Was It Something I Said?

“Part of personal responsibility is to be able to move beyond the guilt, because feeling guilty is also a form of self-pity. That may be an armchair psychologist point of view, but I stand by it. If I end up regretting this decision, which I probably won't, then I will deal with it and do what I need to do, personally, to move beyond it. But I won't actively seek out other women and say, look at me -- I was once like you. If you don't want to be like me one day, then you should stop what you're doing!

http://aholeinone.blogspot.com/”



“Awakening,” is what she calls herself. She is a graduate student who recently found herself pregnant by the love of her life, a man so important to her she watches him as he sleeps and wonders if there are words to describe what he means to her. Yet, he apparently doesn’t mean enough to her for her to want to guarantee that his qualities live on in perpetuity. She has aborted his child.

Awakening’s pre-abortion writing was picked up by After Abortion, and as a result, she was inundated with e-mails from some in the pro-life blog community. I was one of those. I don’t recall exactly what I wrote, except to encourage her to read post-abortion testimony of women who had regrets, and foolishly, I pointed out the breast cancer risk as if the threat of cancer “some day” would be enough to change her behavior today. As a smoker, I should know better than that. I admit I was reaching.

I could not and did not promise her immediate regret for her decision. As she points out, that would be presumptuous of me: “That's a bit condescending, in my opinion: to believe that what applies to you will apply to others without exception.”


I admit I have a habit of doing that. Because I have only my experiences in this life to go by, I tend to predict that other people who share similar experiences will have similar emotions as a result. Should we be expected to learn from the history of other people? But I could not help but notice that she didn’t seem to mind the effort to instruct her when the “teacher” was someone telling her what she wanted to hear to justify her decision: “Planned Parenthood's Report on post-abortion psychological effects. Very helpful.” (But please don’t read this without reading about the studies that show conflicting results here.)


Yes, the next time I am up in the air about an important decision, I think I will go to the source that has the most to gain financially by that decision in order to get advice. There I will certainly find an honest attempt to give me the truth, because they don’t really want my money. They want me to be happy. People who send me advice when they have nothing to gain from it personally cannot possibly have my best interests at heart.

Oh, that’s right. There is a religious agenda. “There is too strong of a religion of guilt in this country.” I keep forgetting that, probably because I don’t have one. Yes, I am a religious person, but I don’t expect it from anyone else and did not ask her to consider it. I don’t believe abortion is unnatural and unsafe because the Catholic Church tells me to think that way, or even because the Bible says so. I believe abortion is unnatural and unsafe because of that darned personal experience again. Rats. I keep finding myself falling back on this weak position.


“I got angry. I'm still angry. There are strangers out there who are trying to project their feelings of guilt and shame upon me -- people who don't even know my past or present circumstances other than what I've revealed. What do they know? That I'm pregnant, that it was unplanned, that my partner and I have decided it to be for the best that we postpone parenthood for another while yet.”


She’s right. I don’t know her, which I explained in my email, and I apologized to her for the imposition. It’s just that I was once pregnant, and it was unplanned. The father was 17, and I was 16, and we just weren’t ready to be parents yet. But why would that make me think we had anything in common?


“Why would anyone want to do that to themselves? Why would anyone want to view themselves as so powerless over their own fates?”


Good question. Why would I want to view myself as powerless over my own fate? Hmm. I don’t. I am completely responsible for where I am today. I was hoping she would make a different choice with the power she has over her life because, oops, there I go again, thinking that she and I might share some of the same feelings. So while I am condescending to her level already, I may as well suggest that some day she will learn, as I did, that there is nothing that can make us feel more helpless than living every day with the consequences of our irrevocable choices.


”Make peace with your own demons, but do not hoist them unto others. They are yours and yours alone to suffer and -- most importantly -- to conquer.”


Well, at least she knows there will be demons to conquer, but she does not understand that we know they are not our demons being foisted upon her, but her own personal demons, of her making, and of her own choosing. Not yet, anyway. Now she has some personal experience of her own, we shall sadly see.