2014/03/14/The Day I Decided to Have an Abortion

title/short::The Day I Decided to Have an Abortion I’m so glad he told me. I had no idea that living a couple of decades as a fertile woman, at least nominally, would have prepared me to make that decision calmly and rationally. I couldn’t possibly have spent my life with abortion as a perennial hot-button political topic, something debated endlessly across the country and, you know, have thought the matter through in that time. I couldn’t possibly have sorted through how I felt about the existence of life versus the quality of life. I couldn’t have thought about what “life” means and which definitions of the word are useful versus which ones are stretching the point for the sake of argument.
 * when: when posted::2014/03/14
 * author: author::Stephanie Zvan
 * source: site::Freethought Blogs Almost Diamonds
 * topics: topic::abortion topic::Massimo Pigliucci topic::rationality
 * keywords
 * link: URL::http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2014/03/14/the-day-i-decided-to-have-an-abortion/
 * title: title::The Day I Decided to Have an Abortion
 * summary: "As it turns out, Massimo Pigliucci is not happy with how I decided to have an abortion. You see, “To decide to get an abortion is always (or, at least, should always be) a very difficult and emotional step, precisely because it has significant ethical consequences.”"

I couldn’t have decided whether and how children fit into my life. I couldn’t have figured out whether my genes should be carried on. I couldn’t have figured out whether I would be a good parent, particularly not after having grown up with an abusive one.

I couldn’t have contemplated the possibility of birth control failing me sometime in the twenty years I’d been having sex at that point. I couldn’t have chosen birth control with the understanding of how I go about having sex and what that means for the odds of failure. I couldn’t have made contingency plans already and reassessed them as my life circumstances changed.

No, according to Pigliucci, I must have sat in that doctor’s office and had a “difficult and emotional” moment, because babby. Life! Ethics!