In 1971, a year before Roe v Wade, I was a 22 year old, married nursing student in Denton, Texas. I contracted tuberculosis and was placed on a regimen of multiple medications in an effort to control the disease.

In early 2010 I woke up in bed at my boyfriend's house with a pain in my abdomen. The pain persisted and became unbearable over the course of an hour and he decided to take me to the hospital.

I didn't exactly have an abortion. I did have to have an abortion procedure that saved my life. If that procedure had been illegal or otherwise unavailable, I would have died 2 days after turning 17 for nothing.

Six weeks before my daughter's first birthday, I learned that I was again pregnant.

I had an abortion when I was 20 years old. I was in my sophomore year of college and my boyfriend had just broken up with me.

I had been married only a few months, but between my precarious mental health due to being a survivor of incest (I thought about suicide almost daily) and my husband's childhood of physical abuse our relationship was intermittently violent.