In talking about her experience taking the abortion pill, Tami laments that she was not given any options when she visited the abortion facility.
“They did not offer to show me an ultrasound image of my baby,” she says. “I was not given any pregnancy resources or told about adoption.”
She notes that she was also misled about what the experience would be like. “I was told that I would experience slight cramping and bleeding and pass some blood clots, but no more than a normal menstrual cycle — it was nothing like they had told me.”
Tami says she sat on the toilet after feeling an intense urge to push. “I looked down and I screamed,” she recounts. “It was not just a blob of tissue. I had given birth to what looked like a fully formed, intact, 14-week-old fetus covered in blood.”
She describes holding her baby boy in her arms and crying, but says she can’t remember what she did with his body after that. Following the abortion, she says she just kept “bleeding and bleeding and bleeding,” so she called the facility and they advised her to go to the emergency room.
The abortion pill is a two-step process involving the drugs mifepristone, which starves the baby of nutrients, and misoprostol, which causes the mother to go into labor and deliver the baby’s body.
Though it is currently approved for use in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, stories like Tami’s show that some women are taking it much later, causing them to deliver a more fully-formed child in the process. This has led to lasting trauma for many mothers.
Tami’s experience of needing to visit the emergency room following the abortion pill procedure is also not unusual. A 2021 study found that as many as six percent of “known outcomes” from the abortion pill were severe enough to result in emergency room or urgent care visits — a striking statistic, especially considering that most abortion-pill related complications go unreported.
Tami ends by recounting the profound negative impact the abortion had on her life.
“The time afterward was not good,” she explains. “For about eight years, I dealt with alcoholism, divorce, suicidal thoughts, rage-filled outbursts, and debilitating depression.”
