“I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE.” Heartbreaking, infuriating NYTM story. Parents bully daughter into unwanted abortion.

Over the weekend, I read Frederica Mathewes-Greene’s terrific book Real Choices: Listening to Women, Looking for Alternatives to Abortion. Don’t read it on the bus unless you actually like crying in public. The odd chapters are women talking about why they had abortions, while the even chapters are Mathewes-Greene’s advice to pregnancy center volunteers. A lot of things stood out–Mathewes-Greene’s adamant refusal to demonize men, her insistence that even creeps and $#@!s can transform themselves and become part of the solution; her obvious compassion; her gentle rebukes to pregnancy centers (we focus on the easier, practical matters, instead of the extraordinarily difficult emotional obstacles that are more likely to lead a woman to consider abortion). But most of all, what stood out was the fact that these women aborted to preserve relationships. They got abortions to avoid disappointing their parents. To keep a boyfriend. Because their husbands wanted them to do it. Because their mothers wanted them to do it. Abortion was not about autonomy; it was about dependence. (And yes, Mathewes-Greene makes no pretense that the women she quotes are some kind of scientifically representative sample; they are women who were involved in various post-abortion counseling groups; but if you think these reasons are unique to a few unhappy women I’m sorry, you are wildly wrong.) Many of these women’s abortions–like many of the sexual relationships that preceded them–were the result of self-hatred, or just a kind of self-ignoring or self-contempt. The woman’s needs, beliefs, loves, desires were downplayed in favor of her parents’ or her man’s. Welcome to freedom.

I’ll post more about this book later, but you should really go read it. No matter what you think about the legality of abortion. (Which Mathewes-Greene notes is nowhere addressed in her book–she’s just not about that.) No one who cares about women can deny that many abortions are the result of emotions and beliefs that are deeply, agonizingly harmful to women.