She Thought Abortion Removed a ‘Blob of Cells’ — Then She Became Pregnant

At 18, Vicki was unmarried, broke and unexpectedly pregnant. She had grown up believing abortion removed little more than a “blob of jelly”. But becoming a mother and witnessing the choices faced by women around her forced her to reconsider what she believed about abortion, wantedness, and the value of a human life.

When the second line appeared on the pregnancy test, Vicki froze.

She was 18-and-a-half years old. She and her boyfriend, Shaun, had been together for only six months. Neither had much family support, they were unmarried and living separately.

Vicki was away doing a course in Rotorua when her period failed to arrive. Two weeks late, she finally took a test.

Amid the shock, Vicki remembers one thought emerging with surprising clarity. I’m going to keep it.

It wasn't that abortion was unthinkable to her, or that she didn’t know it was an option. As a teenager, Vicki considered herself pro-choice, but she understood abortion very differently then. 

“I thought it was just a blob of mucus getting sucked out, a clump of cells. That’s honestly what I believed.”

Two years earlier, when Vicki was 14, a close friend of hers had become pregnant and had an abortion. Vicki remembers her friend coming to her for emotional and physical comfort afterwards, cuddling her and crying for weeks.  “She was broken,” Vicki remembers. “And I couldn’t help her.” 

Abortion was present in the conversations around her. When she told her father she was pregnant, the first thing he said out of concern was, “Please tell me you're not going to abort it.”

Her father wanted her to keep the baby, but the question itself communicated something: abortion was an option.  

She didn't know it then, but that pregnancy would begin changing the way Vicki understood abortion — and human life itself.

Young, poor and judged

Vicki and Shaun had met when she was 17 and he was 18, at a time when both were experiencing instability in their families. Vicki's father had remarried and moved overseas with his younger children when she had finished school, while her mother wasn't in New Zealand. Shaun was dealing with family breakdown too.

“We clung to each other,” Vicki says. “We were always together and only had each other.

“We had no support. My midwife was really it. We had no money.”

Vicki also felt acutely aware of the judgement that came with being a teenage mother in the mid-1990s. 

“We were young, not married and because I'm brown, I fit a stereotype. I felt like a bit of a loser.”

Vicki remembers when she was pregnant and walking down the street men in their cars would see her from behind and toot at her… “until they got to the side and saw I was pregnant. I could sense disdain. I felt ashamed, like a second-class citizen.” 

Yet alongside the judgement came people whose practical support made an enormous difference. Shaun's mother was excited about the baby and began knitting. His rugby club brought over baby clothes and cloth nappies. Most importantly, Vicki remembers a midwife who helped make an overwhelming situation manageable.

“My midwife saved us,” she says. “She was so supportive, available, and made so many things feasible because we had no money or support.”

Shaun was supportive too. He had been adopted himself and had grown up without seeing anyone biologically related to him. The prospect of having his own child meant something profound to him.

Then their daughter, Eden, arrived.

“When she came out I was completely switched and madly falling in love and on cloud nine for weeks. It was so magical for both of us.”

She hadn't set out to change her views on abortion, but pregnancy and motherhood had given her something she hadn't had when she was 14: experience. She had watched a pregnancy become Eden.

Two pregnancies, two babies

Vicki and Shaun married when Eden was about a year-and-a-half old, and around six months later Vicki became pregnant again.

During that pregnancy she caught up with a childhood friend she hadn't seen for several years. Vicki excitedly shared her news, only to discover that her friend was pregnant too. They were only about two weeks apart in gestation.

At 21, Vicki was thrilled to have someone her own age going through pregnancy at almost exactly the same time. 

Her friend, however, wasn't excited.

She wasn't with the baby's father anymore, and he didn't want the child. She told Vicki that she probably wasn't going to continue the pregnancy.

Vicki was stunned. Inside her own body was a baby she already loved and valued. Inside her friend's body was another baby at almost precisely the same stage of development. The circumstances surrounding the pregnancies were different, but the babies themselves were not.

“My baby is the same size and growing like yours,” Vicki told her. “You can't just get rid of it. It's a baby.

“My baby was wanted, hers wasn't. Two babies are the same.”

If the babies were the same, Vicki wondered, why should one have value because it was wanted while the other could lose its life because it wasn't?

A couple of weeks later, Vicki called her friend. She had decided to continue the pregnancy.

It wouldn't be the last time Vicki found herself having that conversation.

‘We will help you’

Another friend came to one of Vicki's birthday dinners secretly pregnant. Her boyfriend was pressuring her to have an abortion, although Vicki wasn't supposed to know about the pregnancy or the boyfriend’s wishes.

Vicki sat beside her friend and quietly prayed for her. She continued praying for weeks, and eventually learned that her friend had decided to keep her baby.

Years later, another friend she met on a training course found herself in much the same situation. Her boyfriend didn't want the child and was pushing for abortion. His argument was that it made no sense to ruin two lives when they could simply “get rid of one life”.

By then Vicki was around 28, and her response was immediate.

“Don't do that. We will help you. Forget him.”

Her friend continued the pregnancy, despite the father's anger. But once the baby was born, the same man who had argued so strongly for abortion fell completely in love with his child.

“He totally turned and fell madly in love with the baby,” Vicki says. “He was obsessed with his baby.”

There was something really revealing in that change, Vicki says. The baby hadn't changed; the father's relationship with his child had. It was another experience that left her questioning whether circumstances, or whether a child was wanted, could determine the value of a life.

The man standing beside her

But another story was shaping Vicki's thinking much closer to home. 

Shaun, the teenage boyfriend who stood beside her when she became pregnant at 18, became her husband. Today he is a project manager and co-director of a commercial construction company, and the father of their four children. 

He is also adopted.

The circumstances surrounding Shaun's conception were troubling. His biological mother was just 15 when she became pregnant to a 21-year-old man - below the legal age of consent. Her father wanted the man charged.

Yet instead of abortion, Shaun’s birth mother was relocated to a facility in Auckland in secret to have her baby. He was not punished for the crime of his father.

She was 16 by the time Shaun was born. She cared for him for three days before relinquishing him for adoption.

Vicki has thought often about what that must have required of a teenage girl.

“To hold her newborn and then to give it away.”

Shaun went to a couple who desperately wanted children. They had experienced six miscarriages, and his adoptive mother had undergone a hysterectomy. They had already adopted a daughter when, with very little warning, they received a call telling them there was a 6-week-old baby boy who needed a family. They were told to get the nursery ready; they could collect Shaun the following day. 

He grew up in Pakuranga in what Vicki describes as a fairly typical Kiwi childhood. He played rugby, went fishing and grew into a 6'4" man with a strong sense of who he was. His mum, Vicki says, was a wonderful mother who responded to his needs and helped shape his sense of security and value.

“Circumstances of conception don't define your value at all.”

Shaun became a builder, a husband and a father. He works, contributes, loves and is loved. His life has touched countless other lives, and four children now exist because he does.

“His birth mother's incredible courage is why he is here and why our four kids are here,” Vicki says.

‘When it's so small, you can just smudge it away’

As the years passed, Vicki increasingly questioned the language she had accepted as a teenager.

She remembered believing that an early pregnancy was little more than a blob of jelly and compared that with what she had experienced through four pregnancies of her own. She had heard their heartbeats very early on and watched her babies on ultrasound. She has a scan of her youngest child at 12 weeks in which, she says, he unmistakably looks like a complete baby. 

“How could I get told that it is a blob of jelly just days or weeks earlier?”

She says one of the things that makes early abortion easier to contemplate is that the developing child is still hidden.

“When it's so small it might seem easier to just smudge it away,” she says.

“It's too easy in the darkness to imagine it away or say nothing happened.”

Vicki can no longer separate that unseen beginning from the person who follows.

From pro-choice to speaking for those without a voice

There was no single debate or political argument that turned Vicki from pro-choice to pro-life. Her views changed through experience.

Today Vicki is 48 and a mother of four. She doesn't romanticise teenage pregnancy or pretend that what happened at 18 was easy. She remembers how poor they were, how little support they had and how unprepared she felt for motherhood. But she rejects the idea that keeping Eden destroyed the future she and Shaun might otherwise have had.

“The reality was we were poor and young and didn't know what we were doing,” she says. “But I feel like we got ourselves sorted out because we became parents. We had purpose and set goals.”

“I'm not saying I recommend 18-year-olds to get pregnant. I'm just saying if someone finds themselves pregnant at that age they need to know it won't take you down, but can elevate you.”

Three decades after she first saw that second line on a pregnancy test, Vicki's understanding of abortion bears little resemblance to what she believed as a teenager.

“I want to be brave for those babies who have no voice,” she says.

“Every life is valuable from conception.”