From pro-choice author Barbara Ehrenreich:
“Quite apart from blowing up clinics and terrorizing patients, the anti-abortion movement can take credit for a more subtle and lasting kind of damage: It has succeeded in getting even pro-choice people to think of abortion as a “moral dilemma,” an “agonizing decision,” and related code phrases for something murky and compromising, like the traffic in infant formula mix.
In liberal circles, it has become unstylish to discuss abortion without using words like “complex,” “painful,” and the rest of the mealy-mouthed vocabulary of evasion.
Regrets are also fashionable, and one otherwise feminist author writes recently of mourning, each year following her birthday, the putative birthday of her discarded fetus.
I cannot speak of other women, of course, but the one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks…”
. “Hers” column in The New York Times, February 7, 1985. Quoted in Rebecca Chalker and Carol Downer. A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486. Four Walls Eight Windows Press,Village Station, New York, . 1992,
Did the pro-life movement create the belief that women mourn their abortions? Do most women experience their abortions as simple and emotionally benign? Read women’s stories here.
