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During testimony at a congressional hearing on reproductive rights Thursday, Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo., Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif., shared personal stories about their own abortions.
Bush talked honestly for the first time about undergoing an abortion after she was raped as a teenager during the House Oversight Committee hearing about the Texas abortion ban and the approaching Supreme Court hearings on Mississippi’s 15-week ban.
Bush, a member of Missouri’s 1st congressional district, said she was raped while on a church vacation and spoke about her terror after finding out she was pregnant.
“About a month after the trip, I turned 18. A few weeks later, I realized I had missed my period,” she said. “I reached out to a friend and asked the guy from the church trip to contact me. I waited for him to reach out, but he never did. I never heard from him. I was 18, I was broke, and I felt so alone. I blamed myself for what had happened to me.”
Bush says she found a clinic in the yellow pages and was told she was nine weeks pregnant. She chose to get an abortion because she was concerned about how she could sustain a child “at 18 years old and barely scraping by” without the father’s help and how her family would respond.
“Choosing to have an abortion was the hardest decision I had ever made,” Bush said. “But at 18 years old, I knew it was the right decision for me. It was freeing knowing I had options.”
Rep. Barbara Lee of California’s 13th district spoke at the hearing alongside Bush about an abortion she had at a “back-alley clinic” in Mexico in the mid-1960s, before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” she said. “A lot of girls and women in my generation didn’t make it. They died from unsafe abortions — in the 1960s, unsafe septic abortions were the primary killer of African American women.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington’s 7th district revealed that her first child was born at 26 and a half weeks, weighing only 1 pound 14 ounces, after a high-risk pregnancy. When the congresswoman fell pregnant again a few years later, despite being on birth control, she discussed her options with her doctors and decided another pregnancy was too risky.
“After discussions with my partner, who was completely supportive of whatever choice I made, I decided to have an abortion,” Jayapal said. “Two decades later, I think about those moments on the table in the doctor’s office, a doctor who was kind and compassionate and skilled, performing abortions in a state that recognizes a person’s constitutional right to make their choices about their reproductive care.”
The three ladies gave their testimony amid fears that the conservative-leaning Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. Along with Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York’s 12th district, they urged the Senate to enact the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would ensure nationwide access to abortion under federal protection.
“Nearly 1 in 4 women in the United States will have an abortion in their lifetime,” Maloney said to start the hearing. “But with a hostile Supreme Court, extremist state governments are no longer chipping away at our constitutional rights — they are bulldozing right through them.”
