Well-intentioned feminists clamor about feelings of relief and burdens lifted without proper mention of those “various other” emotional responses which lend superficial credence to the PAS imaginings of anti-choice pseudo-psychiatrists.
I would know. After aborting a pregnancy a couple of years ago, I plummeted into a state of emotional and psychological distress not unlike that which supposedly indicates PAS. While I fear this confession will be grossly misinterpreted by the anti-choice blogosphere, I believe that it’s important to validate the unspoken negative feelings of those who abort. (This is not to say that my experience is universal; however, there’s little doubt in my mind that it will resonate with many readers who’ve aborted).
I suppose the average anti-choice onlooker would’ve gladly diagnosed me with “Post-Abortion Syndrome.” BUT (and this is a big BUT): I’ve never associated the guilt, shame, isolation, anxiety, or depression that I endured in the wake of the procedure with the procedure itself. In my experience, PAS represents a flawed causal model which conflates abortion (the alleged cause) with aggressive anti-abortion sentiment, sexism, and pervasive cultural stigma (the actual cause).
Yes, antis, I blame you and the patriarchy for my post-abortion emotional upheaval.
Planned Parenthood’s President Cecile Richards answered some questions for the Iowa Independent. Richards believe that doctors not physically seeing and examining women and then prescribing drugs which have killed and harmed numerous women “is an incredibly important advance” for women who don’t live close to hospitals in case a complication occurs.
I guess we can change the adage
Elle has a piece on a couple who agreed to have an abortion if she got pregnant. She got pregnant, decided to keep the child and now he doesn’t want to pay child support.
Greg Bruell and his girlfriend of a year and a half, Sandra Hedrick, had a pact. “We agreed that if we got pregnant, we’d terminate because we were not in a stable family unit,” Hedrick says.Or as Bruell more starkly puts it, “I resumed sexual relations with her on the condition that were birth control to fail, she’d abort without waffling.”
“Resumed,” because nine months earlier Hedrick had conceived a child with Bruell and the couple decided to end that pregnancy. Or rather, he decided, and she went along....
But when she got pregnant in early 2009 (she was on birth control, she says, though its effectiveness may have been diluted by antibiotics she was taking), she balked. “I looked at the ultrasound,” Hedrick says. “A bad move.” She also realized that this might be her last chance to have another child. She broke the news to Bruell: She was keeping the baby.
Posts
If "antichoicers" had enough influence over women's thinking to cause them to be wracked with guilt and anguish after an abortion, how come we don't have enough influence to prompt them to spare the baby in the first place?
ReplyDeleteTheir argument is fatuous. Show of hands here -- how many of you are "influenced" by PETA to be wracked with anguish every time you eat a burger?
"Elle has a piece on a couple who agreed to have an abortion if she got pregnant."
ReplyDeleteSo much for the assertion that people don't use abortion as birth control.