Linda bird Francke, author of the book The Ambivalence of Abortion, in which she interviewed numerous women who have had abortions, was always pro-choice. Yet she felt grief and distress when she went in for her abortion. In the book she describes how she felt in the waiting room of the abortion clinic:
“Suddenly the rhetoric, the abortion marches I’d walked in, the telegrams sent to Albany to counteract the Friends of the Fetus, the Zero Population Growth buttons I’d worn, peeled away, and I was all alone with my microscopic baby…
Though I would march myself into blisters for a woman’s right to exercise the option of motherhood, I discovered there in the waiting room that I was not the modern woman I thought I was.”
She told the abortionist to stop after he dilated her, but he told her it was too late and completed the surgery
“What good sports we women are. And how obedient. Physically, the pain passed even before the hum of the machine signaled that the vacuuming of my uterus was completed, my baby sucked up like ashes after a cocktail party.”
Linda bird Francke The Ambivalence of Abortion (New York: Random House, 1978) 63
She came to realize that abortion killed a baby, and her explanation to the way she acquiesced to the male abortionist seems to hint about how women are exploited by abortion. She still maintains her pro-choice stand, but her story is not a positive one. Later in the book, she would describe her regret, and seeing, in her mind’s eye, a tiny baby “ghost” which she thought about at times.
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