Seated on the edge of a grey couch in a glass-and-concrete condo in Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard neighborhood Monday morning, Cori Bush was dressed the part of activist turned congresswoman in a face mask emblazoned with “Breonna Taylor” and a T-shirt that read, “As Strong as the Woman Next to Me.” But there was an uncharacteristic fragility to her that hadn’t been evident when she’d led the eviction-moratorium protest on the Capitol steps just a couple months earlier, or when she’d beaten incumbent William Lacy Clay in the Democratic primary and sailed through the general election to represent Missouri’s First Congressional District. For the first time, Bush was sharing the story of her abortion in its entirety.

“I’ve kind of made it just a part of my work, really—whether it’s activism or politics—as much as I can, being okay with being vulnerable about my own stories to be able to help someone else,” Bush said. That the personal is political has been a guiding ethos for Bush in her trajectory to Congress; she has regularly shared anecdotes from her life, including accounts of sexual assault. Earlier this month, at a small rally in her hometown of St. Louis, Bush said publicly for the first time that she had had an abortion. She made the decision to do so on the eve of the event, recognizing that as reproductive rights erode amid a deluge of anti-abortion legislation, including in Missouri, stories like hers are crucial. “If there is a moment, this is the moment,” she recalled thinking. On Thursday, Bush will join representatives Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal in talking about her abortion during a hearing on reproductive rights. When we spoke on Monday, she wasn’t yet sure what she was going to say before Congress. But her emotion was palpable as she said, “I don’t know how many times I would want to tell this story.” 

It was the summer of 1994, and Bush was attending an annual church trip. That year, the youth delegation went to Jackson, Mississippi. She was 17 and coming off a rough four-year stretch that had left her depressed and her self-esteem corroded. She had just broken up with her long-term but somewhat on-again, off-again boyfriend, and her mindset, as she put it, was, “I just want to be grown.” There was a man on the trip in a leadership position who Bush pegged to be in his early 20s, and who the girls were “swooning over.” When she shared with a mutual friend that she, too, was interested in him, he asked her to hang out that night.

The hours passed, and Bush and her suite mate were ready for bed when he arrived at the hotel room. At first the two sat on the bed, and “then all of a sudden we went from talking to, he was on top. He was like taking my clothes off.… He’s having sex, penetrating me,” recalled Bush, who at that time had only been sexually active with one person, her ex-boyfriend. “I just remember I was laying there and I just didn’t know what was happening…I couldn’t make it make sense.” Bush said she doesn’t remember the man speaking to her after he finished, or before he left the hotel room. The next day, he ignored her, she said.

“Now I know that was a sexual assault. It’s even hard for me to say a little bit, because I’m still really trying to process all of it,” she said. “I didn’t see that as rape. I felt like I did something—I did something wrong.” Bush said it took her a long time to come to terms with the reality of what had happened. “I’m still like, truly, really, trying to process it because when he started pulling my pants down, I didn’t fight him back. I didn’t even know what was going on, but I didn’t fight him back, I didn’t tell him stop, I didn’t say no. I just laid there and let him do whatever he wanted to do. Now I do know that consent is enthusiasm. If there’s enthusiasm then there is consent, and on my part, there was absolutely no enthusiasm. It was fear.” 

Within several weeks of the assault, Bush learned that she was pregnant.

Bush had had a plan. As her father would tell her over dinner, she was going to excel in school, land a full scholarship to Howard University, and go on to become the U.S. attorney general. Headed into her freshman year of high school, everything had gone accordingly. But things shifted when she transitioned from her K–8 school, which was predominantly Black, to a predominantly white high school. “I was told by the administration that I was the number-one student coming in the door...I took the entrance exam. They said I scored number one on the entrance exam,” she said. “[Then they] told me they didn’t believe that I scored that high...they said that they thought that I cheated. So they made me retest,” she said. “Then I scored better the second time.” Still, the harassment and discrimination continued. Bush’s grades fell and after a few months, she transferred schools. But, she recalled, “I lost something.” Being smart no longer felt safe. “That really knocked me off my square.” 

By the end of high school, Bush was happy to be graduating at all. “I thought people would be knocking on my door, and now I’m knocking on doors, hoping that I get accepted,” she said. “I just felt defeated.” When Bush found out she was pregnant, still expected to go off to college, she was at a loss. “I felt really, really bad at that point, because already [my parents] had this expectation that I was going to be this scholar and excel and go to school on scholarship. So I already had disappointed them that way,” she said. “Now, I have this baby.”

She decided to forgo college and transitioned from part-time to full-time at her job. Bush asked the mutual friend to share the news of her pregnancy with the man. After days of silence, the friend told her that he had just laughed. “So then I realized, Okay, I’m on my own with this thing,” she said. She found the phone number for a local clinic in the yellow pages and booked an appointment for an abortion and was told it would cost $328. When Bush, then 18, arrived at the clinic for an ultrasound—what would be the first of two appointments—she was confused when her car was swarmed by anti-abortion protesters. “I was just like, What is happening? Why are these people so angry, angry at me? And they don’t even know my story,” she remembered thinking.

When she returned to the clinic for her second appointment, Bush was prepared for the protesters. But she wasn’t prepared for the counseling session she had to attend before she underwent the procedure. Bush was taken to a room just big enough for a table and two chairs, where she sat down with the counselor, a white woman. Bush’s recollection of the session is shaded by what she described as hostility: The woman told Bush that she was nine weeks along in her pregnancy, but that the fetus was underdeveloped. Abortion was her best option, the woman implied—the alternative was welfare. “She was almost angry. The way she was speaking to me, it was very belittling and degrading. I didn’t know why she was directing all of that onto me,” Bush said. “I felt like I wasn’t given an opportunity to make a decision. I felt like I was going to go in there and that person was going to be warm and welcoming and telling me about, like, if this was the right decision for me—not that it was their decision to make—but I felt like, if I’m not supposed to do this, I’m gonna hear that in this conversation.” Bush didn’t. “So I went ahead with the procedure.”

Following the counseling session, Bush and a handful of other girls—all roughly the same age, all white—were taken to a locker room. As they changed out of their clothes and stashed their belongings, the other girls shared their counseling experiences, which differed from Bush’s. “They felt like the person was more biased for them to not have the abortion and to keep the child, or put the child up for adoption...very, very different,” Bush said. “I say, ‘That’s not what they said to me.’ And I remember that they all looked at me like they didn’t know what to say.” 

When her name was called, Bush was taken to another room with the doctor, the nurse, and one other person. “It was a very, very cold situation.” She was asked to lie on the table as she underwent the procedure. She remembers focusing on an abstract picture on the ceiling above her head that recalled a stained-glass window one might see in a church. “I remember after that, leaving the parking lot, and again getting to the part where everybody’s swarming a car,” Bush said, “I remember thinking…You’re yelling at me, but you don’t know my story. You’re not going to help me with this baby if I had the baby. I felt like there was no mercy, coming from people that didn’t even know me.”

Bush spent the rest of the day in bed, her stomach cramping. “I was very emotionless for quite a while,” she said. “That was the beginning of a very, very dark period…. That was the darkest period of my life.” 

As Bush spoke, she only broke down crying once: When she described a younger teenage Black girl in the clinic’s lobby. Bush remembered overhearing the staff discussing the young girl, lamenting that she “got herself into this situation” and what a “shame” it was. Bush said she still thinks about that girl. “I didn’t say anything...and now I’m a totally different person,” she said. “But how far have we really come when Black women and girls are still being so mistreated in our health system to the point of death? Regardless of what type of health care we’re talking about, that’s still a thing.… The right to have an abortion is only one part of the need. So those are the things that we have to work on now…making sure that all people who want to have an abortion have the access to those services, equitably, and then also fix the mistreatment.” 

Bush hopes to offer other people space to share their own stories, and to bring about change. “Missouri has passed an abortion ban that starts at eight weeks, with no exceptions for rape or incest,” she said. “If we don’t catch this, if we don’t stop this, it’s just gonna be more and more all across the country.” 

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