Do you really know of someone who did it for THAT reason…?
I do. She deliberately got pregnant at the age of 15 so she could marry her boyfriend and move out of her parents’ house.
I’ve met a great many of them. It’s because of them that I learned about Women Exploited By Abortion.
I’m not a woman but,…
When I was younger I went though that whole boy mets girl, boy and girl get naked, girl gets pregnant.
We were 16 years old. I hardly had a job, she was in school. We decided an abortion was best. I don’t think either of us ever thought it was a mistake (then or now).
Do you regret leaving high school? Do you regret not seeing your old hang-out buddies? Do you regret not having your more naive misunderstandings anymore?
Does a positive answer to any of these convey what the framers of the question are implying by ‘regret’? No.
Since this is now out of GQ, I just thought I’d link to a site, which is all about not regretting your abortion. Many women do regret the circumstances that lead to them getting pregnant, but not the actual abortion.
This site was made by a woman who found that all the post-abortion sites she could find on the net were about how much the women regretted their abortions, and she wanted to shed some light on another side. And make one part of the world where you didn’t have to pretend guilt, or pretend shame for a decision you’re happy you could make.
Thanks, Spathiphyllum, for mentioning my blog, http://afterabortion.blogspot.com.
For those interested in the medical/scientific literature on potential emotional consequences of abortion, I maintain a set of links there.
I also have a selection of poems and short stories about abortion. Those seem to me to be a good way of starting to understand how some women experience abortion, without getting into anything political.
Here’s a poem by Anne Sexton.
The Abortion
Somebody who should have been born
is gone.
Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.
Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,
its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,
Somebody who should have been born
is gone.
the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;
up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all…
he took the fullness that love began.
Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.
Somebody who should have been born
is gone.
Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death. Or say what you meant,
you coward… this baby that I bleed.
I wonder if some women regret having an abortion because outsiders tell them that they are babykillers, and that they should feel regret for the rest of their lives. I’m quite sure that hounding a woman who has made a difficult decision while she is physically and emotionally tired can influence her mindset, and I am equally sure that it is wrong to do so.
Czarcasm, seeing how the field of counseling and support to women who are experiencing negative emotional responses after an abortion is fairly well dominated by pro-life organizations, I’m not sure who is out there calling post-abortive women “babykillers” or trying to impose guilt on them for an act that is in the past and cannot be undone.
Perhaps you’d like to expand on your experience, and provide examples of who it is, exactly, who has been showing such disrespect and malice towards these women?
And tlw, would it occur to you that such organisations that have a particular and/or political agenda are going to lean somewhat towards a negative appraisal of women who have chosen to have an abortion, given that the life of the unborn is paramount and sacrosanct?
Counselling and support? Yeah, right.
:rolleyes:
Years ago I knew a girl (in the UK) who was in her late teens/early twenties when she became pregnant, she rushed off and had an abortion somewhere and was quite proud of herself for having done so, as now she wasn’t “the odd one” out among her friends (who allegedly had all had at leat one abortion), 7 months later - around the time she would have had the baby - she fell ill with depression brought on by the stress of realising she’s have a baby right now if she hadn’t had the abortion. WAG she regretted her abortion (even if it was temporarily)
And yes, girls do get themselves pregnant to get out of the parental home, especially in the UK, and to a lesser extent here in Ireland. If you are an un-married mother you will be given a house by your local council/housing authority. There is a housing estate in my town which is exclusively for single mothers. My name has been on the housing list for 7 years and I’ve never been offered so much as a shed, but if I went out and got myself pregnant, it’d be a different story …
These people have not made me regret my decision, but they have made me doubt it. They’ve made me question my reasons. I’ve heard them call women who get abortions every name in the book. Although they don’t know they’re talking about me I’ve heard them say that I’m a baby killer, immoral, I have no heart, I’m a whore, I use this as my sole birth control. Probably much more that I’ve chosen to block out. After a while it starts getting to you. No matter how strong you are it effects you in some way. I have no doubt that some women have been made to feel bad about their choices.
And that is why I question the appropriateness of rabid Pro-Lifers offering so-called ‘counselling’.
“Let’s turn a bit of self-doubt into some major self-loathing shall we folks? Let’s create some serious depression and make it even MORE difficult for this woman to cope with her life, now that she is a BABYKILLER and all. She has to be made aware of the error, nay SIN, of her evil ways. She is a murderer, but we’re going to help her through her time of turmoil”.
Bwahahahahahahaha. :rolleyes:
Czarcasm-I think you are exactly right!
Actually, they do regret it and fall into a deep Post Partum Depression, and it affects their lives in every possible way: socially, mentally, emotionally, family-wise, etc.
DOn’t have any sources yet, but I did a research paper once on this and I did find this, so I’m not pulling this out of mid air.
Czarcasm says that he is suspicious of “rabid Pro-Lifers offering so-called ‘counselling’”.
The women who have been helped by that counseling offer a different picture and you can read many comments from them, via the permalinks on my blog that point to effective post-abortion resources. http://afterabortion.blogspot.com.
On the other hand, some of these women report feeling abused and misunderstood by therapists who trivialized and dismissed their feelings about their abortion.
What type of counseling should a woman seek if she is experiencing negative emotions after abortion? It probably depends on whether she thinks the fetus was a human life, or not.
If she does think the fetus was a human life, then it most cases it will not be helpful to work with a therapist who himself does not think the fetus was a human life, especially if he feels challenged, provoked or irate by such a notion, or defended around his own past choices or pregnancy losses.
Regardless of who is responsible for the choice of my abortion I still feel tremendous heartache for having had one.
I am not absolving my mother of all responsibility, but I’m sure she made the choice she felt she had to at the time. She is a good person who was caught in a triangle between my alcoholic father with a high pressure career and a confused but combative teenager. He has been sober for a year or so and I’ve discovered recently that entire chunks of family history are lost due the alcohol damage. Only harm would result from his being told about my abortion now.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why we’ve dedicated our lives to children as a foster, adoptive, step and biological parents of six (I was able to deliver one child). So in one respect a lot of good has come from one bad.
I would never presume to speak for all women who’ve had abortions and have found the links provided very interesting.
In my volunteer work with young women, I saw far more “relief” than “regret…”
(that’s not to say that they took the whole experience in stride… but many felt relief.)
Perhaps ‘outsiders’ are trying to enforce the concept that it is babykilling.
Perhaps ‘outsiders’ are desperate to reverse the attitude that killing an unborn child is equivalent to removing a gall bladder or a uterus.
Perhaps ‘outsiders’ are aghast at people referring to their child as ‘non-viable tissue mass’.
Perhaps ‘outsiders’ want nothing more than to make sure that these unnecessary procedures stop altogether.
Perhaps ‘outsiders’ are working against organisations that have a particular political agenda leaning somewhat towards a negative appraisal of women who have chosen not to have an abortion, given that the right to choose to do so is paramount and sacrosanct?
Perhaps 'outsiders hope that one day science will find out how to poll the attitudes of children who were aborted and see if they regret it.
Perhaps your self-righteous attitude is more valid than theirs.
Perhaps not.
Most anti-abortion advocates want women to regret abortions, and hope that they do. In my experience, very few women regret making the choice to abort. Quite a few women feel foolish for ending up the the situation.
Because so many people will attack women who have had abortions, many women won’t admit to it. That leaves some anti-abortion people with a clear field for inventing or interpreting the data in a way that supports their agendas.
Julie