Belated Blog for Choice

I managed to miss both signing up and posting for Blog for Choice Day, but I'm posting today anyway.

When I was in college, a friend of mine with an adorable 4 year-old told me about her abortion. She got pregnant when she was 15, and reluctantly decided to have an abortion. When she got pregnant again two years later, she decided to give birth and along came a beautiful baby girl. My friend said that the reason she had the second child was that she felt guilty about the abortion (she was Catholic). So I asked her if she regretted the abortion. This is when the tears came. She didn't regret it and thought it was the right decision, despite her guilt and grief. What she did regret was having her daughter.

As much as my friend loves her daughter, she felt more guilt and grief over her living child than the aborted one. She felt that she was a bad mother and would never be the kind of mother that her daughter needed. She worked and was in school so that her daughter didn't have to live in poverty, so she wasn't around as much as she wanted to be. She was young and immature, so she couldn't handle the stress of being a mother and at times hated her child, for which she felt terribly guilty. She didn't understand that motherhood is hard for everyone, and her difficulties made her feel terrible. She loved her daughter more than anything else in the world, and still wondered everyday if she did the right thing by having her, not because she worried about the quality of her own life, but because she worried about her daughter's. Having her child made her realize that she made the right decision in having the abortion.

I tell this story because it's complicated. People who believe that this is an easy decision for anyone, whether you give birth or have an abortion, are wrong. It's hard, and many women grieve. I can't imagine, and don't know of, any woman making this decision lightheartedly or easily. Abortion, like all important issues, is not a black/white issue. It's not yes or no. Not every woman's life and circumstances are the same, and therefore a unilateral law is not fair. Women need to be able to make this decision on their own, without interference from the government, because only the pregnant woman knows her situation.

I would love to live in world in which no woman has to make the choice of whether or not to have an abortion. But until we have comprehensive sex education that prepares kids for when they will eventually have sex (because at some point they will grow up and have sex), affordable (or free) and widely available birth control (that is actually dispensed by the pharmacist at the counter!), and easy and judgment-free access to the morning after pill for cases of failed birth control or rape, that day will never come. I want to prevent abortions as much as anyone else does, but I also firmly believe that I have the right to have children if and when I choose to, not because I have to. I hope I'm never in a situation where I have to make the decision - have a child I don't want or have an abortion - but I will fight for the right to make that choice. I am not a baby-making machine.

I marched in the March for Women's Lives march in April 2004; it was the largest march on Washington. I did it because I want to live in a world where every child is a wanted child, and abortion rights are only a small part of achieving that goal.

Someone commented on Dr. Crazy's Blog for Choice post that there are certain issues in which one cannot respect the other side, and that abortion is one of those issues since you are deciding which life is more valuable, the unborn child or the mother. But being pro-choice doesn't mean that you think the mother's life is more important that the child's. Being pro-choice means that you recognize an individual's right to make that choice for herself (hopefully with the support of the father and her family). Being pro-choice is not about believing that abortion is morally right or wrong. It's about believing that you, not the government, gets to make decisions about your family.

Of every woman that I know that has had an abortion, not one has told me she regretted her decision. They all believe that they made the responsible decision based on the circumstances they were in.