Rep. Marie Newman of Illinois

Rep. Marie Newman, 58, defeated one of the last remaining anti-abortion Democrats in a 2020 primary to win her seat but did not share her story until after the decision draft leaked last month.

Newman was 19 when she had an abortion. When she found out she was pregnant, she said she “immediately started crying.”

“I don’t have the emotional ability, the financial ability, the time or the wherewithal to take on something as important as being a parent,” she recalled.

“At the time I was scrubbing tables and floors to get through college, had two jobs, an internship, and had a full 18-hour load in college, so I just couldn’t imagine,” Newman said. “How will I raise this child, and how will I carry a child for nine months? How will I pay for its delivery? How will I pay for its upbringing? How will this child be brought up given that I am a less than optimal parent at this point my life now?”

She made a pro and con list to help make her decision. “It was one of the most difficult times of my life . ...

“I talked to a counselor before and after. And they said: ‘I think you made the right decision for you,’ ” Newman said. “‘She’s like, ‘You have to own your own body.’ And it was the first time someone kind of gave me permission to be OK with making my decisions because at 19, any decision is tough.”

Newman kept her pregnancy and decision secret until she was around 40 years old, when she told her now-husband.

“The shame of it was so deep,” she said. “You buy into things when you have a specific type of upbringing in a deeply Catholic household, a deeply Republican household – that you don’t have agency over your body, that you should not be able to make bodily decisions for yourself ...

“The one misstep I may have made is that if I had talked about my abortion sooner, I probably would have stopped shaming myself, for decades, literally.”