From a woman who had abortion:
“I wanted to have a clear idea of what I was doing. A couple of weeks (the time between the moment when I missed my period and the test to make things clear) I turned the library upside down in my search for books that described gestation. I wanted to see with the fetus looks like in its various stages of development, what organs it already had developed, how its metabolism functioned, and so on. I learned that the point of a pregnancy at which an abortion takes place makes no difference: it is always a question of killing something. This became quite clear to me, but it didn’t at all change my decision.… I was also astonished that the idea of killing didn’t strike me as intolerable…”
Commenting on this, the author of the book says:
“To find one’s way through this state of mind, without telling oneself that abortion is nothing special, consciously accepting the idea of killing: such an attitude merits respect and the suspension of conventional judgments.”
Eva Pattis Zoja Abortion: Loss and Renewal in the Search for Identity (London: Routledge, 1997) 73 – 74
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