The Abortion Was Worse Than The Rape

  Tammie
Alabama,  United States
 
  At the age of 16, just a few days before my 17th birthday, I went on my very first date.  I was thrilled. He played football and was popular. We ate and saw a movie. I still had some time left before my curfew, so we drove around our rural area for a little while. We went to some of his family's property and walked around looking at horses. My first date, which seemed like a total dream, soon turned into a nightmare when he forceably raped me in a barn.

I didn't tell anyone initially; after all, he threatened me immediately after, telling me that I would live to regret it if I told anyone, that he’d make my life miserable, and that nobody would believe me. A couple of weeks later, I told a friend. After talking with a few people, and finding out that he had already been spreading his version of what happened that night, no one believed me. People who I trusted and loved and who should have supported me did not.  I began to just deny the whole thing and started trying to block it from my memory.

I didn’t think a lot about the possibility of being pregnant because I had a distorted view that because it was rape, then it was somehow less likely I’d become pregnant.  It wasn’t until I started having symptoms that I began to realize I might be pregnant.  I drove to a different town by myself to buy a pregnancy test kit, doing the test in the gas station bathroom so no one in my hometown would ever know.  Before I took the test, I had kind of already thought ahead of what I would do if it came back positive, and so, I had the name of a pregnancy center with their phone number because I thought they were an abortion clinic.  I felt extremely scared and angry there all alone in the gas station restroom.  I was angry at God, asking “How could you allow me to raped?”  I was angry at myself for putting myself in a position to allow this to happen.

Read the rest of Tammie's story HERE
   
   
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