This connects to PSoul’s piece here this morning. Access to abortion is not an abstract philosophical discussion topic. It’s the very foundation of physical liberty. As posters have said above, pregnancy has huge physical ramifications, even if it goes completely smoothly. No one-NO ONE-should have the power to force a woman to go through that.

I think we need a groundswell of women willing to tell their stories about abortion. We need a public relations campaign that calls out all the falsehoods and sick logic that the antis use. We need to make young women-and men-think about this in real terms, not in terms of a pretty Hallmark baby that never cries and never costs any money and never grows up to be a rebellious teenager. Abortion is our right. We have no cause for shame, nor need we bow and scrape to Congress for “allowing” us our bodily integrity, albeit in more and more limited forms.

I wonder if these polls reflect the way women behave. They may say that they’re anti-choice. But we see women like that at the clinic every single week. When you get pregnant unexpectedly, your life really flashes in front of your eyes. Our silence has allowed the antis to shame us. It’s time to stop being silent.

I would say that focusing on the fact that even if you have doubts about it, it’s better to have it legal than not might be a place to start. That’s where I am, I guess.

I also always thought that I would never have an abortion, and I still hope I don’t get in the situation where I have to choose, because I do think it’s a complicated issue, but I am glad it’s available in case something goes wrong. In fact, one of my few recurring nightmares is of being pregnant and HAVING to have the baby (I blame this on my mother giving me a magazine special issue about teen pregnancy at age 10 and telling me that *that’s* what happened to women who have sex before marriage. No lie. No idea how I turned out semi-sane after that sexual education…), and in the dreams I always wish I could get an abortion.

Reading L’Evenement (the Happening) by Annie Ernaux, about her back-streets abortion, also strengthened my commitment to having it legal. She doesn’t waste ink on hemming and hawing about whether to do it – she is sure right away, and the book just deals with the search for a way to do it and the rather horrific procedure, which is hardly described at all and yet lodges in your head.

Exactly. That is the one pro-life argument it’s hard to argue with. However, I always follow up with “Why are you treating babies as punishment?” Every child should be wanted and loved not seen as mistakes or regrets.

IVF involves the creation and destruction of embryos, sometimes after they have been implanted. It seems to me that if all abortions were outlawed, then IVF might become suddenly less available. I wonder if that would make a difference to any of the anti-choicers.

Then I was in college, my best friend had an abortion, complications arose, I *confessed* to my mom that I’d helped her set it up (in tears, mind you. Catholic guilt, sigh), and she looked at me, said “Is she going to be okay?” and then told me about the abortion she’d had while she was dating my dad but before they got married. Honest to dog, in under 4 seconds I’d gone from “I helped kill a baby!” to: My mom had an abortion, my mom’s the best person I know, a good person had an abortion, ohmigosh is it possible that abortion is not pure evil, abortion is not pure evil. Further study and contemplation was needed to round out my beliefs, but I basically got intellectual whiplash from the speed of that transition.

Moral of the story: we shouldn’t let the antis control the dialog.

That’s partly why the adoption argument always seemed dangerously over-simplistic and misleading to me. It’s certainly a good option for some, and maybe even the best option for some, but not for everyone!

Ms. M, I know! I read those articles by women who say they became pro-life when they saw the ultrasound or felt the baby, and I’m mystified. I know my pregnancies have been unusually hard, but I also know women who had uncomplicated pregnancies who still failed classes, had to cut back hours, or (in my mom’s case), dropped out of college because they were too tired to cope. How can anyone who’s been through it not think it’s a huge deal? I know you can give a kid up for adoption and, in this day and age, even be pretty sure it was going to good people who would send you pictures and stuff, but that sounds unbearably unfair to me. Why would you put your body through this if you weren’t getting some benefit from it?

Rachel, I’m 31, and have never known a lack of birth control. And certainly, amongst women like me, the availability is part of the judgment. You hear people speaking derisively of women who use “abortion as birth control” and I think that meme didn’t exist so much when it really was one of the only options for woman-controlled birth control.

The other thing is, when you’re young and invincible AND on birth control you might think “I’m being responsible and won’t need abortion services” and of course “I’m not like THOSE girls cuz I’m on BC”.

Pregnancy is hard on the body, hard on your other kids, hard emotionally, and I cannot imagine carrying a child to term that I did not want or could not care for. ESPECIALLY because the brunt of raising said child would fall on ME for the rest of my life.

Anyone thinking otherwise seems to be dreaming of some kind of utopia, which certainly doesn’t exist here in the U.S.