the holes in my business were really starting to cause financial strain, which eventually lead to my financial downfall in December. If you follow my journey, I started out as a broke ass entrepreneur making $15K total in 2017, and, in September of 2018, my business had completely turned around and grown significantly making $21K alone THAT MONTH. What I usually made in a year – I made in a month in September 2018, and it just got crazy, which lead to having the good problem of growing too fast.
Organization, planning, tons of marketing, and checking my numbers was something I neglected to give proper amounts of energy to during the really huge peak in my business (September 2018-September 2019). This neglect ultimately started unraveling my business in November 2019 causing major financial issues, which today I’m actually thankful to learn from my mistakes, so I can fix my business and help my clients today. In December 2019, things were really getting bad and slowing down for the Christmas season. Christmas and the lead up to it is always brutal for me, because I am a motherless daughter. My mom died of colon cancer when I was 28 years old, and I always miss my mom thinking about her lots during Christmas.
In November, I also got a $34,000 lawyer bill (more about that in another blog post) on top of all my other expenses – mortgage, bills, gas, food. This big lawyers bill was already making me nervous financially, because I had already spent my back-up emergency fund on other lawyers bills.
The day I found out I was pregnant in December, I was with a friend who found it a joyous occasion, while I panicked. Part of my panic, which made be feel like a real slut, was I wasn’t 100% sure who the father was. One thing I’ve learned about this whole experience; every woman handles the situation differently, and I appreciate another woman in the exact same situation as me could have definitely chose to keep the baby.
At the time, there was so much going through my head: who’s baby was it, am I even going to keep the baby, and what the fuck do I do. I made sure the next thing I did was went and told the biggest support in my world – my sister. When we’re in fear and panic, we want solutions right away to get rid of the pain, and surrendering to the process and taking my time making a decision actually ended up being the best thing for my self-awareness.
I went into my office the next day after taking another positive pregnancy test again in the morning. So there I was being torn apart with this new tremendous news interacting with my team trying to be normal, while tons of thoughts run through my head about the future of my business – how am I going to run my business and have a kid.
Then the the second bomb hit…
I didn’t have any financial savings or back up plans, because I had spent it all on lawyers and paid off a credit card. I was relying on my PC MasterCard until we had more sales in January. Then I logged into my account, and PC MasterCard had reduced my limit by about $13,000 with no warning, which left me with $17 to live off for the remainder of December. They had reviewed my account after I made the big payment to pay off the card and decided to reduce my limit, which made no sense with good credit but it was “policy”.
So there I was…$17 to my name and pregnant trying to keep my business afloat. I ended up selling a bunch of stuff around my house and did a few card readings. I had no money and no mom for Christmas. That’s when the depression started setting in. I went into a deep depression despite teaching mindset techniques for a living. I realized for the first time I had never been depressed previously. I thought I had been, but this was next level deep fucking black hole depression. I hit rock bottom, and I actually went into this deep root chakra survival mode afraid of being abandoned if I told anyone and afraid of what people would say.
The doctor gave me time to make a decision and advised me to not tell either of the fathers, because he was worried about them talking me out of it. I kept on going back and forth about my decision, and eventually decided to tell the fathers to witness their reaction. They started out happy, then disappointed and confused it may not be theirs, then they took their own time – which caused me to feel abandoned, and in the end one got nervous about if the abortion was the right decision and the other tried to talk me out of it. This was really hard, and I kept having to remind myself why I couldn’t have a baby. Ultimately, I was still concerned about ending up a single mom. Part of my disappointment was not having an amazing relationship by now like I’ve helped so many other women achieve. First and foremost I know I needed a good stable relationship in order to feel safe to have help with the baby, and I didn’t have that.
One of the things I was really ashamed of was being 34 years old and not be able to care for the baby, because abortion seems like “a young girl thing”, and still to this day, I don’t know any older women who have gotten abortions. I was ashamed for not having my life together by the time I was 34, and we all struggle with this…AND we all have to realize that nobody has their life together at any age. It’s also frowned upon to choose your business over motherhood, because it would totally put a hold on things without someone reliable helping me raise the baby. When I looked at my hands on help for raising a baby, so I could still build my business, there wasn’t a lot. This was all the foundations of my shame and guilt.
I started telling people for more support, and I told people who I thought would be supportive of me. As soon as you start telling people, there’s all these opinions. There’s a saying I heard lots after telling people: children are a gift, and after my experience, I cannot agree more. Children are the biggest gift ever including those unborn, and my unborn baby gave me a serious perspective shift I cannot thank him enough for. This was a checkpoint for me, where the universe was testing me you on how committed I was to my goals. This was very serious, because it’s a human life. When babies are sent to you, the universe is very aware that we have a choice to continue with baby or note, and this baby was a gift me, because I have been coasting along for way too long.
I’m really good at pushing through my fear, but prior to getting pregnant, I had be coasting along in all areas of my life according to Brittany standards. Here’s the thing, you can’t replace space and time, and you’ll never have the same baby again, so regret starts to sink in and fear… what if I can’t ever have a baby again – fertility only last for so long. We have a decision to make, and whatever path we take there’s always the same issue: What if I would have chosen the other path? This happens to women who choose abortions all the time. They go back and torture themselves with regret. I made that decision to terminate, but what if I actually had the baby… what if…
What would it have been like? What would it grow up to be like? These regrets don’t just come up with abortions – they come up with every single decision. Whatever decision you choose no matter what – regret is one of the biggest things in our lives keeps up paralyzed. I urge you to stand behind all your decisions and forget the phrase you always ask yourself, “What if I regret it”.
…and that’s how I keep on going today. Everyone wants to know why and how I’m so sure of my decision. I’ll tell you a secret – I was never 100% sure, I refuse to let regret haunt me after making the decision. I need to go easy and gentle on myself, because we don’t love ourselves enough
Here’s why I had an abortion…
Because I want a good solid partnership before I have a baby. I wanted the potential father to have a chance to go live his dreams, and I knew that his dreams would be a lot harder if not impossible with a child at this time.
And most importantly, I need it for myself, my dreams, my future love to be thrilled to raise a child with me. I also need real solid help to be an entrepreneur and mom.I have a purpose and my business to actualize, and I believe in all the women that I want to help. I always teach to think, talk, and align all your actions with your goals. My primary goal was my purpose and having an amazing partnership, and I knew a baby would bring me further away from those goals at this point in my life.
The doctor couldn’t find the ultrasound, so I never did know 100% who the father was. I had a good idea, but it killed me at moments not knowing for sure. Medically I felt forgotten about, because my ultrasound was December 13, and then I was basically dropped for Christmas and New Years, while everyone took time off. The holiday was really hard carrying a baby I didn’t intend to keep and going through all the side-effects along with it – morning sickness, bloating, depression, low energy. It was already getting hard to run my business at times. I ended up carrying this baby for way longer than I should have due to the holiday season. It was hard, because the longer I carried it the more unethical it seemed. I ended up having to advocate for myself a bit to get the process sped up.
There was actually a surprising amount of people who told me they supported me no matter what, but there was also a surprisingly amount of people who were inappropriate. I got support from friends who had abortions, friends who were trying to have babies but couldn’t, friends who had never had abortions, the potential father, and finally my dad. I had a lot of people congratulate me, when I first told them, and I had one friend say, “I bet your mom has met your baby.” That’s fine to use that line in an effort to try to get me to keep the baby, but I knew the universe had given me a check-point, so of course my mom in spirit knew about it.
Here’s what I know: The minute I don’t lean into my fear and fail to go for my goals living life fearlessly is the minute I let my unborn child down, because this unborn child gave its life so that I can have a better life. In the end, having an abortion was actually the most responsible choice for me. This became very apparent to me, because the natural tendency is to avoid what’s hard, and there was a point in my pregnancy where it almost became too easy, because I didn’t feel like i was pregnant some days. This was a really scary fact, because I could almost take the easy route and just ignore that I was pregnancy, and then I wouldn’t have to deal with the hard decision of the abortion. I know now a lot of women feel this, and then they don’t go through with it.
This brings me to my point of making decisions right for you, but it’s hard to make decisions and we naturally avoid them because of this. Know this about decisions, there are great benefits and consequences to making each decision, and whatever decision you make the most important thing is being able to accept the benefits and consequences of each decision you make, while not getting caught up in the pit of regret and what if’s you would have made the other decision. There benefits to having an abortion: I get to continue being an entrepreneur and I won’t have the struggles as a single mom. The consequences: taking a life, regret, and never being able to have a child again.
When you have two big decisions to make, make the decision and accept it. Accept the consequences that go with your decision and celebrate the benefits. Once you make your decision, the other option is taken away and here’s what people do – they play over in their mind what the other option would have been like. It’s torturous to ourselves. For all I know I could have miscarried, the baby could have died in month two of its life, or I could have died in childbirth. I don’t know. There’s an infinite number of possibilities. The mind will take that decision that you didn’t make and make it whatever the f*** it wants, and that will debilitate and stop us from moving forward being caught in guilt and paralyzed in fear.
The ability to make decisions, accept the successes and consequences of your decisions, and not let the other option go what if what if what if needs to be mastered. Last night, the night before the procedure, I didn’t sleep, because I was going back and forth on my decision. In the morning too, I took those pills and still was having a hard time with my decision, and in the waiting room they make it very comfortable for you, but I cried and I cried and I cried. Decisions are hard, and it’s hard to be 100%, but you have to make decisions and stand behind them, if you want to live life. In the waiting room, I checked in with my body and asked myself where I felt it in my body – I felt it in my heart, so I knew very much it was grief for not being able to have the baby. I cried and cried to accept the consequences of the decision I was about to make. Never being 100% sure but standing behind the decision.
I was awake the whole time. There was pinching, suction, and the whole procedure was maybe ten minutes. Five days later as I finish the final edits on this blog, I’m a bit traumatized I was awake for the whole thing. I’m just going through accepting the consequences of my decisions now and grieving the baby I didn’t have. You just show up, go through it, and then you have to go through grief – the acceptance of the consequences: not having a baby, hormones going crazy, and physical discomfort. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made.
Keep on following my blog, where we continue to talk about becoming aligned with your goals, being a calm confidence centered individual, and me speaking my truth. This weeks challenge: commit to making decisions and stop thinking about the what ifs. Accept your decisions along with the consequences, and celebrate the benefits. I invite you to p.m. me, reach out in any way you want, and follow me on social
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I will say only one thing. Your baby did not give his life to make yours better, you made the choice for him to die.
I hope we can have some back and forth on this topic. Even though I believe you made the wrong decision, I’m genuinely interested to hear your side. I think part of what makes abortion a difficult decision is the realization that you’re killing another human being. If this was merely a clump of cells, like a wart, nobody would feel any guilt for it’s removal and it wouldn’t be a difficult decision.
Brittany, you said “ this unborn child gave its life so that I can have a better life”
I think part of what helps people cope with abortion is coming to grips with the reality of what it is and then moving on from there. Even though this is a crude way to say it, would you say that at the end of the day, abortion is murder? I know that sounds extreme, but setting aside emotion, purely rationally, logically speaking, is abortion legal premeditated murder?
I’m asking this because a lot of people want to sugar coat what abortion is and I think most women know that they are killing their child, but they feel that this is acceptable at times to serve a greater good. I think owning that is a necessary part of the recovery process don’t you agree?