A question for the people who had an abortion: if you knew in advance that the clinic would be obligated to notify your parents if you had an abortion, would you still have had it? (Obviously this only applies to people who were underage when they did it.)
Corollary questions:
If you were underage, did you tell your parents?
Do you think parents should be told?
If you were a parent and your teenage daughter had an abortion, would you want to know?
I told my parents first, and both of them accompanied me to the abortion. I was 18.
I also told both my parents when I lost my virginity two years earlier.
Parent’s should NOT be told.
If I were a parent I would want to know, but not if it violated her rights and desires.
Me too. I have two children and when I got pregnant again after a birth control failure (when I was separated from my ex – wasn’t his), there was never a moment’s hesitation as to what I’d do. I had a medical abortion at ~7 weeks along and TBH it was just like a slightly heavier period. I absolutely knew I was done having kids and with my two, was a full-time college student living below the poverty line.
I have told a few friends and my husband, but I do mention it online or if people ask directly. Part of pro-choice to me is to not villify abortion, but to relate my story so that others don’t feel alone.
I have never wanted to have a child. I realized this in my early teens. Almost everyone told me I’d change my mind. I’m 40 and I still don’t want children; neither does my husband.
I have crippling migraines that require medications which are absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy. Right now, my migraines are kept away with a hormonal IUD (Mirena). I could literally not bear to bring a pregnancy to term.
I married the only son of a male chauvinist who rather seethingly resents that I “won’t” bear children and continue the family name. If I ever got pregnant, somehow was able to continue the pregnancy, and wanted to adopt the child out, my father-in-law and probably some of his daughters would make our lives miserable. Guilt trips galore for the rest of their lives.
I would absolutely, without a doubt or a moment’s hesitation, have an abortion if it came to that. It never has. I’ve been lucky in that I grew up with a good birth control education via school and other sources (thank you, Dr. Ruth radio show), and I didn’t start having sex until college - and had easy and access to birth control pills and condoms, plus being on the birth control pill stopped my menstrual cramps, so it was a “good girl” reason to be on it.
I wanted to echo this from another perspective. In three years of trying to conceive, I have managed to get pregnant exactly once, and I had a miscarriage. I actually didn’t find out I was pregnant until the crazy bleeding sent me to the emergency room. It was a very sad situation all around, and I’ve told people that I lost a pregnancy - but never that I lost a baby. Because it never was a baby.
I’ve been pro-choice since I was old enough to understand the issues, but now that I’ve spent so much time trying to get pregnant, a lot of people seem to think I ought to have moved over to the other side of the debate. I haven’t - like a lot of other posters have said, I know that there are some situations where having a child is just not an option, or an option that will result in worse lives for everyone involved.
You might find this a weird question, and I’m sorry if it is, but I’ve never really been able to understand it, and I’m hoping you can explain it to me. You say you didn’t want kids, so why did you have sex with your boyfriend in the first place?
The clinics closest to me would have notified my parents, so I went 4+ hours out of town to do it in another state. I am thankful they were that close; had I been in a different part of the country I don’t know what I could have done.
I never told my parents, and I do not think they should be told. I don’t think anyone should have to tell, if they don’t want to. I trust the girl to make that decision. If my daughter had an abortion, I would hope she could tell me; I try to create that kind of relationship with her. It’s hard to do alone, at that age. But if she didn’t want to, I respect that.
I am honestly baffled at this question. Seriously, I don’t understand. But, if you are serious, here’s the serious answer: I wanted to have sex. I mean, I was sexually aroused, and so was he, and it was a lot of fun and it felt great. I have sex every day, and have for years and years. I like it. It feels good. It creates a closeness that I don’t think we could have without sex. It’s what separates him from being just my friend.
None of that means I want to have a baby. They are just two different (although somewhat linked) things.
I too am viscerally anti-childbearing. The idea of pregnancy is utterly repellent to me (when it involves ME, that is - I love my pregnant friends, and I breed a variety of animals and adore holding them and feeling their pregnancies) and induces panic attacks and strong urges of self-harm. I have a cocktail of medical issues including adhesions and keloid scarring that would make pregnancy insanely painful and likely impossible, not to mention a host of things I would never want to pass on to a child.
I got pregnant (despite protection) at 21, after just having left my insanely abusive husband and gotten a very tiny apartment that I could pay for with my tiny job. I was currently seeing someone (the father of the fetus) but we were not married, nor was I interested in marrying anytime soon. The father also had a host of serious genetic issues (joint problems and diabetes) that I was not interested in combining with what I have.
While I was debating the idea of the abortion, I miscarried. But even though I’m one of those people who always supported choice but never thought I could go through with an abortion - I would have, and was planning on it. The idea of the pregnancy was so painful and panic-inducing, I would have done ANYTHING to be rid of it. So yes, if abortions were illegal, I would have obtained one anyone, unsafe or not. As it was, the miscarriage was very painful, and likely the result of the same things that would probably make pregnancy unsafe/impossible for me even if I DID want one.
Someday, my husband and I will adopt, when the economy sorts out and we’re well-employed and financially stable again. But I will never bear a child, and no amount of right-wing legislation or shaming would ever change that.
And to Captain Amazing: are you serious? Sex isn’t just for procreation. That isn’t even its primary function in human society now, if indeed it ever was. Seriously? Because sex feels good, and pregnancy doesn’t. 
Some of us like sex, and have sex because we enjoy it. Or maybe we’re agreeable to having sex with our boyfriends/husbands because THEY are in the mood. I mean, if I want to go to a certain restaurant that my husband doesn’t care for, he’s happy to take me there because I enjoy it so much, and he enjoys my enjoyment.
And birth control fails. I’ve had three different kinds of birth control fail me. I don’t want to get into more detail here, because I really don’t want that info floating around on the intartubes.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: when I was going to get my abortion, I had no problem whatsoever finding a doctor who would perform the procedure for me.
However, I could NOT find a doctor who would voluntarily sterilize me. And I looked for years. Because I “couldn’t possibly know” that I didn’t want babies, and I would surely change my mind when I got older, or had a couple. They would NOT do it. Even when I had an unrelated abdominal surgery later and I asked for them to just cut my tubes while they were in there.
The priorities boggle me, sometimes.
I don’t understand it, but I’ll take your word for it. There just seems to be a lot of physical contact and fluids, but anyway. I guess my next question is, did the fact that abortion’s legal contribute to your decision to have sex? If, hypothetically, you knew that abortion wasn’t available, and if you were to get pregnant you’d have to carry the pregnancy to term, would that have influenced your decision to have vaginal sex, or (for those people who’ve answered who had unprotected sex) unprotected vaginal sex? Because I’m assuming that, when you had vaginal sex, you knew that pregnancy was a possibility, right? You weren’t ignorant of the babymaking process. Did any of that, or the possibility you might get pregnant, enter into your decision making process at all?
Have you never had said, Captain Amazing? I’m not being snarky, but have you never had an orgasm?
Sex is an urge like eating is an urge. The physical contact which you appear to see as a negative is a strong emotional positive if you care about the person. It’s intimate, unifying, bonding, and it feels really, really good. I think that, for most people, procreation is not number one on the list for why they do it, and for many people, it’s not on the list at all.
I want to second this. I mean, I know there exists such a thing as an “asexual” who has very low libido and attraction to anyone of any gender, but even the people I’ve known who fit that category understand why other people might want to have sex.
I’m answering for myself and pretty much every sexual partner I’ve ever had here. We’ve use multiple forms of birth control, pretty much every time. Generally condoms and the pill, or condoms and an IUD. The only times I’ve had unprotected sex were when I was open to conception as a result.
If there were no abortions, and no emergency contraception, it’d affect some but not all of my sexual decisions, certainly. Even a 0.5% chance is still a chance. I’d be willing to accept that risk with my wife, but not probably with previous lovers.
As I said, fortunately we have this thing called science that allows us to decouple sex from pregnancy with a high degree of certainty, and emergency contraceptives for when that doesn’t work, and abortion for when none of the above work and the child is not desired.
Bolding mine. CA, I note that in another thread, you make your feelings on abortion known:
Bolding mine. Apologies if I’m misreading you, but your posts in this thread struck me as a rather disingenuous attempt to get people to state outright that they knew pregnancy is a possibility with vaginal intercourse, yet had sex anyway. Given your expressed opinion that abortion is murder, I wonder if you’re not trying to subtly force an anti-abortion argument here, slowly drawing it out with naive questions.
Again, I am sorry if I am misunderstanding you, and apologies for hijacking the thread.
Captain Amazing (and I’ll just have to take your word that you are,) do you seriously, every time you have sex to the point of orgasm, think “my partner could become pregnant from this event?” If you do, I think that’s unusual. And I say that as someone who is perfectly aware of the potential consequences of sexual activity, and the potential for birth control failure… I assure you, though, that some women have sex because it feels really, really good, not because we want to be mamas.
Personally, I have never had an abortion, but I would argue to my last breath in favor of a woman’s right to choose that option. I’m not trying to be snarky here, but I think that, if you don’t personally possess a uterus, you don’t really have the right to vote on that option either. It’s very easy to say “I would never/I would always,” but if you are never going to face an unplanned and unwelcome pregnancy, it’s easy to play armchair quarterback. (And like I said, I’ve never had an abortion. I have, however, carried a child to term and placed her for adoption. In retrospect, abortion would have been easier, physically and emotionally, but I don’t second-guess my decision - it was the right thing for me, at that moment. At another moment, abortion may have been a better decision.)
That’s a very good question.
I don’t want to derail this thread with a debate about abortion, because that’s not really what this thread is about, and I apologize to Anaamika and the other people who have shared their stories because my questions seem to have taken the conversation off track, but I will just say that I don’t think abortion is murder, and I’ve never, or at least not any time recently, to the best of my knowledge, expressed the opinion that abortion is murder. Further, in the United States, abortion isn’t murder. I was answering the question about what I saw my moral obligation as being if I were hooked up to the hypothetical violinist.
Although I don’t agree with the anti-choice position, it is at least understandable given the social conservative proposal that life begins at conception, with which I also disagree.
Where it all breaks down for me, however, is the same folks who are against abortions are generally against contraception, sex education, and social welfare as well. So not only do they not want post-pubescent adolescents to learn anything about sex, they don’t want them to have access to the devices or medications designed to prevent pregnancy, they want to force the girl, once pregnant, to gestate and deliver a baby against her will and, finally, when she has had the child, and has, in many cases, had to give up school, a boyfriend who’s mysteriously fled the scene, and with little to no means of support, they want to eliminate social programs that would help her financially and emotionally in raising the child, thereby increasing the likelihood of a life of poverty and despair for both the mother and child. Now THAT is illogical, not to mention freaking sick.
It seems the anti-choice movement’s true goals are to force women to comply with the tenets of a superstition, and to subjugate women into being little more than mindless baby factories who have no rights over their own biology and, by extension, not much else.
What a great OP! Thanks for sharing 
I myself have had unprotected sex a couple times in my life (I was desperate enough not to insist on it, he pulled out) and I didn’t get pregnant. But I often am grateful that I dodged the bullet and haven’t had to make this decision yet. And I don’t do that stupid shit anymore!
Thanks again, great topic
The orgasm explanation doesn’t work for me, as you can have orgasm outside of actual vaginal intercourse. In fact, for women, I was under the impression that orgasm usually required some digital, oral, or mechanical stimulation. That’s what certain people have told me.
There has to be something besides orgasm and having a partner that enters into the decision to have PIV sex. Is it just a biological urge or instinct that overrides rational thinking? Is there a special pleasure with PIV sex that is absent from other forms?
Yes, I’ll admit that I am completely inexperienced in this area. I am the infamous intentional virgin. But I thought I had a good idea of at least the basics, based on the stuff I’ve read and the guys who love to describe in detail what they do and the stuff I read online from both men and women. Oh, and this one S&M girl I knew in real life who, second conversation I had with her, wound up having drifting to how she enjoyed having sex with gay guys, as long as they enjoyed pain.