Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush Reveals She Got Abortion After Rape at 17

Forward of her testimony at an Oversight Committee listening to on reproductive rights, Congresswoman Cori Bush has shared the story of her personal abortion in its entirety for the primary time.

“Once I was 17, I used to be raped, turned pregnant, and bought an abortion,” she wrote on Twitter on Wednesday. “And I’m not ashamed.”

Bush disclosed her abortion earlier this month, at a reproductive rights rally on the steps of the Outdated Courthouse. Chatting with Vanity Fair this week, she disclosed for the primary time the entire story.

In the summertime of 1994, a 17-year-old Bush attended an annual church journey to Jackson, Mississippi. She had simply damaged up along with her long-term boyfriend, the one individual she’d ever been sexually intimate with. A pacesetter for the youth delegation journey, a person in his early twenties that the women have been all “swooning over,” invited her to hang around, she advised Self-importance Honest.

In her resort room, the scenario escalated uncomfortably rapidly. She and the person have been sitting on the mattress, when “hastily we went from speaking to, he was on high.” The alleged assailant took her garments off and penetrated her, Bush mentioned. She couldn’t course of what was taking place on the time, and didn’t. The subsequent day, he pretended it hadn’t occurred, she mentioned.

Bush realized that she had turn into pregnant inside weeks of the assault.

“Now I do know that was a sexual assault. It’s even exhausting for me to say just a little bit, as a result of I’m nonetheless actually making an attempt to course of all of it,” she mentioned. “I didn’t see that as rape. I felt like I did one thing—I did one thing incorrect.”

Bush was emotional in talking with the journal, saying, “I don’t know what number of occasions I’d need to inform this story.”