Teenage Abortion Lindsey: A Story

Teenage Abortion

Lindsey: A Story of Teenage Abortion

Some individuals believe that all teenaged girls who become pregnant and have abortions are immoral, unethical and murderous. However, for many underage girls, their parents make the choice for them to have abortions. Since they are minors they have little choice in the matter. That decision can haunt both the parents and the daughter for a lifetime.

I have two cousins. Danielle is the older of the two. Danielle was a pretty, vivacious teenager who had no problem attracting members of the opposite sex. At the age of sixteen she became involved with a street gang member named Julio. She soon found out that she was carrying his child. She carried the pregnancy through to full term with her parents' consent and gave birth to a healthy baby girl who they named Skylar. Danielle and the baby lived at home with her parents. At first Danielle made the effort to be an attentive mother, but after about three months she stopped getting up in the middle of the night when the baby cried. My Aunt Gladys got up to take care of the baby, and it wasn't long until Gladys had assumed the full-time care of her granddaughter. Danielle was still too young, immature and irresponsible to be a good mother.

My younger cousin Lindsey had been going steady with Robbie since eighth grade. Robbie was a devout Baptist who planned to be a minister one day and did not believe in sex outside of marriage, so she stayed out of trouble until he went away to college. Distance did not improve their relationship, and they soon drifted apart emotionally. Lindsey began dating a soldier from the nearby military base. When she was sixteen, she found that she was pregnant. She told the soldier about her situation, expecting that he would offer to marry her. He swore at her and said the baby probably wasn't his anyway. She never heard from him again.

When she finally worked up the nerve to tell Gladys that she was expecting a baby, Gladys was livid. After a tear-filled explosion, she calmly called Planned Parenthood and scheduled an abortion for her younger daughter. Lindsey was devastated. She could not understand why her mother would help care for Danielle's baby but would not do the same for her. Skylar, unfortunately, was a handful, and Gladys was already well into middle age. Gladys assumed that since Danielle had abdicated parental responsibility that Lindsey would do the same. She did not feel that she would be able to care for a second baby.

The abortion went through as scheduled, and Lindsey returned to school soon afterwards. For Lindsey, though, things didn't return to normal. The girls at school called her a baby-killer and started making threats against her. She sank into a deep depression. She had deeply wanted the baby and she thought she would have made a good mother. Lindsey was always a quiet person and not one to share her innermost thoughts, so it was a surprise and a blow to everyone when Gladys came home from work early to find Lindsey unconscious in her bedroom, with a suicide note on the dresser and an empty bottle of pills in her hand.

Lindsay survived her suicide attempt, but she was placed in the state mental hospital for six weeks afterwards so that she could get some much-needed counseling and full-time observation. During that time all of the bitterness and sorrow came out over the loss of her baby, the anger towards her mother, and the devastation of having her friends turn on her because of Gladys's decision to terminate the pregnancy.

Lindsey remained in her black depression for some months afterwards, until Robbie came home for the winter break. He had heard all about the situation. He showed up on their doorstep one winter morning and asked Lindsey point blank, "Why didn't you call me? Why didn't you talk to me? I would have married you. I wouldn't care if it was someone else's baby. I'd have loved it like it was my own."