Without going into details of why a married woman would have an abortion, I’m with dragonlady. Regret having to do it, but not doing it.
I once dated a woman (actually was embroiled in a tortuous 4 year affair) with a woman who had a total of 5, count 'em, 5 abortions. These all happened before I knew her. If she deeply regretted them, she kept those feelings to herself.
Gtanted, she was psychotic.
I think a lot of it is the woman’s mindset going into the procedure. It has to be truly the woman’s choice. Good clinics that take the woman’s emotional state into consideration make a big difference.
I’ve had two. Both can be chalked up to me doing stupid stuff. I’m not proud of either one, but it was what I had to do at the time. I do NOT regret either one. If I had it to do over, I can’t say it would be different. Fortunately, I had the support of family, and good clinics.
Robin
Two abortions, no regrets about either: I emphatically do not want to have children. If I ever had any doubts before the first pregnancy, the pregnancy itself resolved them.
I don’t regret that I got pregnant. It’s not a regret thing for me. I’m angry, and probably always will be, that it was hard then and now to get effective, simple birth control. FTR, I do not consider the Pill, condoms, Depo-Provera, or any other current method of birth control to be both effective and simple.
I was 16 the first time, and no way in hell was I going to tell my highly religious parents what was going on – I was certain they would make me keep it. Uh uh. No way. They would never have even found out if my sister hadn’t narked to my mom that I was taking antibiotics. (And my sister wonders why we don’t get along.)
I was 24 years old when I had the second one. I knew I was pregnant only a week after “the act” – that being infrequent enough for me to know exactly when it occurred – but it took until the 5th week for me to get a doctor to perform the abortion.
It took some doing, but I managed to find a doctor to tie my tubes a mere 6 months after that. (Usually doctors won’t do that operation on women so “young”, so it was a challenge.) So now at least I can’t get pregnant. That’s a major relief.
Nearly every woman I know has had at least one abortion. Granted, I hang out with an experimental crowd, and most of us have a checkered past. But there’s plenty of my coworkers in the bourgeois tech world who’ve had the experience too.
Of all of the women I’ve talked to that have had abortions, only one regretted it: She and her husband felt they didn’t have the financial or emotional resources to care for a child. Had they been better off, they would have kept it.
The rest have expressed varying degrees of emotion, but they pretty much agreed with what’s been said before: They didn’t regret having the abortions, but they regretted the situations that got them to needing an abortion.
One thing to realize is the other path it might have taken. My ex-girlfriend was adopted, and she met her birthmother like a year ago. She got to talk about all this stuff, and Her birthmother told her that she could have been aborted. She decided just to put her up for adoption.
I thought about how different my life might be without her, if she had been aborted. I was pro-choice befoer this, but now I’m kinda on the fence… I don’t want them to ban abortion… I don’t know…
In my circle of female friends, almost every single one has had an abortion. No regrets anywhere. I have never been pregnant, but I know deep in my heart that I never, NEVER want kids, so if I were to find myself pregnant I would have no trouble at all aborting.
Michi