I'm Not Sorry

No, this isn't a personal apology from me. This is a about a newly created campaign about abortion: instead being ashamed of having had an abortion, women who have undergone the procedure and are happier because of it are being encouraged to speak out, speak up, and make it known that abortion can be a positive choice.

According to the site:

Per Planned Parenthood, 88 percent of all abortions performed in the United States take place in the first trimester—and out of that number, 80 percent are performed in the first six weeks. If you listen to the anti-choicers, they would have you believe that full-term babies are being ripped out of wombs and having their heads bashed in, when in fact what’s being removed is an alien-looking clump roughly the size of a kidney bean. Many anti-choicers will of course say that we’re avoiding reality by believing that what’s removed during an abortion isn’t a baby. We reply that many people avoid reality by believing that every woman gets gooey over babies and wants to be a mother. We have no doubt that the moment the human race figured out that babies were the result of sex, someone began coming up with birth control and abortion.

The primary reason INS was created (as you can read in this section) was that almost without exception all other story sites were full of regretful women. If a woman who had had a positive abortion experience attempted to post to one of these sites, they were turned down--even at the sites that claimed to be "neutral." Some sites will even tell prospective contributors flat out that they will not accept positive abortion stories, yet somehow INS gets continuously singled out for "not telling both sides of the story." Perhaps it's because this site DOES tell the other side of the story, a story that the anti-choicers don't necessarily want women to hear--that abortion, quite frankly, isn't that big a deal for many of us. INS has not and will not ever claim to be neutral, unlike some anti-choicer sites.

[I]t was only very recently that women have been “allowed” to enjoy sex, and a lot of people are still suspicious of women who are free in their sexuality, a leftover from the joyless Puritans who founded this country. Quite frankly, we’d prefer it if the anti-choicers would just come out and say, “Since our religion or upbringing tells us that enjoying sex is a sin and we’re so sexually repressed we squeak, we think that any woman who has sex for any reason other than to conceive is a whore. And that includes rape, which wouldn’t happen if you didn’t lead that guy on by looking in his direction for two seconds or wearing that short little skirt or owning a vagina.” Also, we consider the “why didn’t you keep your legs closed” thing pretty funny anyway, considering that many of the abortions performed in America are on married women who already have kids (and whose husbands probably complain that they don’t open their legs enough).

Considering how many girls and women spend more time thinking up creatively spelled names and sighing dreamily over adorable little babies on TV than considering the realities of motherhood, we'd say that those of us who chose to abort have given the whole situation a lot of thought. We knew that a child born at this particular stage in our lives would not have a good life, whether it was due to finances, emotions, problems in our relationships, or other reasons. Some women have always known that they did not want to be mothers, but because doctors refused their requests for sterilization ("But you're so young! You've never had children! What if you change your mind?"), they take their chances with birth control failure, and sometimes they lose. And some of us know what we're going to do long before the specter of pregnancy is raised. We'd hardly call that panicking.

It seems to me that part of the success achieved by the anti-choice movement has been to ensure that "abortion" is a dirty word that doesn't get repeated in polite company. Considering how many abortions have occurred in America, it's likely that we all know at least one woman who has had an abortion, but how many of us know that some particular woman has had an abortion? Probably not so many.

Granted, it is a personal matter and we shouldn't expect people to tell us all about the abortion they had a decade previously, but that doesn't mean that they should also feel ashamed about what they have done. Some women consider their abortions to have been a positive choice and shouldn't have to hide their actions.

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics
• Bioethics\