My fiance and I have been together for seven years, and I proposed to her around nine months ago. She is Danish, but we live in Sweden together. This means you can generally access abortion up until eighteen weeks. We discovered she was pregnant about three months ago. We were both delighted, and she’s about sixteen weeks pregnant now. While it was not planned, we are living together, and are in the financial position to look after a baby so we both thought it was just supposed to happen. She’s had all her ultrasounds and tests that have needed to be done and our baby seems to be healthy and everything was going well. Her doctors were happy and she doing well. Her pregnancy hasn’t been terrible so far, she does get morning sickness but that has almost gone now and I’ve been doing as much as I can to support her while she’s pregnant.
I got home from work in the evening and she was sitting on the floor crying. She’s been having reduced hours at work, so she is always home earlier than I am these days. I asked her what was wrong and if she wanted to talk about it. She said she couldn’t do this anymore, the baby was trying to kill her and she wants to abort it. I was absolutely shocked, but I tried to stay calm and put it down to pregnancy hormones. I made her dinner, she had a bath and I told her we’d talk about it in the morning.
I had been hoping she had just been having a funny moment and that with some sleep she would be able to think properly. In the morning I asked her if she wanted to talk about what she said yesterday and she looked at me and said flatly that she knows that the baby wants to kill her and that she needs to get an abortion. I asked her why she thinks the baby wants to kill her, and she said she just knows and that if I want her to live and to marry her, she has to get an abortion. I called her doctors and said what was happening, and that I didn’t know what to do. They said if she wants to get one, then she has the ability to make that decision if she wants to. And that they know I might disagree, but it is almost always the pregnant woman’s decision, as it is their body.
I don’t know what to do. It’s her body. I would never want to force her to go through something as big as pregnancy when it would have such a big impact on her. I love her, I want to marry her, she’s my everything. But we’ve seen our baby on scans, it’s a real little person. And she was happy about it. I know she wanted that baby, just like I did. Because we had a talk when we found out and we both agreed that it felt right and that we wanted this baby. Her parents were delighted, mine were too. I was so happy, she was so happy. I don’t know what has gone wrong. I feel awful for disagreeing with her, but I haven’t told her I do. I’ve just said we’ll go through this together, and I will support her. But I feel awful. I feel like I’ve let her down. I don’t know why she feels this way about our baby and what has happened to make her feel so terrible. I want to support her, I really do. But I don’t know if I can.