This topic is so contentious and upsetting, I always feel completely torn.
I genuinely couldn’t abort a living being inside me, no matter what the circumstances. But I am so grateful that I’ve never been in the awful position of having to make that choice and can’t imagine imposing my opinion on another woman whose situation and life choices I can’t possibly know or understand unless I walked in her shoes.
On the one hand, my Grandmother was raped as a young girl, and if she had had an abortion, my lovely Mother, my brothers, myself and my children just wouldn’t exist. For previous posters who’ve called that a “meaningless point” in comparison to the injustice or lack of compassion of ‘forced births’, come on!!! I’m sorry but that’s not some abstract argument. I obviously can’t look at this part of the debate objectively, but I can see the amazing potential of several full, happy lives that could have been snuffed out by one medical procedure decades ago.
As for the many posts dismissing adoption (e.g. “It's no good saying that a child conceived as the result of rape is innocent and shouldn't be aborted, because there's no recognition of what it could mean to that child subsequently finding out that their father was a rapist. There have been occasional posts here from MNers who don't know who their father is, and their mother won't say, and they're left wondering why.”), it’s just not true to say adoption is not a viable alternative. Sadly it’s not a magical win-win solution that leaves everyone happy, but it can’t be dismissed as a possible least bad outcome for an unwanted pregnancy. My poor Grandmother struggled with the secret of her experience for most of her life, but she lived an incredibly full and exciting life involving amazing travel and a loving marriage. Then after my Mother and she were reunited (a process only possible if mutually agreeable and made horribly difficult due to red tape and outdated Irish laws on the subject at the time) she took great joy in getting to know our family over 10 years before her death. And of course my lovely Mam was very upset to hear that she was conceived from a rape, but that doesn’t mean that it would have been preferable for her not to live rather than learn that! This is just my family’s experience, and is not true for all, but my Mother has met lots of other adopted people and their birth mothers who all have positive stories of adoption to tell.
On the other hand, my wonderful friend had to go through the awful experience of travelling alone to England for a secret abortion as a student and my heart breaks for what she went through and the shame and stress she felt, never mind the logistics and cost of it all. The only regret I feel about that is that she didn’t confide in us, her friends, at the time so we could have supported her when it counted, even though we did our best after she’d told us a few months later.
Abortion is an awful last resort choice that I don’t envy anyone having to make, but all the vitriol and nastiness on both sides of the debate is unnecessarily cruel in my opinion. There’s too much strong feeling to be able to agree, but some of the hardline positions of pro-lifers and pro-choicers are mind-boggling! How can a so-called pro-lifer justify terrorizing vulnerable girls and women with pictures of aborted babies, or even murdering abortion clinic staff? Or how can a pro-choicer celebrate the destruction of a tiny, helpless foetus just to avoid inconveniencing a woman’s lifestyle (outside of medical, or other dire circumstances) or label anyone who disagrees a misogynist?
This is never going to be a black or white issue, no matter how strongly either side of the debate feels about it.
Sorry for such a long post.