USA – Do women feel guilt after having an abortion? No, mainly relief

Do women feel guilt after having an abortion? No, mainly relief
Most women don’t regret their decision to have a termination – and that outlook could help us protect reproductive rights

Suzanne Moore
Mon 13 Jan 2020

Women know themselves! Shock! Women can make the right decisions about their own bodies. Isn’t that amazing? Though I and most of my friends who have had abortions know this, I guess that’s just anecdata. You can’t trust women when they tell you that the main feeling was relief and that they didn’t really want a load of counselling about adoption or to wait another few weeks.

Still, a study conducted over five years across 21 states in the US has found that this is true. Of all the emotions that women were asked about – including sadness, guilt, regret, anger and happiness – it was relief that was the main one expressed.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/13/do-women-feel-guilt-after-having-an-abortion-no-mainly-relief

13.01.2020

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‘Savita!’: why the Irish abortion vote touched women the world over

'Savita!': why the Irish abortion vote touched women the world over

Finally, a woman’s death at the hands of an old madness did not mean nothing

Van Badham
Wed 30 May 2018

The photograph from the Irish referendum that brought me undone was of white-haired men in the street holding a yellow banner. It read “Grandfathers for Yes”. It came across my phone as I traversed Melbourne in the 86 tram only a couple of days before the vote, like a lobbed bomb of hope and love, relief and change. I sobbed aloud.

It struck with specific weight because there’d been another photo circulating a week earlier of Irish men the same age in a sadly more familiar scenario. “Vote NO” read their own pink signs, “Support women, protect babies, save lives.” That one had left me not in hot tears but a cold rage.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/30/savita-why-the-irish-abortion-vote-touched-women-the-world-over

Ireland’s abortion battle shows we must never let the fundamentalists win

Ireland’s abortion battle shows we must never let the fundamentalists win
Women have paid a terrible price for a law that gives the unborn the same rights as mothers

Suzanne Moore
Thu 8 Mar 2018

It’s a bugger when your flight is cancelled. It’s worse, I imagine, if you’re having to travel to another country to have an abortion. Time and money matter. When I saw that the recent snow had grounded flights from Ireland I immediately thought of this. Maybe I have never forgotten the time I sat next to an anxious young woman on a flight from Dublin who began to tell me why she was coming to London but couldn’t finish her sentences. She was just so alone that I wanted to go to the clinic with her. In the old days I remember seeing such women on the ferries.

Irish women have abortions, you see – they just don’t have them in their own country. Currently about nine women a day travel to the UK for terminations. Irish society knows of this export of hypocrisy, yet it continues to export its responsibility for human rights. Women pay the price.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/08/abortion-ireland-women-unborn-mothers