Nobody has an abortion for fun. It’s always a careful choice, and sometimes not an easy one. It’s a choice that can be hard to understand, because one person’s lentil is someone else’s baby.
In response to the current political climate, and because there are only so many snapshots of a cup of tea that a person can put on Instagram, one afternoon I posted an old black-and-white news photograph. It was a striking image of women protesting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The women are angry, fists in the air, caught open-mouthed in a defiant chant, their heads covered with black scarves as a symbol of their oppression and mourning.
So I explained to my eldest that in 1970, nearly a decade before I was born, the women in the photo had been part of the Abortion Caravan, a protest movement that travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa in response to laws making it difficult for Canadian women to be in charge of their bodies. I explained that abortion is a medical procedure that means a woman doesn’t have to be pregnant if she doesn’t want to be, but some people don’t like that a woman gets to make that choice.
Part of the problem was that I couldn’t even say the word “abortion,” not in polite company. The truth is, abortion is ordinary. Statistics suggest that one in three or four American women will have an abortion in her lifetime; the rate is lower in Canada at 14 abortions per 1,000 pregnancies, possibly due to sex education programs in schools. But despite the prevalence of abortion, we don’t make space in everyday conversation for these stories.
My kids need to know about my abortion because my own experience of unplanned pregnancy is going to underline how I talk to them about sex and birth control when they are older, and it will be useful for them to know where my own potential worries and apprehensions are coming from. I would also like my story to be the foundation for their, that they should have control over what happens to their bodies, and should be able to make their families—if they choose to—on terms that are their own.
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