[lbo-talk] "I Had an Abortion"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

"The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily 
taken away," Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us in her New York Times 
column ("Owning Up to Abortion," July 22, 2004). "At least 30 million 
American women have had abortions since the procedure was legalized, 
mostly for the kind of reasons that anti-abortion people dismiss as 
'convenience' -- a number that amounts to about 40 percent of 
American women," according to Ehrenreich, and yet, if you look at 
only the corporate media, you would think that few women would even 
consider abortions and that rare women who chose them only did so 
burdened with "terrible guilt" (Ehrenreich, July 22, 2004). 
Ehrenreich argues that women should own up to abortions and practices 
what she preaches in her column: "Honesty begins at home, so I should 
acknowledge that I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. 
You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a 
dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was 
all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby 
lower-middle-class level" (July 22, 2004).

I, too, had an abortion -- simply because I did not want a child. I 
was young and poor, living single in a foreign country, but, unlike 
Ehrenreich, I do not wish to suggest that economics was my 
explanation. My parents are very liberal and wish nothing but 
happiness for me, so if I had wanted to have and raise a child, my 
parents -- who are working-class but are hardly abjectly poor -- 
would have given me all the loving support that a young single mother 
and her baby would need. Indeed, had I been as rich as Teresa Heinz 
Kerry, I still would have made exactly the same choice.

There are tens of millions of women in America who made the same 
decision as I did, and they, too, need to not only speak up and 
defend the legal right to abortion and moral freedom to exercise it 
but also demand universal health care that covers abortion, free 
child care, jobs with living wages, and the guaranteed minimum 
income, so other women who become unexpectedly pregnant, too, can 
make their own decisions -- to have or not to have children -- based 
only on what they want to do with their lives.

How can women begin owning up to our abortions, which is to say, our 
freedom and responsibility?

Planned Parenthood has made beautiful "I Had an Abortion" T-shirts available:

[An Image of an "I Had an Abortion" T-Shirt]

Buy one for yourself, wear it, and let other women know about it. We 
can help make our experiences of abortion visible while financially 
supporting the good pro-choice organization. If you don't want to 
shell out $15 for a T-shirt, make your original "I Had an Abortion" 
T-shirt yourself.

According to Alice Thomas of The Columbus Dispatch, the "I Had an 
Abortion" T-shirt has been denounced by such anti-abortion groups as 
the National Right to Life Committee ("Promotion of 'I Had an 
Abortion' T-Shirts Not Wearing Well," July 29, 2004, A1). Jennifer 
Baumgardner, who designed the T-shirt, says, "It's meant to be part 
of a bigger, political and serious conversation" (Thomas, July 29, 
2004). The conversation has already started:

Pat Siekkinen, 56, of Ashtabula, likes the idea of the shirts. She 
was in Columbus [Ohio] for a business meeting today.

"What's wrong with it?" Siekkinen said. "I'm pro-choice, and if you 
choose to tell someone this, it's your choice." (Thomas, July 29, 
2004)

Baumgardner is also "making a documentary called I Had an Abortion 
that features women who don't regret having abortions. The movie, 
which comes out in January, aims at countering abortion horror 
stories circulated by the Victims of Abortion group, she said. 
'Abortion is a safe, legal and very common procedure; 1.2 million 
women a year have one. It doesn't serve us to demonize it,' 
Baumgardner added" (Thomas, July 29, 2004). My fellow feminists -- 
let's make sure that her documentary will be as popular and 
profitable as Fahrenheit 9/11!

[A Photograph of Jennifer Baumgardner]
Jennifer Baumgardner

Visit, also, I'm Not Sorry.net, a website that celebrates the right 
to choose, "where women can share their positive experiences with 
abortion."

<http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/07/i-had-abortion.html>
-- 
Yoshie

* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
* Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/>
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: 
<http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, 
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>