Robbie Ausley discovered she was pregnant for the fourth time in 1973, the same year abortion was legalized through the Roe v. Wade ruling.
It was an unplanned pregnancy — her husband had gotten a vasectomy two years earlier, but it had apparently failed. Ausley, then 29 and a stay-at-home-mother, already had four children including a set of twins.
She wasn’t aware yet that abortion was legal. But she knew one thing for sure: She couldn’t handle another child.
“I found myself screaming at my kids, then feeling guilty and depressed,” Ausley, now 78, said. “I was already under a great deal of stress. When I found out I was pregnant again, it put me on the edge of hysteria. I decided to have an abortion, which felt like a moral, life-affirming decision, because my responsibility was to the four children I already had.”
Her husband, a young lawyer, supported her. They traveled from Austin to San Antonio for her procedure, making Ausley one of the first women in America to exercise the newfound right to female bodily autonomy under Roe.
She still believes it was the right decision. Indeed, Ausley became an activist, raising money for a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin. In years past, she testified before the Texas Legislature, trying to ensure that other women had the same ability to control the trajectory of their lives as she did.
When the current U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in June, Ausley was devastated.
“My first reaction was that women of my economic status will always have access to abortion,” she said. “It’s poor women who are going to be affected the most, poor women and their children. We’re going to see more kids not getting the care and nurturing they need, more ending up in the prison system.”
Ausley’s story is emblematic of how a freedom that women possessed for five decades was suddenly ripped away by judicial fiat. It’s also representative of another truth, one that has been lost amid the tumult surrounding Roe’s reversal.
Namely: A great deal of attention has focused on how states with near-total abortion bans — like Texas — make no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, or that feature fetal anomalies.
That hyper-focus isn’t surprising, given the overflow of heartbreaking stories about those situations, such as the 11-year-old girl who received an abortion in Utah in 1983 after being raped by a male babysitter.
But the truth is that abortions resulting from rape or incest make up only a small portion of the procedures in the U.S. Same for abortions resulting from fetal anomalies.
The majority of pregnant people seeking terminations do so for reasons related to the realities of their lives: They’re not ready to have another child; they’re not financially or emotionally in a position to parent; they don’t want to be single mothers; they’re finished having kids. The reasons are as complex and varied as the lives of women across the land.
Among women who have sought abortion care, 60% are already mothers, and half have two or more children. Most are poor, unmarried and in their late 20s. In the past 50 years, abortion has become one of the most common medical procedures, with roughly one in four women having one in their lifetimes.
But it’s easy to understand the fixation on rape and incest: Those are the abortions wherein girls or women get pregnant through no fault or action of their own. Their birth control didn’t fail; or (even worse) they didn’t neglect to use contraception in the first place.
The subtext is obvious: If you’re so careless as to become unwantedly pregnant during consensual sexual intercourse, then your abortion is especially stigmatized, resolutely shameful. For abortion opponents, you must pay for it with the intimate fabric of your very life — by shelving your hopes and goals (at least temporarily, maybe forever), taking a drastic detour away from your life plans and undergoing the real physical risks of pregnancy, which can be far more dangerous than abortion.
Interesting, isn’t it, that we never expect this level of selflessness from men?
For Ausley, being able to access safe, legal abortion meant she could focus her care and love on the four kids she had, all of whom grew up to be happy, well-adjusted adults. It turned out her twins had a significant learning disability, one that required a great deal of her attention.
“I remembered thinking, in retrospect, if I’d had that fifth child, my twins would have ended up falling through the cracks,” she said.
When I had my abortion at age 23, I was working at a secretarial job I hated. I got pregnant on the second (and final) date with a guy I barely knew, while I was temporarily on the outs with my then-longtime boyfriend. Since I wasn’t planning on having sex, I hadn’t brought along my birth control, but decided to go ahead and risk it.
I was shocked and crestfallen to learn I was pregnant. But I also knew I was in no position — financially, emotionally, spiritually — to have a child. Neither was the guy with whom I’d had the casual fling, whose only response when he learned of my condition was to offer me money. I told him I could handle it.
Like most women who have abortions, the singular feeling I had after the procedure was not regret but relief. Forty-two years later, like Ausley, I still believe it was the right decision. Looking back, I’m sure that without my abortion I wouldn’t have been able to leave that boring but stable job (because I had a child to raise) to strike out on the iffy quest to become a journalist, a career I’ve relished. It’s doubtful I would have met and married the man who would become my husband of nearly four decades. Which means I wouldn’t have conceived and carried our beloved child Sam, now an amazing young adult who is the light of my life.
Does this make me selfish? Well, that’s sort of the point: That the needs and desires of fully grown women take precedence over embryos or fetuses, no matter how they’re created — a sentiment that 61% of Americans agree with, especially in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, when more than 90% of abortions take place (or used to, that is.)
Ausley and her husband have joined an effort at their church of 50 years to become a Reproductive Freedom Congregation, an initiative of the Texas Freedom Network that helps clergy and laypeople learn how to become advocates for reproductive rights. So far, more than 25 churches have signed up.
As part of the initiative, Ausley wrote a story about her abortion that she has shared in Sunday school classes. Afterwards, several women approached her to say quietly, sotto voce, that they, too, have had the procedure.
“My story is not unique,” Ausley wrote in her essay. “It is a story similar to that of many women who walk silently among us. … Behind every choice is a story. Hopefully, by putting a face — my face — on this issue, people will be less likely to judge and demonize women … and might more fully understand that simplistic solutions to complex problems too often trivialize the human dilemmas in our journeys.”
This column is the first time Ausley has shared her story in a more public space.
Her decision to speak out is part of a growing national movement that spotlights the importance of women sharing their abortion narratives — in hopes that coming out of the shadows will dispel some of the stigma around what is (or has been) a surpassingly common medical procedure, one that has enabled so many women to steer their own lives, determine their own destinies.
I asked Ausley if she shared my trepidation in going public with our abortion stories, for fear of risking the wrath of online trolls (or worse) in these incendiary times.
“I’m tired of being frightened,” she said simply. “Let them come.”
We can tell our stories, Ausley said, but what’s truly needed is a grassroots groundswell among women and their male allies to show up at the ballot box this November and beyond.
Already, the backlash to Roe’s reversal is changing the political landscape. Women are registering to vote in droves; the pushback is driving pro-choice wins in referendums in red states and stands to thwart chances of a once likely Republican midterm sweep. Newly nervous Republican candidates are moderating their once-fiery anti-choice rhetoric; some are even erasing references to abortion from their campaign websites. (Be careful what you wish for, guys!)
When Sen. Lindsey Graham recently proposed legislation for a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, his Republican colleagues avoided him like the weird fellow on the bus talking to himself.
Voting is the answer to this war on women, said Ausley.
“Now they’re coming after (abortion) pills,” she said. “I can see this (fight) taking years.”
Until then, she’ll keep telling her story.
