I was sixteen when I found myself swelling with life, a secret growing inside me, and the boy I adored, Jack, was the cause. We had been seeing each other since we were in Year10, and when the news slipped into our ears we froze, too terrified to tell anyone. When our parents finally learned of the pregnancy, their faces turned a fierce shade of anger.
Our family was held up as the model of respectability in the little town of Ashford. As the only daughter, I had always been the pride of my parents, a straightA pupil at the local comprehensive. Jack and I were still minors, so the adults took the reins, deciding what should be done for us.
Both of us were diligent students, and our parents dreamed of us gaining places at the university in Cambridge, graduating, and stepping into respectable careers. A child, they warned, would throw a spanner into those careful plans.
Thus my mother, with a voice that trembled like a cold wind over the moors, forced me into an abortion. It was still early enough to be legal, and the procedure passed without a hitch.
Afterwards Jack and I slipped back into the rhythm of ordinary life. We still met, finished our Alevels, moved on to university, and a year later we stood at the altar, our families smiling approvingly. My parents kept their distance, letting us chart our own course. Then, unexpectedly, I became pregnant again. Joy swelled within us like a tide.
But in the sixth month a strange, relentless bleeding began. My son was born tinyjust a pound and a half, no larger than a newborn sparrow. Three hours after his first breath he slipped away, a fragile wisp of existence gone.
Complications spiralled. The doctors could not stop the bleeding and, in a swift, clinical decision, removed my womb. I would never bear children again. My mother appeared at my bedside in the ward, tears tracing her cheeks, confessing how deeply she regretted having forced the first abortion years before. Her words, however sorrowful, could not stitch the wound in my heart.
The past cannot be rewound, nor can its errors be mended. I am now forever barred from motherhood, my future empty of the laughter of my own children. I wonder whether Jack and I can keep the marriage afloat, whether any happiness can be found when the very thing that once seemed essential to a normal family has been taken from us.
