In 1973 when I was 21, in college and on the pill, I became pregnant.  It took me a while to discover this because my periods were not even regular yet but my swelling breasts finally told me something was going on.  Thinking back, I had had a bad case of food poisoning so the pill must have found its way out of my body prematurely from one end or another.

 

My only emotional response was the immediate and clear certainty that I would not remain pregnant.  Some unwanted growth inside me, like a cancer, was going to take over my body, end my education, tie me down to motherhood when I was not ready for it,  force me to co-parent with a man I was not fully committed to, and radically reroute my life.  I knew immediately that I wanted, needed to have an abortion.   So I did, and my boyfriend paid for it.  I have never, not once in my life, regretted it.

Those opposing abortion are profoundly misogynist – yes, including the women among them.  They don’t want us to have the freedom to make life choices for ourselves the way men routinely do as a matter of course.  They see us as wombs on two legs who should always choose having children above all else.  I openly and proudly declare that we should have the same freedom to pursue whatever life we envision for ourselves.  This most emphatically includes the right to have an abortion when a pregnancy does not fit into those life choices. It’s as simple as that.