Russia is kind of an interesting case. Widespread abortion stems from the Soviet era. The Soviets placed an emphasis on gender equality and (by extension) sexual liberation. However, they could not change the deep rooted cultural conservatism that still runs through this once extremely religious society. Birth control is hard for a conservative society to take, because it is an outright admission that sex is going on.
It’s not that unusual. For example, in American, traditionally conservatively Catholic Latino teenagers are far less likely to have sex than their peers. But when they do, they are also far less likely to use birth control.
So abortion became a more palatable option to the Soviets. It implies an accident or a mistake. A one time deal. Not a willful and preplanned action. The government saw it as a way to maintain their values while not completely offending the values of the people, and started whole heartedly promoting it. This legacy still remains.
It would occur to me that such would be the opinion of those with an opposing agenda.
It would, however, not correspond to the experience I’ve had as both a counselor and in attending a counseling group with a close friend who wanted my support.
Many of the pregnancy centers in the U.S. are affiliated with one central organization which provides a “curriculum” of sorts for the post-abortion counseling program, one that is based upon reestablishing a woman’s sense of wholeness, health and peace, helping her deal with the negative emotions which she believes are a consequence of having had an abortion. (And often, it is discovered that they’re a result of much, much more.)
Having a “negative appraisal” of the women who step up and say “help me” would be entirely defeating of the purpose and intention of a counseling program. It would also be quite interesting as a good number of the counselors have had abortions themselves, as someone mentioned. (Was it **JThunder? I think so.) In fact, I was the only counselor I met (of about five dozen or so) who had never been pregnant (at the time) with one outcome or another.
Yes, of course this type of counseling is ultimately only going to have positive results for someone who is coming into the process feeling that what was aborted was a life, or at very least something whose loss is regrettable. Surprisingly, this is not a small number. There are quite a number of women who describe themselves as pro-life who end up having abortions anyway, for a number of reasons. There are also women who come to a pro-life perspective after having an abortion. (In some cases, many years later.) These are, in the main, the women who seek this type of counseling and for them, it works.
This doesn’t correspond, of course, with the convenient fictions about pro-life people. We are not all a bunch of women haters who villify anyone who has an abortion out of hand. That’s the cheap and easy realm, the stuff of talking head soundbites from the anti-intellectual side of the Operation Rescue reject pile.
Those who put real action behind their beliefs, in an effort to help women – not just their babies – do recognize that it’s very rare that abortion is entered into lightly, and in most cases it’s the option that a woman takes when she feels that there just isn’t any other that’s viable for her. The idea is to find those other options and make them viable for women, not just to codify bans and picket and throw guilt trips.
Some of us get that.
And we also get that the other side of the equation, for women who have already had abortions and are in very real, often heartwrenching pain, is to let them know that the world isn’t going to collapse because they made that choice, that there are ways to deal with things and move on.
And that, kputt, if you’re still reading, is exactly why abortion can be easier for many women than giving birth and placing their child for adoption. If a fetus isn’t, as Stoid put it, “much of anything” then getting rid of it and walking away is no big deal. But even if your view is that a fetus isn’t much, there’s no denying that a living child is, and knowing that your child, your flesh and blood – unwanted and unloved though it may be – is somewhere out there is much harder to walk way from. It’s a burden that many women don’t feel capable of bearing.
I have never been pregnant and hope never to become so. I do, however, suffer from a rare endocrine condition that, before I was diagnosed and treated, caused me to spend quite some time with hormone levels that resembled those of a new mother. I was lactating and everything (sorry if that’s TMI). I felt like I had a baby, or was going to have a baby, or was supposed to have a baby. I’m not saying I had a desire to get pregnant or have children, because I did not. But I felt in my blood that there already was or should be a baby that was mine.
Now, in my case these feelings had to be purely hormonal. A woman who had recently been pregnant for real would have even more extreme hormone levels than I did. And if she gave birth but put the baby up for adoption, those hormonal feelings that there “should have been” a baby that was hers would combine with the knowledge that this truly “could have been”…if only she had decided to keep her baby.
So I think I have some faint inkling of how difficult it must be for a woman to give up a child for adoption even if that is the choice that she really wanted to make. Intellectually she may know it’s for the best, but everything in her body is telling her that SHE HAS A BABY and SHE IS SUPPOSED TO BE CARING FOR IT. That must be very, very hard to deal with, especially for a woman who expected to feel relief once the baby was safe with loving adoptive parents and no longer her responsibility.
I suspect that at least some women who have abortions may suffer from similar (if weaker) hormonal feelings that “something is missing” or “my baby is gone”. At least some regrets after abortion are probably due largely to these hormonal factors. I don’t mean to belittle these feelings, only to say that they should not be taken as a sign that abortion is a bad decision or morally wrong.
That’s true- and you know what else? They’re almost all women. Buncha sluts…
I was the only male employee other than the doctor in a clinic that offered abortions (among many other services) and every last unwanted pregnancy we got was some woman.
From the few months that I worked in that clinic and from the people I’ve talked to who’ve worked in others, the things I can swear to:
1- you know a LOT more women who’ve had abortions than you probably think you do
2- it’s not just urban legend- there are protestors who show up at other clinics when they themselves or their teenaged daughter become pregnant (the clinic I worked in was one of three owned by that doctor and he had confronted women who showed up at one clinic after picketing another- invariably the phrase “raped by a black man” entered the equation [there evidently being a very fertile black man who loved upper middle class white women running loose in AL & GA])
The women who tended to be the most certain of their action and the most resistant to any form of counselling (women were required to undergo a counselling session at this clinic) were not who you might think (i.e. 16 year old airheads or young single career women), but older married women (35+ the world older here is used in relativity to the age for a pregnancy). It was not terribly uncommon for women with grown or nearly grown children and granchildren to suddenly discover at 48 they were pregnant, meaning all the plans they’d made for retirement and their later life were tossed a major curve ball and the baby’s chances of having a major problem (Down Syndrome, for example) were magnified, and these women were usually the most insistent and composed (“I am positive that this is what I wish to do”).
The doctor I worked for (as office manager) was a legend in his field. He interviewed every woman himself before performing the procedure and would not perform the procedure if
1- they were crying
2- they seemed at all uncertain
3- they seemed incapable of making up their own minds
4- they were extremely overweight (it can cause complications due to the pressure on the organs)
5- they had had the procedure within the past two years
He had only caused one perforation in his career (almost unheard of) and many of the women later wrote to thank him for his kindness. He was gunned down outside of his Pensacola clinic by a man who was absolved publicly by his priest in Mobile, who said the killer had performed the work of God.
Since this topic has been so thoroughly hijacked, here’s my two cents. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I suffer from clinical depression. Last winter, I was also unemployed. If I had somehow gotten pregnant last winter, I would not have hesitated to have an abortion, even though I consider it wrong, but sometimes necessary. You see, if I were pregnant, it would make it even tougher for me to get a job. I’m single, solely responsible for supporting myself. I also have atrocious eating habits. I simply was not capable of supporting myself in a manner which would allow my body to support a child for nine months.
Here’s another reason I remain firmly, adamantly pro-choice. A good friend of mine loves kids and is great with them. However, there’s a rather high risk that any child she and her husband had would have severe health problems due to a combination of genetic factors on both sides. Since all birth control is fallible, to me, the position that one should never take an action which has the possibility of resulting in an abortion implies that she and her husband should never have sex.
Years ago, I fell in love with a wonderful man who I fully intended to marry and who I believe fully intended to marry me. As things worked out, we never married. Do I regret not marrying him? Sometimes, when the moon is full or the wind is in an odd quarter. Do I regret loving him? No. He brought too much joy to my life for me to do that. So, I suspect, it would be if I did find myself in a situation where I chose to have an abortion. Would I regret finding myself in a position where I had to consider it? Probably – I’m good at regretting things. However, from what I know of who I am and who I would choose to have sex with, I don’t think I’d regret the act which led to me being pregnant, at least not in broad terms.
I think I can offer a somewhat unique perspective to this dramatically hijacked discussion.
As stated earlier in this thread, I had an abortion as a teenager.
I am the adoptive mother of two beautiful (biracial and black respectively - I’m white) children who have been a blessing since the day they came home with us as infants. We thank God each and every day for their birth mothers and the decisions they made to carry through with their pregnancies rather than have an abortion.
I am the foster mother of two gals who joined our family as teens, now young women, who made adoption plans for unplanned pregnancies in their mid-teen years. One of those teens went on to marry and settle into as normal a life as possible for a kid reared in foster care. The other remains a baby making machine - she’s on her third in 5 years, has made adoption plans for them all. Adoption is her form of birth control.
BY FAR - the most traumatic and emotionally scarring of all of the above was caring for these gals, as teens, after they gave birth and placed their children in adoptive homes. Hysteria, unbelievably low self esteem, physical damage to their bodies due to being pregnant too young (one daughter was 13 when she got pregnant).
My point? Adoption plans were/are just as emotionally damaging to these young ladies as my abortion.
There are no easy answers to an unplanned pregnancy. Any choice made can be alternately a relief to some and horribly traumatic to others.
Let’s be kind and respectful in how we view others and the choices they made - please.
I think you need to flash back to your earlier post:
I’m not one who, in general, says that men should have no opinion/say when it comes to abortion. But I do feel that, as a man, you can never fully understand it.
I doubt most women consider it their primary purpose to serve as an incubator for a fetus.
Also, if you look elsewhere in biology, the relationship between mother and developing offspring can be quite antagonistic. In basically the whole of the insect world, it’s normal for the production of offspring to be so expensive that it requires the death of one or both parents. While it’s nice to think of gestation in humans as a cooperative process, this isn’t really the case. If it improved chances that the offspring would survive to reproduce, the fetus would syphon resources off of the mother’s body to such an extent as to lead to her death. This isn’t beneficial, in the case of humans, so pregnancy, while it can be taxing to one’s health, usually doesn’t kill you. But, the fetus DOES NOT have the mother’s best interests in mind (meh, well, it doesn’t have a mind…) as it draws off calcium and iron, causing anemia and osteoprosis.
What is your reasoning to justify making a mature sentient being subservient to something that has no interest in its wellbeing? You wish to make women slaves to a careless master… why?
I could look myself in the mirror every day for the rest of my life after an abortion, but no way in hell would I be able to go through a pregnancywithout deliberately doing harm to myself.
Having an abortion before the baby is sentient, moving, and knows who I am is infinitely easier.
Here’s how the adoption went, for me: I and the baby’s birthfather chose the adoptive parents, before she was born. They were the first ones called when labor started. They were the first ones to see the baby once she was born–and when I say first, I mean, first ones after I and her birthfather, but before she was even cleaned up. She was still covered with all of the ooky stuff that babies have on them when they come out.
And at the time she was born, mothers were still kept in the hospital for three days, and mothers still carried the babies out of the hospital themselves.
In other words, I was wheeled out of a hospital carrying the baby I’d just given birth to. And then, I handed that baby over to the woman that became her adoptive mother. The birthfather, the adoptive father, a nurse, and the counselor from Catholic Social Services (who arranged the adoption) were all present at the time this happened. And while it might take me a while to acquire and post them, there ARE pictures to prove it.
In other words–I went through nine months of pregnancy, went into the hospital in labor, delivered a baby, actually saw that baby, touched it, and carried it in my arms…but went home with no baby to show for it.
When I had my abortion, on the other hand, all I had was a stick with a blue line on it, and a doctor telling me that the blood test I’d just had confirmed the fact that I was pregnant. I wasn’t showing. I’d gained no weight. The baby wasn’t moving.
That’s why it was easier. Not much easier, but it was. And FWIW, the abortion occurred after the adoption. Not before.
We’ve really broadened the discussion here, so I’d like to pick up on a point that tlw made: making other options viable.
I think the U.S. really falls short when it comes to supporting women who have made the decision to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. For young women, there is a lot of ostracism associated with pregnancy. Doesn’t matter that half the girls in high school are sexually active–YOU’re the one with proof that you’re a “bad girl.” Sometimes they ask you to interrupt your studies or transfer to a different school. When I was in high school, I knew parents who tried to bar a pregnant girl from running for student council. I have a young friend who is raising her baby, and she got nasty comments from strangers in the mall while pregnant–and even after her baby was born.
As an adult, it’s somewhat easier, but I think you’d be constantly dealing with the expectation that you’re keeping the child. You’d face difficult questions from friends, family, and strangers. You might find your employer is less sympathetic about leave for a “mistake” that you’re not planning to keep in your family.
All this to say, “social embarrassment” should not be the sole reason for taking a drastic step like abortion, but I think it’s a factor. Pregnancy is hard enough, without having to deal with an unforgiving society at every turn. Abortion allows an awful mistake to remain private, something that’s appealing in a harsh judgmental world. I wish things were different.
Only in some parts of the US, Cranky. Hell, only in some parts of the state you and I both live in.
Honestly, here in Flint, it is actually a bit of a surprise to find a single person under the age of 25 who is not the biological parent of a child somewhere. The question most single people ask each other here isn’t “do you have any children?” It’s “How many children do you have?” And they do NOT expect to hear “none.” It sucks, but that’s just the way it is here.
Where I live, you’re ostracized if you haven’t kept a child that you didn’t plan.
Please don’t misunderstand–I am completely and totally pro-choice. And while it simply is NOT my place to tell ANYONE what I think they should do…I must admit to kinda wishing that some of these young girls would choose abstinence or adoption. Abstinence because I really, really wish for them to NOT EVER have to face what I’ve had to face. Adoption because if they DO have to face what I’ve had to face…well, there’s a lot of couples out there who can provide a wonderful home to babies who’s birthparents simply cannot.
See, carrying a baby to term, and handing it over to someone else, is actually frowned upon MORE than abortion. “How COULD you CARRY that BABY in your BODY, then GIVE IT AWAY?” I’ve been asked, for the last 14 years. “Didn’t you LOVE her? Didn’t you come to KNOW her and WANT her?” Well…yes, yes, yes and yes.
I loved her more than anything I’ve ever loved. And at the time, that particular pregnancy was not to be aborted. Don’t ask me why. I just knew that *in that case, * it wasn’t the right thing to do. I WANTED to keep her. But I KNEW I would totally suck as a parent. And I knew that even though her birthfather hadn’t left me, he was just as unready and unwanting of parenthood as I was. But he was also just as interested in adoption as an option as I was, too. Like me, he was pro-choice. But also like me, for some odd reason…in this case, he just didn’t think that abortion was quite right. He wouldn’t have fought me had that been my choice, but…we both just happened to be on the same page here, for that particular baby.
She’s 14 now. But nowadays, I hear people talk trash about women who “give up” their flesh and blood more than I hear people talk trash about women who abort. As if carrying to term, but NOT RAISING an unplanned child is somehow WORSE than having an abortion.
I’ve never understood that. Particularly since both the adoption AND the abortion took place in Ann Arbor, the single most forward-thinking city in the state of Michigan. No, I didn’t live in Ann Arbor when I had the abortion. But I did when the adoption ocurred. Before the abortion. And I caught shit for NOT aborting. Go figure.
Sorry about the ramble. Pregnancy issues just hit home for me.
I haven’t posted because Homer asked to have this closed, but since it hasn’t yet.
I’m also an adoptive parent. I’ve never had an abortion, but I know many women (and Sampiro is right, some you wouldn’t expect) who have. And now three who have both had abortions and made adoption plans.
All three say it was MUCH easier to have an abortion and there was MUCH less guilt and pain associated with it. An abortion provides closure. There is no “my baby turns eight today.” There is no wondering twenty years later (one of my sample had her abortion back in the 1960s when it was illegal) if your child will show up on your doorstep expecting a relationship. There is no craving a relationship with a living human being that the other living human being doesn’t desire (which happens as well - some birthparents would like contact but the adult child does not). Three is not much of a sample size (is it Cranky?), but I doubt we’d be able to find a study on this - though if I needed a Public Health or Sociology Masters thesis, this would be a really interesting one to do.
Moreover, adoption is not simple for the adoptive parents or the child either. Adoption creates families that are most of the 500 piece jigsaw puzzle but with important pieces chewed by the dog and lost under the couch. Adoptive kids are missing parts of themselves and adoptive parents can’t help feeling it. Yes, I do know adoptive kids who wish they would have been aborted rather than rejected. The “rejection” can be very painful. A study was done on Korean adopted Swedes as adults - they are much more likely to need couseling, much more likely to commit suicide. (There are other issues than adoption at play here - Korean Swedes are not common, so there are some racial issues as well).
I really really really admire birthmoms and am so very grateful to my son’s. But I really hate the “why don’t you just put the baby up for adoption” logic - like its that easy.