# Most Woman Regret Abortions **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 18, 2003, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887 "2003-08-18T02:52:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crankyasanoldman/32/11670_2.png) [@CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrankyAsAnOldMan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/101 "2003-08-20T14:41:24Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by kputt \* > \*\*Whatever. I’ll let the Lord judge. I don’t hate the sinners who commit what I call atrocities. > > “Yeah, tramp, I’ll bet you never thought of that. Golly!” > > And real mature. \*\* I apologize for the sarcasm. I have busted my hind end being patient, talking to you rationally even when you suggested I was a murderer, should be jailed, etc. I think, overall, my maturity should be judged by the thoughtful and respectful posts I have composed to you, not by the one time I got exasperated. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/102 "2003-08-20T14:41:32Z")
It means that I didn’t mean it that strongly. I was just a little upset at the time. ---
**Author:** ![ShadiRoxan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@ShadiRoxan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShadiRoxan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/103 "2003-08-20T14:44:25Z")
And we’re all just a _little_ upset at being called murderers. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/104 "2003-08-20T14:44:48Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by CrankyAsAnOldMan \* > \*\*I apologize for the sarcasm. > > I have busted my hind end being patient, talking to you rationally even when you suggested I was a murderer, should be jailed, etc. I think, overall, my maturity should be judged by the thoughtful and respectful posts I have composed to you, not by the one time I got exasperated. \*\* No, you are not a murderer. Even though, none of us should be this strongly opinionated against real murderers. I said what I said because I had a nerve struck or something. Look, I’m just an idiot and say stupid things sometimes. This was one of those times. ---
**Author:** ![tramp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/4491bb/32.png) [@tramp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tramp)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/105 "2003-08-20T14:45:14Z")
Oh so you mean abortion gals like me should go to minimum security prisons? Or maybe we should just be fined. Or put in the village stocks for a day… ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/106 "2003-08-20T14:45:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by kputt \* > \*\*Can someone though please answer me why it’s more difficult to put a child up for adoption than it is to make the decision to have an abortion? That doesn’t make much sense to me at all. \*\* If it were possible to put a child up for adoption in the first trimester, I’m sure most women would do it. The problem is that adoption requires the woman to go through nine months of pregnancy. Many women cannot afford that for various reasons. Other women are simply repulsed by the idea of pregnancy (I’m one of these). If you want to be pregnant, it might be an interesting or fulfilling experience. If you do not want to be pregnant, it is a horror. Julie ---
**Author:** ![CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crankyasanoldman/32/11670_2.png) [@CrankyAsAnOldMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrankyAsAnOldMan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/107 "2003-08-20T14:46:22Z")
And Homer, I do apologize, but I would rather hope this wouldn’t be closed. Your thread has been moved several times to reflect the changing nature of the thread; I know we aren’t answering the OP anymore. All in all, I think the discussion has been hadled fairly well, even as we’ve wandered far beyond your original question about the proportion of women who feel regret. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/108 "2003-08-20T14:49:03Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by ShadiRoxan \* > \*\*And we’re all just a _little_ upset at being called murderers. \*\* That’s why I said I was sorry for saying that. I didn’t mean to call you murderers. I was angry at the time. REally, I think it’s a major sin, but I don’t hate you for it. We’re all sinners. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/109 "2003-08-20T14:51:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tramp \* > \*\*Oh so you mean abortion gals like me should go to minimum security prisons? Or maybe we should just be fined. Or put in the village stocks for a day… \*\* No. I believe the emotional and physical pain and suffering is punishment enough. I know it’s hard to do. There is no way in heaven that it’s easy. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/110 "2003-08-20T14:52:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by jsgoddess \* > \*\*If it were possible to put a child up for adoption in the first trimester, I’m sure most women would do it. > > The problem is that adoption requires the woman to go through nine months of pregnancy. Many women cannot afford that for various reasons. Other women are simply repulsed by the idea of pregnancy (I’m one of these). > > If you want to be pregnant, it might be an interesting or fulfilling experience. If you do not want to be pregnant, it is a horror. > > Julie \*\* ok. I guess as a man, I can never fully understand it. ---
**Author:** ![tramp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/4491bb/32.png) [@tramp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tramp)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/111 "2003-08-20T14:54:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by kputt \* > \*\*ok. I guess as a man, I can never fully understand it. \*\* kputt, I think that is the most brillant thing you have contributed to this thread this far. ---
**Author:** ![CrazyCatLady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dfb087/32.png) [@CrazyCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrazyCatLady)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/112 "2003-08-20T15:28:05Z")
**Kputt** , while I seriously doubt it’s possible to accidentally hit 50+ keys on a keyboard in the proper sequence to call a bunch of your fellow Dopers murderers who should be imprisoned, I’ll indulge you. There are a lot of reasons it might be easier to have an abortion than to give a baby up for adoption. 1. Privacy. It is absolutely, bar none, no one’s business but mine and my husband’s if our birth control should fail. Not our parents, not our friends, not the old couple next door or the folks at work. Our personal private life is just that, _personal and private_. In such a situation, I could quietly have an abortion and never have to tell anyone but my husband and my doctor that my birth control had failed. I wouldn’t have to listen to all the well-meant but badly thought out advice everyone I know would bombard me with. I wouldn’t have to put up with the constant barrage of “Weren’t you using birth control?” and “You’re not keeping it?! But whyyyyyy?” and “Oh, you’ll love it too much to give it away when it gets here.” If I weren’t married, I wouldn’t have to deal with the whole passive-aggressive “my daughter is a tramp, but I love her anyway” bullshit I got when **DrJ** and I started living together six months before we got married. 1. Physical and emotional distress. As you might suspect, pregnancy is pure hell on the body, and it leaves a lot of women with permanent physical damage. The stretch marks, the extra strain on your kidneys (some kidneys aren’t up to the strain), the nausea, the cramping, the aching back, the sore feet, having someone use your bladder for a trampoline, it ain’t fun. And it drags out for the better part of a year, culminating in an incredibly agonizing experience which often leaves you with a boatload of stitches in your nether regions and six weeks of recovery. Hmm, a day or two physical hell versus nearly a year of physical hell. And, of course, there’s the emotional distress brought about by being pregnant when you emphatically do NOT want to be. It’s like that dead-end job that’s sucking your will to live, but you can’t quit till you finish this nine-month contract. There’s also the emotional distress of everyone around you bugging you the whole nine months about why you’re not keeping your baby, and the maudlin little sighs about how it’s probably sitting up now, or riding a bike, or going off to college, or whatever, _for the rest of your life_. 1. Personal safety. Pregnancy may be natural, but it’s also dangerous. My gyno told me that carrying a pregnancy to term was far more dangerous than an abortion. There are also lots of women out there whose parents, husbands, or boyfriends would beat the living hell out of them for getting pregnant. In fact, I have one friend whose mom (actually her grandmother) threatened to shoot her if she ever put a baby up for adoption. (The woman had a gun out waving it around at the time, so my friend believed her.) Raising a baby herself wasn’t an option, letting one of her truly insane relatives raise a baby wasn’t an option, and getting shot for going the adoption route wasn’t an option. So when she was faced with an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, she went the abortion route. 1. Some children just aren’t adoptable. Sure, there are waiting lists to get healthy white babies. But what about the non-healthy, non-white babies? I’ve flipped through the folders of “hard to place” adoption candidates before, and most of those kids either have handicaps or birth defects, aren’t caucasian, or aren’t babies anymore. What about the baby my friend would have had? She didn’t even know she was pregnant till she was four months along (she has a lot of gyno issues and was in for her annual pelvic), and preliminary tests indicated some pretty hard-core birth defects. On top of that, this kid would have been bi-racial. How many people are willing to adopt a biracial baby with severe birth defects? Without an adoptive family, we’re looking at a succession of foster homes. No permanence, no stability, no real home. As she put it, “I wouldn’t put a dog in that sort of situation, because it would be cruel. I’ll be damned if I’ll put a human being in situation that’s too bad for a dog.” There are probably other reasons abortion is easier and better for some people than adoption, but those are the ones that spring to mind for me. ---
**Author:** ![catsix](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e19b73/32.png) [@catsix](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/catsix)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/113 "2003-08-20T15:29:01Z")
There are lots more women out there like **jsgoddess** who are repulsed by the very thought of ever being pregnant. That, to someone like me, is a toturous hell in the same way that spending the larger part of a year being force fed drugs that make you sick, fat, get high blood pressure, diabetes, screw up your endocrine system and can get you shunned from your family would be hell. See, adoption is a good alternative to _raising a kid_. It is in no way an alternative to the body-ravaging hell that is pregnancy. The only alternative is to not be pregnant, which if your birth control fails, means abortion. I find it really unfortunate that if my birth control failed I’d have to abort, but I really couldn’t go through pregnancy. For that reason, and because the medicines that I’m on to control my immune system and give me a somewhat normal life are teratogenic. If I don’t take them, my hell is compounded by near constant anaphylaxis, and I could die. If I do, there’s no telling what damage could be done to a fetus. Why would I go through all that and produce a kid who could very well be born without a brain, with severe deformities, when I am completely repulsed by the thought of pregnancy anyway? ---
**Author:** ![tramp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/4491bb/32.png) [@tramp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tramp)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/114 "2003-08-20T15:38:12Z")
Another thing is that at the time I was taking medication for depression… I no longer take it because I got the hell out of Pennsylvania… But at the time I would have had to have gone off the drugs to have a baby. Now there are probably many women who would be selfless enough to put their entire life and wellbeing on hold to have a baby. I’m not one of them. I wanted to go to law school, I wanted to have a career, I wanted to have a loving relationship with my boyfriend without being saddled with the responsibility of child. I wanted all that, I did not want a baby. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/115 "2003-08-20T15:41:16Z")
50+ words that came out in a dumb way. I’m off this topic now. If you all want to justify abortion in your own way, go ahead. It’s not hurting me. ---
**Author:** ![ShadiRoxan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@ShadiRoxan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShadiRoxan)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/116 "2003-08-20T15:46:19Z")
I couldn’t quit smoking. It was too much for me to handle pregnancy, school, work and trying to quit. I didn’t want to be attached to the father for the rest of my life. If I hadn’t have gotten that abortion I wouldn’t be finishing school this semester. I wouldn’t be getting married next year. Instead I’d probably be stuck trying to find a way to get off of welfare and support my child and myself. If you think the father would have stuck around, you’d be wrong. He was more into pitying himself over the situation than actually helping me. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/117 "2003-08-20T16:00:46Z")
Sorry people. ---
**Author:** ![kputt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/f475e1/32.png) [@kputt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kputt)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/118 "2003-08-20T16:06:57Z")
Sorry people. ---
**Author:** ![Stoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stoid/32/272_2.png) [@Stoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoid)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 4:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/119 "2003-08-20T16:18:19Z")
Without slogging through the mess, I thought I’d drop in and say… I got pregnant because of pure hubris when I was 18 years old. There was not a millisecond when I considered doing anything \* other \* than having an abortion, which I did, at 7 weeks gestation. I found it a very unpleasant experience because it \* hurt, \* and because I really can’t stand haivng my innards messed with. There is no question, when you are getting your uterus vaccuumed out, that your innards are being messed with. From an “I just killed my offspring standpoint” I felt absolutely nothing and I have always felt absolutely nothing. I have never in my life wanted children. I do not view a 7-week fetus as much of anything. And that was all 27 years ago, so I don’t expect I’ll be having any blowback if I haven’t by now. Just one woman’s experience. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [August 20, 2003, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887/120 "2003-08-20T16:48:39Z")
This doesn’t get brought up often but I guess a lot of Russians are going to hell: > [@](#): > > Induced abortion remains possibly the most common and effective means of family planning in Russia. Russian society and the public health system have adapted to the provision of induced abortion as the primary method of family planning. Therefore, Russia can be defined as having a stable abortion culture. Induced abortion is still the primary and often the only method of reducing fertility in many regions. At the same time, there is a high degree of regional differentiation in family planning behavior related to ethnic, social, and demographic variations across Russia. From [Family Planning and Induced Abortion in Post-Soviet Russia of the Early 1990s: Unmet Needs in Information Supply](http://www.rand.org/publications/CF/CF124/CF124.chap3.html). Also remember the marriage rate is traditionally much higher/earlier as well. Many of these abortions apparently take place during wedlock. It’s funny that much of the “pro-choice” side in the US would still find this situation repulsive. In the words of the next governor of California “It takes different strokes”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-woman-regret-abortions/195887.md?page=7)