I had an abortion at 22, I wanted a baby but it was impossible – it was tragic, but curbing the right to choose is worse
OUR abortion laws are under the spotlight.
Last week columnist Mercy Muroki wrote about her own experience of an unplanned pregnancy, after a Labour MP tabled an amendment to existing legislation to make abortion up to birth, and for any reason, legal.
The MP, Diana Johnson, has already withdrawn the amendment after facing a backlash.
Mercy told how she was against any extension to the current 24-week limit for abortions and, if anything, believes our laws are already too liberal.
She had an unplanned pregnancy as a teenager. She considered abortion but chose to have the baby — and that’s an important word, chose.
This good experience, though, led her to believe that women should be encouraged to keep their babies, with more support.
I understand her reasoning. She wants women to have what she had. It is called confirmation bias.
But what if your story isn’t like hers?
When I was 22, I had an abortion. I was very sick, with alcoholism, and I didn’t know who the father was. I had no job, no money and no home of my own.
I waited 12 weeks, not because I wanted to inflict the greatest pain imaginable but because I really wanted that child.
But it was impossible.
Mercy’s call for better support for pregnant women is a hard thing to argue against superficially. I don’t hear the Government offering it, though — incomes and houses for pregnant teenagers are not a vote winner.
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We also have the most expensive childcare in Europe — and let’s not forget, crucially, how dangerous childbirth is. We have some of the highest maternal death rates in Europe, too — women from ethnic minorities suffer disproportionately — and the NHS needs £350million just to make maternity services fit for purpose.
People who argue for more stringent abortion laws tend to shame women — they say women are having abortions later in their pregnancies or cite that more than 200,000 women had abortions last year.
But what I don’t hear is men being encouraged to support their partners — one of the main reasons women abandon a pregnancy.
And what about the need for easily accessible contraception? It should be thrown at teenage girls like glitter — made widely available in schools.
They also call out those women who abort children with Down’s Syndrome. I find this tragic but that’s the right to choose. If you let people choose for themselves, you may not like their choice.
I have sat with a woman contemplating an abortion. When she chose one, I wept privately. But I don’t have to give birth to the child and I don’t have to raise it.
British abortion laws are a fudge but they work. It is technically legal to have an abortion until term for certain reasons, but the late-term baby killer — too busy drinking Chardonnay to notice she is pregnant? — is a myth. She will more likely be pregnant with a child that will die or her own life might be in danger, or she could be at risk of grave mental or physical injury.
Many women do have abortions late but this is usually because they are not sure if this is the right thing.
They have them late because they are more careful, not more careless.
Mercy wants more support for women to change their minds.
But how many women, do you think, walk into an abortion clinic not knowing what they are doing, and why? It’s not really a baby, say some pro-choice activists. It’s an, er, embryo. Of course, it’s a baby, and those having to make the decision know that better than anyone.
I know that from my own experience. I don’t need people to tell me what I have done. It is always with me.
I am only grateful that I wasn’t shamed for it by anyone but myself. So much of the talk around abortions implies that women are selfish and stupid, that we don’t know what we are doing, and that we don’t care. We do.
Mercy said that women’s “right to choose” — she put it in quote marks so it sounds like something spurious, like buying a shoe — shouldn’t be taken away entirely. But that it should come with “sensible time limits”.
What would that be? A tidy 12 weeks? Ten? Eight? Six? And then we can all feel better because we don’t kill babies? You might not even know if you are pregnant, if you are very young or going through the menopause.
You might have an abusive partner, from whom you have to hide the truth.
You might, as I did, have a rollocking mental illness.
You might be a single parent who dared to have sex and who can’t even get the time off work or childcare to get to a doctor.
You might choose abortion because another child will be the difference between just managing and destitution for you and the children you already have.
You might be at serious risk of postnatal depression — another taboo around childbirth which is hardly ever discussed.
Women are supposed to be perfect — we all know that. Perfect bedmates, perfect wives, perfect mothers.
But God forbid if your life is in chaos and you should miss the deadline imposed by people who don’t face what you do.
It’s a straw man, anyway. No one is going to raise the limit beyond which abortion is almost impossible to obtain, which is 24 weeks.
If it does happen — and it won’t — we will indeed have some of the most liberal abortion laws in the world. I am proud of that.
There is a worldwide war on female reproductive rights. In parts of America, it is almost impossible to obtain abortions now.
They make you watch an ultrasound video of the baby before the abortion — for the pain and the shame. In South America, you read of 12-year-old girls — raped girls — being forced to give birth. Sometimes they die.
In Ireland, until very recently, they made women carry and give birth to dying babies.
In America, the disgusting Kermit Gosnell performed illegal late-term abortions on women at his “house of horrors”.
Why were they there? Because in countries with little access to abortion, women have illegal abortions. Some-times they die.
Because that is where the end is, when you talk about too-liberal abortion laws. Dead women. Make your choice on that.
We romanticise childbirth. All those pictures of the Madonna and baby Jesus — it’s nothing like that.
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I had my son at 40 and it almost killed me.
We don’t talk enough about the reality of childbirth, so here is mine: I was too old and too fat. I had an emerg-ency C-section, had a danger-ous complication and was in hospital for a week.
My son is the best thing in my life but the experience of having him made me more pro-choice, not less.
How could I make another woman go through what I went through, if she didn’t want to?
We need more access to abortion, not less, and we need to advocate for it everywhere.
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We need more contraception, too. As I said, it should be hurled at young women.
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I am not saying that abortion is not a tragedy. I think it is.
But the alternative is nothing but the enslavement of an entire sex — and that is worse.