Lived Through This
Why I Hate Abortion but Believe in the Right to Choose
My high-risk pregnancy convinced me that every woman has the right — and obligation — to make this choice alone
My position on abortion is paradoxical: I hate abortion, yet I’m pro-choice. I expect more people than you might think agree with me.
Abortion rights were a big deal on college campuses when I was a freshman at Yale in 1971. Students held loud rallies promoting it on the Old Campus where most freshmen lived. It was confusing and a little lurid to me. That women should claim, as the defining characteristic of their liberated womanhood, the right to terminate a pregnancy seemed wrong and unnatural. I was looking forward to having children one day and just hoped it would be possible. I couldn’t understand the fervor of pro-abortion crusaders.
Most of those yelling were not parents; their obsession with the right to end the miracle of life seemed perverse. I hadn’t thought much about abortion before listening to the chanting on campus that night, but, once I did think about it, I understood that the fight for abortion was not my fight.
Flash forward: In graduate school, I married the love of my life, a fellow student. Nine months later, in a…
