Under Din of Abortion Debate, an Experience Quietly Shared

[MountainLaurel]

A good story about the reality of abortion in the U.S. today.

At Little Rock Family Planning Services, the women filed in without making eye contact, a demographic that remains unrecognized.

Leah works in a clothing boutique. Alicia is in high school. Tammy pulls espresso. Regina is a sergeant in the Army, recently home from Iraq.

Far from Washington and the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge John G. Roberts Jr., here in Little Rock on an August weekend, 26 women from as far away as Oklahoma joined the more than one million American women who will probably have abortions this year.

Their experiences, at one of only two clinics in the state, offer a ground-level view of abortion in 2005, a landscape altered by shifts in technology, law, demographics and the political climate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/national/18abortion.html

[TallahasseeGrannie]

1. Great link.

I feel abortion is always a sorrow, but it my decision whether to bring that sorrow into my life.

Don't mess with it.

[MountainLaurel]

2. For some people, it's a salvation

Talk to a woman in the process of escaping an abusive husband who finds herself pregnant. Or a teenager with fundamentalist parents who would kick her out of the house at 15, after beating her to within an inch of death.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

4. Any number of hundreds of scenarios

and I few I have experienced personally.

[bliss_eternal]

7. ...or forcing her to marry and have the child at 16.

I speak from experience. This happened to a relative. Mother forced her to marry and have the baby at 16--threatened to have the guy charged with statuatory rape if he didn't as he was 18.

:eyes:

So the right and most virtous thing in her opinion (marriage) was arranged under duress, through blackmail and coercion. Niiiiice! :sarcasm:

[politicat]

5. Not when you're already the mother of an emotionally damaged child.

When we got my step-daughter, she was just coming out of several years of neglect and abuse at her biological mother's hands. (We did not know what was going on because everyone covered up for my step-daughter's bio-mother.) She was hugely fragile, and an infant sibling would have made her feel like she was yet again not loved, not wanted and not part of the family. She needed full time parents devoted to her for a while. When the pill failed 6 months later, I had no hesitation in deciding that we needed to have an abortion.

We chose the breathing over the not breathing. It was that easy and it wasn't painful or sorrowful at all.

[stillcool]

3. an excellent article...

and another example of the fine society we live in, that diminishes and distorts lives any way it can.

[musical_soul]

6. Good link.

I think if a lot of these self-righteous anti-choicers could put a human face to the people they're calling murderers, they might have different feelings about whether abortion should be legal. It would change the view that these women are just not wanting to be responsible or just want to kill their kid. I think a lot of anti-choicers don't know many if any women who have had abortions outside of the ones some of them manipulate at the crisis centers.