There isn’t much to tell really!
No fear! No dilemma! No painful decision to make. No guilt. No drama.
17 years ago I had an abortion. My period was late and I tested positive. At that time my husband and I weren’t ready to bring a child into the world. He drove me to the clinic in the morning and I waited my turn with some other women. There was another ethnic woman next to me with her husband and we started talking while waiting. It turned out they were newlyweds who had just purchased a house and could not yet afford to have children.
The procedure was performed under anesthetic and I remember some pain afterwards that was like a bad period pain. Later on, my husband picked me up and we went home where I spent the rest of the day in bed. When I had the abortion I was only about 7 weeks pregnant. At that stage the embryo is about one centimeter long, has no consciousness and resembles a cashew nut rather than a baby. Not at all like the images that you see on the anti abortion sites. Later on I had two children.
If my contraception were to fail me I would not hesitate to have an abortion. Bringing a child into the world involves much more than the nine months of pregnancy, it involves two decades of careful nurturing and responsibility. No amount of “support” from the pro lifers or the government will induce me to continue an unwanted pregnancy; after all, it is my body, my womb!
Even if abortion were to become illegal, I will still try to find some way to end the pregnancy, just as countless women have done for thousands of years.
The pro lifers don’t get it: even if abortion becomes illegal, women will still have abortions.
Pro choicers don’t get it either! Even if all abortion laws were repealed there would still be those who would want to make abortion illegal. The pro lifers are well funded, well organized and are not about to disappear. If women had a safe effective method to end early pregnancy, laws would make little difference and the worst nightmare of the pro lifers would have come true.
Necessity is the mother of all invention.
