18/09/2025 - When I found out I was pregnant. (extra entry)

Later in the afternoon I went into the cathedral. It was immense, the kind of place that swallows you whole as soon as you cross the threshold. The stones kept the heat outside, the air inside was cool and damp, carrying that faint smell of time which passed. Shadows clung to the corners, and the statues lining the walls stared with their strange, imperfect proportions, relics of a time when human hands hadn’t yet mastered symmetry. I found it oddly comforting. Churches have always felt this way to me, as if they hold a familiarity beyond this life. Maybe it comes from past lives, maybe it is simply an affinity, but in the end it doesn’t matter. What matters is the comfort I feel sitting in them.

I sat in front of the Virgin Mary, the one known for fertility on the Camino. The room was vast and empty except for me, the silence pressing in. I looked at her for a moment, then closed my eyes, and what rose inside of me was something I have carried for so many years: my abortions. Yes, in the plural. Three. And I realized I no longer want to drag shame and guilt with me through life. This was the place to let it go.

The first time I was seventeen. I had been with my boyfriend for over a year, careless with the pill, careless with myself, careless with kind of everything. When I found out I was pregnant, I dissociated completely. I made the decision in seconds and wanted it over with as quickly as possible. At the hospital they gave me the pill, and I remember lying there in a sterile white gown, waiting. The pain was unbearable, ripping through me for hours until I bit into the pillow just to muffle my own sounds. And then, the sight of the embryo my body had just released. It had revealed the truth of what I was doing, that I was capable of creating life, and I shut it all down immediately. I buried it deep, along with all the other things I didn’t want to face at this time.

The second time was a year later, again with the same boyfriend, again the same recklessness. Because "nothing mattered". But that time it struck deeper. I was alone in my own bed, no sterile room to distance myself from the reality. The guilt was unbearable, heavier than the pain itself. I promised myself that day it would never happen again, that I would never put myself in that position.

That promise led me into a new path, one where I learned my body and my cycles, where I discovered the rhythms of fertility and the magic of the feminine. Instead of burying what I lived, this time I used it to transform, to understand, to connect to myself. It was empowering. I even carried that knowledge to Madagascar, teaching young women in orphanages how to know themselves better, how to prevent pregnancies without depending on pills they could not afford.

For almost a decade, I held that promise. And then came the third time. One mistake, one day out from my fertile window. I even bought Plan B but didn’t take it, telling myself I didn’t want to disrupt my cycle. I knew I was dancing on a fine line, that because we had sex during night, there was still a chance. But I convinced myself it was fine, that I had learned the lesson, and it wouldn't happen to me again. And when it did, when I learned I was pregnant, it crushed me.

I had to look at the promise I had made and admit I had broken it. I could have carried the pregnancy, tried to raise a child alone, and pretend I could offer stability when I knew I could not. Instead I chose something else: I chose to honor the life I was living then, to make the decision that felt truest to my capacity and safety at that moment, and to carry the consequence with openness. I say this with fierce gratitude because every woman is sovereign over her body and her choices, and I feel incredibly lucky in this life to have been given the agency to decide.

I remember crying like I had never cried before. Crying for the seventeen-year-old me who had been too scared to face her sorrow. Crying for the girl a year later who drowned in guilt and had no space left to feel anything else. Crying for myself now, for the dream of motherhood that still lives inside me, and for the pain of knowing that I could not welcome it then. I hated myself for making the same mistake, for hurting my body, for creating scars no one could see.

But today, in that cathedral, something shifted. I sat in front of Mary and I cried again, but this time it was not with guilt. It was with love. I saw all the versions of me who had lived through this and realized that every so-called mistake had brought me closer to respecting myself, my body, my womb. I honored the times I almost became a mother, and I forgave myself. I forgave my past, my choices, my ignorance, my fear. I let the shame and the guilt dissolve into the silence of that stone room.

I left feeling lighter, as if a burden I had been carrying pressed against me one last time before releasing its grip. I am not broken. I am a woman who has learned the hardest way what it means to hold life inside her body, and I will never forget it. One day I will create life again, but it will be from a place of reverence, not guilt. And when it happens, I know I will honor it completely.

With truth, Louna.