Jenny was 17 years old when she got pregnant. She lived in a small town and went to a small high school where everyone knew everybody else’s business.  To this day, she professes a great deal of pride that she was able to guard her secret as well as she did.  Jenny came from a fairly poor home, although most of the families in her town, with the exception of the family who owned the grocery store, were probably as poor or worse off than her family.  Her mom was working hard to raise three children by herself and Jenny was the middle child.  Her brother was off at college on a scholarship and Jenny worked 30 hours a week bussing tables in a busy restaurant in addition to attending high school full time in order to help buy groceries and pay the rent on their small house.

Jenny was a senior in high school and had already been accepted to multiple colleges by the time she discovered she was pregnant.  Jenny worked hard at her studies, believing that going away to college was her ticket out of this town.  She was a likeable person, involved in a lot of school activities and sports and was friendly with most of the students in her small school.

Jenny successfully managed to avoid having sexual intercourse with her first serious boyfriend but after a painful breakup, she quickly rebounded into a new relationship.  Still feeling depressed and angry over the breakup with her “first love,” she decided she didn’t have anything to lose and agreed to sleep with this new boy.  After the first time they had sex, she didn’t feel as though she could turn him down and the two became sexually active.  While Jenny had genuinely liked Jason, she had no illusions about being ‘in love’ with him.

 “I didn’t want to break up with him. I would have felt like a total slut. If I had had sex with him and then we broke up right away it would have seemed like I had slept with a guy I didn’t really like that much. And it was somewhat satisfying to think that my ex might hear that we were sleeping together and get jealous that I hadn’t done it with him. Why Jason and not him?  So we stayed together.  I figured it was only a matter of time before I headed off to college and we broke up, anyway.”

Jenny fantasized about gaining true independence and adult status as soon as she graduated from high school and moved away from this small town.  She had already been accepted to three universities with scholarships and was simply riding out her last few months of high school.

Birth control was something Jenny thought she knew a lot about.  Jenny’s stepmother had spoken to her on a few embarrassing occasions (which Jenny very much appreciated although she would never have admitted it at the time), and Jenny was clear about her options.  She understood the importance of using some form of birth control, but getting access to it in this small town was another issue.  Her mother had no health insurance, and there was no way she was going to ask her to take her to the doctor to get on the pill.  Jenny’s mom was a devout Catholic and the tearful, guilt-ridden conversation that she envisioned seemed hardly worth it to her.  Jenny and her mother loved each other, but their relationship at this point mostly consisted of trying to avoid confrontations in an effort to  make everyone’s lives easier.  Jenny’s siblings challenged their mother and had both been involved with drugs and alcohol.  Her little brother ran away several times and Jenny thought of it as her role to provide some cushion for her mother by being predictable and responsible.

Jenny’s stepmother lived 200 miles away and Jenny felt as though asking her for help with birth control would instigate too many personal conversations that she wasn’t willing to engage in.  All Jenny really wanted was a safe, anonymous way to obtain reliable birth control.  She didn’t want education or discussions or anyone who might try to talk her out of having sex with her boyfriend.   Jenny’s boyfriend complained about using condoms because he found them uncomfortable and ‘messy.’  It was risky to go into either of the two local drugstores to purchase such items, anyway, since both of them were owned by parents of Jenny’s classmates.  Jenny’s desire to keep things simple for everyone led her to agree with her boyfriend that as long as he pulled out prior to ejaculating, they would be fine.

Jenny remembers clearly the first day she realized she was pregnant.  She was on her way to give a friend a ride to school and halfway up the porch stairs to the front door, she had to lean over the railing and vomit into the bushes.  Later that day she was so overcome by nausea that she left her second period class to throw up in the girls’ bathroom.  Every day after that for the next week she repeated this pattern.

One afternoon she called in sick to work and drove 30 miles to the nearest large town to buy a pregnancy test.  Sitting in the parking lot, she read the instructions and tried to figure out how she would manage to take this test first thing in the morning in a bathroom she shared with her mother.  The next morning Jenny made sure she was up early.  Locking the door, she sat on the toilet and peed.  Although she wasn’t surprised to see the pink plus sign appear, her heart sank.  Jenny stood in the shower and sobbed until a voice inside her head barked at her to “suck it up.”  After that, she resigned herself to moving forward.

The rest of this story will be available in the book when it is released. Like our Facebook page to get updates on the publishing process!