I regret all the circumstances, economic, cultural, interpersonal, and familial, that led me to choose to end a pregnancy, but I am grateful I had the right to make that decision, and grateful to have a president who supports that right in office.

I was very, very lucky this winter to be able to choose to have an abortion and not go through with a pregnancy that, had it gone to term, would have doomed me, and a child, to a lifetime of dealing with the emotional, economic, genetic and other consequences of being tied to a bipolar, abusive man. When I made that choice, I joined the 30-50% of other American women who have made similar choices, for various reasons. So, ladies, think about that when you vote. And you too, men. You really, truly want your sisters to have no right to choose?

He acknowledged dating a woman named Tawnya for “a couple of months” in 2000 and helping her with financial problems but said he was unaware she became pregnant. “I never asked anybody in my life to have an abortion,” Erickson said. “Did I pay for an abortion? Absolutely not.” [via]

Undoubtedly, the possibility that a Republican! paid! for his girlfriend’s abortion! will enrage conservatives. But for a little perspective, even if he did know, Tawnya made the right choice to get out of that mess. What kind of jerk dates a woman for a couple months and can’t even remember her last name?

Erickson…said in an interview with The Oregonian it was a casual relationship and that he could not remember Tawnya’s last name or where she lived.

Nice one, that.

Each year, half of American women who would rather not get pregnant will have an unplanned pregnancy, often because they failed to use their contraceptive properly or forgot to use it at all, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

As a result, 28 million women in the United States are at risk for an unintended pregnancy, according to the study conducted by the Guttmacher Institute in New York.

And how is it that birth control–supposing women are fortunate enough to have access–winds up failing?

Among the results, they found that more than half of women who have a gap in contraceptive use of at least one month have experienced some type of major life event — such as the end of a relationship, a move, job change or personal crisis.

Yup. Sounds true to me. Wouldn’t it just be great to have a birth control method that was cheap, easily reversible, hard to forget, didn’t make you gain 40 pounds on average, and was available in enough dosage levels that it could work for most if not all women? I’m dreamin’ again.

Read more at the Guttmacher page devoted to the research findings.

Some of the worse right-wingers who have been hanging about this site have shown themselves to be surprisingly unsophisticated readers, unable to comprehend nuance or context. It’s as if they read with mental blinders on that censor out anything with which they don’t agree. I know that, as they interact with what I have written, they use similar rhetorical strategies to what “Jill” uses, strategies that, to people trained to think critically, don’t make any sense. To say “I am going to use the parts of what you wrote that support my beliefs and accuse you of not knowing what you’re talking about and deceiving yourself with the statements that do not support my beliefs” is not to marshal an effective argument; it is to act like an idiot.

Let me rephrase that: it is not to act like an idiot. It is to act like someone who has no flexibility of thought or imagination, and thus must recur to an empty “morality” to understand the world. This morality is not based on love, or life. It is based on fear, fear of the unknown, of change, of the world not being absolute. It can’t stand difference, and in its own way, it is pathological. Normal, healthy people do not go about life, looking for strangers to attack–and without provocation–for doing things that do not agree with their subjective version of what is right.

“Jill,” I hope that you find the help that you so obviously need. Now, fuck off.

This is why I wish more women felt ok blogging about having an abortion. It contextualizes that kind of choice in a way that stand-alone narratives cannot. I’m no longer an appealing target for the far-right now that I’m feeling better; in fact, none of the “well-wishers” have anything to say now.

I think I should write something really inflammatory to stir things up, like how I did actually name the fetus while I was pregnant. Its name was “Life Sucking Alien.”

If you’ve had an abortion and want to write about it in either a private or a public forum, I encourage you to do so. In my experience, it really helped to deal with my feelings in a way that left me healthier and stronger than I was before. Your experience, no matter how similar to or how different from mine, is valid. And somewhere out there, there’s probably a woman who has gone through nearly the same thing or will go through it at some point.

For me, despite the unwelcome attacks from the right and their misrepresentation of my experience for their political gain, I am glad to have written about this, glad for myself and glad that my story is out there for women in similar situations to read.

If you choose to write about your abortion publicly on your blog rather than offline or more anonymously in one of the pro-choice abortion story projects on the internet, here are some things that you should know, at least from my perspective. I’m sure others could add advice, too.

1. If your blog has an established readership, expect to find out that some of the women reading have had abortions. You’re not alone. A third or more of American women have abortions, and the vast, vast majority of them are not only ok but are glad they were able to make that choice. (See here for a summary of peer-reviewed studies on the long-term psychological impact of abortion.)
2. Consider your own comfort level with people in your life knowing what happened. I have gradually told many of my friends about my abortion over the past month, but I was not ready for them all to know initially. I don’t want my parents to know. That meant that some of the natural places for me to write about my life, like my two other blogs, weren’t optimal because of their readership.
3. Expect that feminists will be allies, not enemies. There’s no one out there claiming that having an abortion is always easy or without emotional or physical impact. You are not betraying your belief in your right to choose if you say choosing can be difficult. Your personal experience as a woman is valid, and I think it would be hard to find a feminist who believed otherwise.
4. Unfortunately, you should not be surprised to receive attention from the forced-birth, anti-choicers out there with nothing better to do than scan Technorati for women to attack. If your blog is indexed by search engines, they will find it. Many see fetuses as a weird punishment for having sex and really only care about controlling your body and your mind through coercion and guilt, regardless of whether they can be honest about this with themselves or others. You may get comments, and possibly emails from them. These will almost always contain misinformation and/or accusations. You do not have to accept what they say, publish their comments, or respond to their emails.
5. If you need help, ask. Writing about a personal experience does not mean you must now fight a political battle by yourself–and that at a potentially difficult emotional time. While there’s no organized answer at this point to right-wing anti-choice stalkers who methodically look for women to prey on, there are many, many people out there who’d be glad to tell you they respect your decision and your courage in sharing it. If you’re a blogger, you probably read other blogs. Ask the authors for help if you find yourself the target for anti-choicers. Ask your regular readers for help. Ask me. Again, you’re not alone.

I had an abortion, I’m fine, and I am going to keep on talking about it when I wish. I hope that maybe what I do can help other women feel safer telling their stories. There is absolutely no reason that anti-choicers should be the main people talking about what abortion is like for women; they should not have the level of influence on the discourse that we have allowed them. I know that there are many, many stories out there, stories from people whose experiences have far more legitimacy than any rhetoric from the far right. You should be able to share your story if you want, and you should know that, regardless of whether you choose to do so, there are many, many women out there who understand what it’s like to make a choice to have an abortion and to move on with life, even if there is some pain involved.

Despite the fact that I live with basically the best housemates in the world, I feel reluctant to ask for help when I need it. So, some things have piled up for me to do, and with my better energy and overall outlook, I’ve been taking care of them this weekend.

The absolute rage I feel over having my writing co-opted by people who care nothing about me and are simply looking to further their own right-wing agenda has given me an extra boost, I must say. I’m really motivated to do something to make sure women like me have a better, safer chance to talk about their abortion experiences. Unfortunately, feminists so far don’t seem to loiter around Technorati waiting for someone to write a blog post about an abortion so they can inundate them with genuine support. Instead, people like me get “support” from anti-choicers who seem to hope my life will be ruined by my choice so they can have a good story that supports their bizarre agenda.

It’s a crazy world, but damn, it’s nice to have the asthma meds back.