Deciding to Have an Abortion Wasn't Hard For Me — Affording It Was

This article is part of POPSUGAR's 50 States, 50 Abortions, a large-scale storytelling project that aims to elevate the voices of people who've had abortions. For more information about how to find an abortion clinic near you, please visit The Cut's abortion service finder.

My abortion story starts on the day that I found out I was pregnant in June 2018. I went into the hospital for a routine ear surgery that I had scheduled months prior. With any kind of preop situation, they typically do a urine screening just to make sure you're not pregnant and you can take the medication. Unfortunately, my urine screening popped positive for human growth hormone. So they did a blood test to confirm that I was, in fact, pregnant and told me that they would not be able to do the surgery and that I would need to come back after the pregnancy.

I was not exactly thrilled with this news. I was actually shocked, because a stranger had just told me that I was pregnant after I'd prepared myself for a surgery I thought I was going to be having.

As soon as they said, "You're pregnant," I knew exactly what I was going to do. I'd always known I was not having more than two children. I didn't have the means to have more than two children, and to do so would've caused the lives of my current living, breathing children to suffer, and I wouldn't allow for that. I always knew if I were to get pregnant without planning on it, I would have an abortion. As soon as they discharged me, on my way to my car, I messaged somebody I knew who worked for Planned Parenthood and said, "Oh my god, I found out I'm pregnant. What do I do?" She told me to call Planned Parenthood. So when I got to my car, I called.

Planned Parenthood helped me schedule my first appointment. They told me what the abortion was going to cost and said if I needed help affording it, I could contact abortion-access funds. They laid everything out in a very straightforward way for me.

It was 2018, and the cost of my abortion was $500. At the time, I was 28 and made $13.10 an hour. I'm a working-class person; I didn't necessarily have the ability to just come up with $500. But I was able to get half of that cost funded by an abortion-access fund that was local to our state that regular people like you and me donate money to. The other half of that abortion cost was funded by my mother-in-law. If it weren't for other people paying this bill for me, I would not have been able to seek out that abortion.

When I went in for my appointment, I had to wade through a crowd of people shouting at me that they wanted to give me a present and telling me not to go in — they were quite literally holding gifts in front of me. But of course, I went in and had my procedure. I sat in the waiting room with tons of other people in very similar situations, people of all different types and ages.

I had to have an ultrasound done. I was fortunate, though, because I wasn't forced to look; in some states, they do force you to look at the ultrasound. After that, I was given the medication for a medication abortion — I believe one was called mifepristone, and there was something else. They told me exactly what order to take everything in. You take one pill there, you go home, you do the rest.

It was, for me, a very seamless experience. The folks at Planned Parenthood explained what to expect so well that there were no shocks for me. Any emotional turmoil didn't come from the fact that I had an abortion, it came from the fact that a stranger told me I was pregnant when I was fully ready to have my ear operated on, and now I had to figure out how to afford the lifesaving procedure that I needed, and also how to get there, and also who was going to watch my kids, and also who was going to tell my boss that I needed a week off from work. That's where the turmoil came from — it wasn't about my uterus, it was about my socioeconomic status.

The accessibility of my abortion was probably one of the hardest things. In addition to having to get money from other people to pay for it, I had to drive an hour each way to my closest Planned Parenthood for each appointment. (Editors' note: Pennsylvania enacted a 24-hour waiting period in 1982.) I had to find somebody to watch my kids for the appointment. I was the breadwinner of my family because my partner had been in a car accident and was out on disability, and I had to take time off of work that was not paid, so I had to lose a week or so of income.

And this was four and a half years ago, before Roe v. Wade was overturned. When we had "protections in place." And this was in a "safe state" — Pennsylvania had a Democratic governor.

Through all of this, my wife was my biggest support system. (My partner is a woman, and we are both transgender, so we have the necessary parts to reproduce, which I think is an important detail.) My wife was with me when I found out I was pregnant. She drove me to the appointment, held my hand in the waiting room, and wiped my tears if I cried. She got me food if I needed to eat, brought me every pill I needed to take, and let me make the decision 100 percent myself. My wife couldn't stay home and take me to have an abortion at the same time, so I'm so thankful I had my mother-in-law to watch my kids.

But another huge, huge, key factor for me was finding support online. I'm estranged from my biological family, so I didn't have the ability to just call my mom or a sister or something. I was able to find support on social media apps, on different messaging boards, and via Planned Parenthood. Finding people who had been through the abortion experience — who had navigated that successfully for themselves and were willing to share their stories and give information on where you need to go or what you need to do — was really the most invaluable resource for me, other than having the emotional support from my partner. They'd been there. They knew what to do. When you don't know somebody in your life who can say, "Hey, I've had an abortion, I know what to do. You can come talk to me," the next best thing is the internet.

I'm so grateful for every human being who told me what to do when I felt like the wind was taken out of me. Every person who was like, "It's OK, I've had that happen to me." Those people who decided that they would tell me the details of something that is so awful to recount for so many people.

For those in my situation, that's the thing that makes the biggest difference: people who are not afraid — or maybe even are afraid — to give you the information that you need because you're a human being and you deserve to have that information. Those people are the greatest.

— Shay Ellis (they/them) (Pennsylvania), as told to Mirel Zaman

Image Sources For "Click For Stories From Each State": Unsplash / Aaron Burden, Getty / Sergii Iaremenko/Science Photo Library, Unsplash / Manik Roy and Photo Illustration: Patricia O'Connor