I'm 18 and just experienced a medical abortion - I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone

I'm 18 and have just experienced a medical abortion yesterday, mostly because my partner didn’t want a child, and I knew I couldn’t do it alone :(

The night before, Wednesday, I read all these stories on this site and was terrified. My friend had had one last year and said the pain was bad, but not as bad as the nurses were making out, and not as bad as some of the stories on here, so that was reassuring.

[You'll find links to more abortion stories, organised by e.g. abortion type, provider and gestation period on this page.]

Then the day came, I went to the unit, and it was a horrible experience all round. The nurse who attended me refused to put the tablets in me (you have to have four pessaries inserted vaginally), which made the situation a lot worse, because I was so scared that it would all go wrong.

She wouldn’t do it for me, although on the Tuesday, when I had taken the tablet, they said to me that they would do it for me, yet she refused to. She handed me a glove, some lube and the four tablets and took me to the toilet.

I came back crying, saying and knowing I had done it wrong, so she demanded "Take your trousers off!" really rudely. I lay on the bed and she did it for me, although she really didn’t want to and was making rude comments like "You only have one vagina!" The situation was bad enough, but she wasn’t very pleasant either.

Anyway, I then came home, and that’s when the pain began. I wouldn’t recommend this type of abortion to anyone. It really is as bad as everyone says, and really is such horrific, horrible pain. At some points, I honestly thought I was dying.

I was sitting on the toilet being sick out of my nose and mouth (despite an anti-sickness tablet just moments before) and having diarrhoea and bleeding. It wasn’t very nice at all (understatement). The pain was so horrible, but I couldn’t keep the painkillers down to help long enough, as I was just being sick the whole time.

The reason I’m sharing this is just that I really really hope that people read this so that they can definitely consider the surgical abortion, as I really wish I had now.