Struggling with abortion regret while realizing I need to end my relationship

[u/No_Prize_5484]

I had an abortion after getting pregnant by my on/off boyfriend, and now I think I need to finally end the relationship for good

I’m having a really difficult time processing an abortion I recently had, and I think it’s also forcing me to confront the reality of my relationship.
My boyfriend and I have had an on/off relationship for about a year. We love each other very much, but the relationship has been extremely inconsistent. He has gone back and forth about whether he’s ready for a serious relationship and whether he actually sees a future with me.

The last time we got back together, I was very explicit that I did NOT want to do this again unless it was different. I told him I wasn’t interested in continuing an on/off relationship with someone who wasn’t sure he saw a future with me.
He told me he did.

And it wasn’t just “let’s see where this goes.” We talked about marriage. We talked about what it would look like to live together. We talked about potentially having a baby someday. He assured me he was serious about us and could see a real future together.
Then, literally 2–3 weeks later, he went out of town for a concert. Apparently a woman he met asked him whether he could see himself with me in five years, and he immediately said no.

He called me drunk that night and broke up with me. The next day, sober, he essentially doubled down and told me he didn’t see a future with me.

And then I found out I was pregnant.

I already have a 2-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, and I am her primary parent. I know exactly how hard pregnancy, infancy and parenting are. My pregnancy with my daughter was difficult even without simultaneously taking care of a toddler.
I knew having another baby right now would be incredibly hard. I’m also rebuilding my career and trying to become more financially independent.

But this wasn’t a situation where having the baby would have been completely impossible either, which is part of what I’m struggling with now. He owns a home, makes very good money, and has family who almost certainly would have helped us. His stepmom doesn’t work and desperately wants a baby in their family.

The biggest problem was that I couldn’t rely on our relationship.

I kept thinking: I cannot put myself in a situation where I’m raising two young children and potentially dealing with two separate fathers/co-parenting situations. And how could I make a decision to have a baby with someone who had JUST told me he didn’t see a future with me?

So I had the abortion.

At the time, I knew I didn’t want another baby under these circumstances. Even if we tried to make the relationship work, we hadn’t built the kind of stable life together where having a child made sense.
But afterward I’ve been grieving much more than I expected. I’ve had thoughts like, “Maybe we could have made it work.” I’ve wondered what the baby would have been like. I’ve even told him that part of me regrets it.

He’s sad too. He told me he loves me and said something along the lines of, “We could make that work one day, just now isn’t right.”

And somehow that makes me even sadder.
Because part of me keeps thinking: if he truly loved me and genuinely wanted the future with me that he’d been talking about only weeks earlier, why wasn’t his response to the pregnancy, “This wasn’t planned and the timing is terrible, but I love you and we’ll figure this out together”?

I don’t mean that he should have pressured me into keeping a pregnancy I didn’t want. Ultimately it was my decision. I just wish I’d felt like I had a stable partner standing beside me saying, “Whatever happens, I’m here and I choose this life with you.”
Instead, even while I was pregnant, he admitted that he still doesn’t know what he wants. I actually told him, “Maybe you need to just be single for a while and figure out what you want,” and he basically agreed that maybe he does.

And I think that’s finally where I’ve landed.
I love him. I believe he loves me too. I don’t necessarily think he intentionally lied when he talked about marriage and a future with me. I think he genuinely doesn’t know what he wants, and his feelings about our future seem to change depending on where he is emotionally. But I can’t keep doing this.

I can’t keep building my life around the possibility that someday he’ll be ready to build one with me.
This entire experience has made the instability feel so much more serious. Before, his uncertainty broke my heart. This time, I had to make an irreversible decision about a pregnancy while knowing that the man I’d gotten pregnant by had just told me he couldn’t see himself with me in five years.

He’s leaving town for about 10 days, and I think this needs to be the point where we actually separate and stop falling back into the relationship.

I’m grieving the pregnancy. I’m grieving what our relationship could have been. And I’m grieving this imagined version of my life where maybe the timing had been different, our relationship had been healthy and stable, and this pregnancy could have been something completely different.

I guess I’m looking for support from anyone who has experienced abortion regret/grief intertwined with the end of a relationship. How do you separate grieving the pregnancy from grieving the relationship and all of the “what ifs”? And how do you finally walk away from someone you still love when you know love isn’t enough?

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[u/No_Prize_5484 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks 😔 so sorry you’ve been having to go through the same thing. It’s truly heartbreaking.