CLEVELAND, Ohio — Holly Bland was 19 and working her way through college at the Kent State University campus in Ashtabula when she discovered she was pregnant.

Her partner was in the military, and she didn’t see him often. She knew she didn’t want to have a baby, so she took to the internet to research options.

“The second I found out that I was pregnant, I already knew I didn’t want to carry the pregnancy. I had already made that decision in my mind. It’s just one of those things that you don’t think about until it happens to you, sometimes. I had already made the decision when I was younger,” Bland said. “I just don’t want to be a mom.”

Bland, who had an abortion in 2014, is open about her experience now. She works for Preterm, a Cleveland abortion clinic, and is speaking out because she wants to humanize abortion.

“It’s a normal experience that many people share,” Bland said.

But when she was pregnant, she was afraid to tell anyone about her abortion, because no one talked about it when she was growing up. It was considered a bad thing.

“I didn’t want anyone to know because I felt shameful at first because of the stigma,” she said.

Bland initially connected with crisis pregnancy centers nearby, and said they tried to dissuade her from getting an abortion. She eventually made an appointment to have an abortion at Akron Women’s Medical Group, but it wasn’t easy.

Clinics are busy she said, and she couldn’t afford to miss a class or a shift at her two jobs, at Dairy Queen and a grocery store.

It took a week for her to get in to the Akron Clinic. Then, she was five weeks pregnant.

That’s earlier than many women know they’re pregnant. A pregnancy is generally counted as 40 weeks long, beginning with a woman’s last menstrual period. By the time a woman misses her period, she’s generally considered four weeks pregnant.

Bland said she knew so early because she usually got sick during her period. When she got even sicker this time around, she had a suspicion she might be pregnant.

Since Ohio requires a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion, Bland had to schedule another trip for the procedure. When Bland tried to coordinate her schedule with the clinic’s, she couldn’t get in for another two weeks.

Bland was seven weeks pregnant when she had her abortion – a point that could be illegal under the proposed abortion restriction, known as the heartbeat bill, which was approved by the Ohio legislature this year, and is now on Gov. John Kasich’s desk. She went into credit card debt to pay the $650 cost.

If abortion wasn’t an option in Ohio, Bland said she would have tried to cross state lines for the procedure and likely would have lost a job because of the time off she would have had to take.

If abortion wasn’t an option at all, Bland said she doesn’t believe she would have been able to graduate college, or move away from Ashtabula. She said her own experience with abortion influenced her desire to work in her current job, taking patients’ information when they arrive at Preterm.

“If I absolutely was forced to follow through with the pregnancy, I’m not sure what I would have done,” she said.

Bland’s sex education in high school had centered around abstinence. Students signed a contract promising not to have sex and, in exchange, they received restaurant coupons.

Bland didn’t tell her parents until later. Bland said she and her father, who is conservative, have been able to move past it. Bland said her mother was supportive and told her of her own abortion.

That “made me kind of wish I would have told her when it was happening,” Bland said. “Because I would have felt less alone.”