I FELT NO GUILT going in or out just annoyance the protesters showed up at all like they have no life or anything better to do on a beautiful saturday morning. Then bombarded me with bullshit when I came out about how I needed to go to church today, be abstinent, & later on I would feel terrible about my choice because I lost a child. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s being told my own feelings you want to get punched in the face approach me telling me how I feel like you live in my body! They piss me off not because they’re pro-life so correct yourself above please, they piss me off with their methods trying to guilt-trip women as they walk in and out of the clinic & exploit their own children in their political/religious beliefs! One person inside said they beat on her car as she pulled in & they were blocking the driveway which is illegal. I’m sorry but I’ve never seen pro-choice people show up at a church or pro-choice clinic & beat on the cars & block the drive as the people left have you?

I do not feel terrible I feel complete relief because I did not choose the pregnancy nor the sex that brought it along. I was in a relationship, we were actually engaged, and he raped me multiple times so all you spouting crap about being irresponsible with a boyfriend just shut up it’s not always like that! The only reason I stopped birth control is because he badgered & begged me all last year about getting pregnant because he was older and had his retirement planned at a certain time. He even went so far as to ejaculate inside me everytime we had sex instead of pulling out like he had previously done.

He promised me things, promised me a happy life, comforts, money etc. he got me a car when mines broke down. He seemed perfect but pushy so after much internal fighting & a compromised mental state after being unrightfully fired from a job after being harrassed over a year, I decided to try to give him his baby. Throughout most of this time our relationship was on a edge, but i’m stubborn I was determined to make things work and be happy with him. I was to sacrifice everything my attempts at a career, my choice of where to live, my money, school, my freedom for him everything was about what he wanted because “a wife is supposed to depend on her husband.” I realized I was being made helpless so i couldn’t leave the relationship he destroyed my sense of self-worth & independence. He called me names, verbally & emotionally abused me, he played psychological games with me to subtly control my actions like yelling at me for ‘getting drunk’ in public (I stopped going out & refused drinks, even though I wasn’t drunk that night, simply to avoid fights effectively giving him what he wanted control over me). I started to realize he was lying to me, how often I’m still unsure but I’m leaning to almost all the time. His extravagant stories didn’t add up, family members did not confirm anything he was saying, he admitted to lying to me about being in the army when we first got together, stories about his ex-wife didn’t add up the list goes on.
But I stayed faithful, I tried my best to trust him & make it work I blamed flaws in my own personality when I saw the red flags I ignored, I told myself to not be selfish & give him everything even when I started to fear for my life. I didn’t call the police on him because we were still together & I didn’t want him to get in trouble at school, but he wasn’t hesitant to call the police on me still affecting my life today as I just learned I have a warrant out for my arrest for what I don’t even know but it’s stemming from that indicent with him. He even went so far as to ask a mutual friend to report the car he got me stolen when I went to get my hair done she said no she wanted nothing to do with it!

I was stupid, I’m young and this was a learning experience I hope no one else ever has to go through! But I don’t and will never regret my abortion I was no longer committed to giving him what he wanted and it was disrupting my school work & would’ve eventually disrupted my dreams for the future. The only mistake I made was not getting out of the relationship when I had a home of my own now I’m stuck back home with my equally abusive parents.

My problem with your claim that abortion is a movement for liberation like the anti-slavery movement is this: Anti-slavery set people free from their bodies being bought and owned by other people. You want to be set free from your own body.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on this whole problem – desiring sexual freedom, but baring the consequences in our own bodies in a way that men do not.

But pregnancy is something a woman’s body does. We don’t choose the body that we have and we don’t choose unplanned pregnancy. But when it happens curse God, curse nature, curse the blasted contraception that let you down. But don’t curse people who believe that life begins at conception – they’re just telling it how it seems to them.

The fact is, your own situation was nothing like an abused woman’s situation and nothing you did helped woman who is being sexually exploited. Doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. Doesn’t make you a bad person. Doesn’t mean that it would be a good idea to make abortion illegal and force it into the backstreets. But talking about ‘forced abortion’ is sensationalist and unnecessary. You chose to risk pregnancy and you chose to have an abortion – you had the liberty to do that. Women in abusive situations do not have that liberty.

First of all, read my post again. I did NOT say that nobody was forced into slavery. My whole point is that people ARE forced into slavery, but that pregnancy is not something that can be forced, like kidnapping someone and forcing them to work for you.

Also, although it’s true that rape is scarily common (and on the rise) when people talk about ‘forced pregnancy’ they do not mean rape – they mean a woman not having the option of abortion once she’s pregnant, however the pregnancy happened.

My contention is the pregnancy itself is a neutral thing – it’s just what our bodies naturally do. Somebody can force you to have sex with them, but they can’t force you to be pregnant – you don’t get pregnant every time you have sex. Perhaps that seems like splitting hairs, but the fact is that the majority of women who have been raped go on to have the child because they find that instead of seeing the child as something bad that came out of the rape they begin to see the child as something separate and something special inside their bodies. (Not that a woman should feel guilty who doesn’t feel like this, of course – you can’t choose how you feel.) If a woman has an abortion in this situation simply to please her family or the doctors she will often feel like the abortion is a further violation.

With all due respect, I completely disagree with your argument. What is your position on rape, molestation, and incest? Women and girls everyday, all over the world, are victims of forced sexual acts, therefore resulting in a “forced pregnancy”. There are countless circumstances in which a woman is a victim of “forced pregnancy”, including having a gun held to their head and being raped.

Given the choice between slavery and liberty, liberty would reign. Movements across time have been ignited by a desire for agency. A woman’s right to choose her pregnancy and what is right for her body is another great movement for liberty and freedom.

Jane

So if you *really* want to take care of your body another option out there (you don’t have to take it) is to think really long and hard about whether you want to have sex before you’re ready to have a baby. Don’t just ask yourself ‘am I emotionally ready to be sexually intimate with somebody?’ Ask yourself ‘am I emotionally ready to deal with a pregnancy if something goes wrong with the contraception?’

And if your boyfriend doesn’t respect you enough to accept that you might want to wait until you’re ready to get pregnant to have sex, if your friends all laugh at you when you tell them you want to wait, then are you really free to make your own decision?

What does it mean to respect our bodies? Modern society gives quite conflicting views on this – one the one hand it says respect your body by using it for sexual pleasure when you feel is the right time for you, and don’t repress yourself (even though you’re risking getting pregnant). On the other hand it says, respect your body by having an abortion when you’re not ready to have a baby (even though, as we’ve seen from these comments, there are risks involved – such as infertility – even in ‘safe’ abortion).

To anybody who has had an abortion, would you say that the sexual pleasure was worth the abortion? I’m asking this as a real question – not to be judgmental. Perhaps some women really do feel that freedom from constraints on sexual intimacy really are worth it, which is fine if that’s you’re point of view, but you need to come out and say it so that young women who are making these very difficult decisions about whether to sleep with their boyfriend know what they’re getting into.