Glamour has a great article about the complex reality of abortion, and the culture of silence around the procedure. It’s a powerful piece, and includes perspectives from women of all stripes. It’s definitely worth a read.
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Thanks so much for posting this – I think it’s a fantastic article. I’ve been fortunate enough to never have an unwanted pregnancy (or any pregnancy, yet) due to very consistent use of birth control pills since I was 15. But my mother had a hospital abortion (this was before Roe). She was married to my father, but they did not feel they had the means to have a child at that point, and my mom also had some health problems at the time that made pregnancy more dangerous. She said that she’s never regretted it, and said that she’s glad it was done before the days of protesters. No one she encountered even suggested that she was doing anything wrong.
I also wonder if part of the hesitation to talk about it is due to embarrassment at having unprotected sex. I know a fair number of highly educated women who know very well the importance of using some form of birth control, but who haven’t done so on at least one occasion (usually in college or high school). A few had to have abortions. It’s totally human, people make mistakes, but I think that if you feel like you should know better it’s embarrassing to admit that you had sex without using birth control.
That was a good article… but I decided to skim the comments and found this:
Really? I mean… really? I guess every single abortion is because the guys makes the girl do it. I mean, how did I not see this…?
Ugh
Please post your appreciation for the article in Glamour’s comments–many anti-choice people are piping up there and shaming other commenters who wrote of their own abortion experiences.
I’d like to see a lot of feminists showing support there, and encouraging Glamour to print more thoughtful and realistic articles on abortion like this one.
Thanks for the head’s up, Anna. Just left mine.
I thought that was a great article! I was surprised to see it when I first opened my copy of Glamour this month. It’s nice to see a women’s magazine address actual women’s issues with honesty and compassion.
Of all the mainstream women’s magazines I’ve read, I feel like Glamour is the most comfortable dealing with political and controversial issues and I find that they generally take a pretty feminist approach. (They also host those Glamour Women of the Year Awards, which can be cool.) They also seem to be slightly more woman-friendly in their sexuality pieces sometimes… I know they recently had a piece on female orgasm. Yet somehow this just makes me more annoyed with their annoying and/or fluffy pieces on fashion/beauty/body image/sexuality. You clearly have the potential and the talent, Glamour, use it more often!
So the abortion they describe in the article is done without any painkillers. Is this standard? Any idea why?
I ask because the exact same procedure (D&C), when done on a miscarrying woman, usually involves some amount of pain killer or sedative.
I feel the same way about Glamour. I see far fewer of those terrible “how to please your man” articles than I do articles about female sexual health and pleasure. I don’t really mind their fluffy fashion spreads and beauty articles, because I think a lot of women are drawn to the magazine partly because of them, but end up finding rather feminist articles, too.
“I also wonder if part of the hesitation to talk about it is due to embarrassment at having unprotected sex. ”
Betsy, you’re exactly right (at least in my case). And that is the only guilt I ever felt, for fucking up and getting knocked up, not for having sex or the abortion.
I was also pleasantly surprised to see an article called “The Serious Health Decision Women Aren’t Talking About” be about abortion. It was just presented in such a normal way, including pictures of 5 women who had abortions for various reasons (none of them mourning or suffering because of it).
I’m really glad you posted this article – I never would have thought to look to Glamour for anything like it.
I’m one of the many silent women. I had an abortion in January and didn’t tell anyone – still haven’t. Once you get used to internalizing it and thinking it’s your own burden, your own stupid fault, it’s hard to find the words.
I sort of expected Glamour to take a pro-choice stance (especially after reading through the Obama and McCain side by side comparison on their politics).
I’m glad to finally see some pro-choice stances in mainstream media. The only other two I have seen was with Scrubs and Rosanne (getting protestors to go away). Not sure if these are mainstream media but I think you get my point about being public with pro-choice. Every other instance I see of unwanted pregnancy whether it be teen pregnancy or adults, they always seem to have to keep the baby. Thank you for posting this article Feministe!
Ashley, the abortion described in this article is not the same as a D&C. They usually offer a mild sedative if you want one, but it is not very painful. It feels a bit crampy. A later term abortion is the same as a D&C, and I am not really sure about the painkillers involved.
Betsy, I’m stunned at how much the cultural conversation about abortion has changed within my lifetime. My mother, an evangelical Christian, has told me that German measles (which can cause birth defects) went around the Sunday school class she attended back in the early 60s, and a couple of married women who were pregnant had hospital abortions. Nobody blinked or suggested they were doing anything wrong, and it was pretty common knowledge — and this was in a conservative Christian milieu. My mother considered an abortion, herself, when she became pregnant with my brother, her third child, in the early 70s; her doctor was afraid that the pregnancy might kill her due to her previous health problems. Again, it was common knowledge, and she has said that she would have had the abortion without a second thought because she already had two children. That sense of pragmatism about life’s choices seems to have disappeared, and it’s a shame.
Ashley, I don’t know if this answers your question because I’m hazy on the details. But when my stepsister needed an abortion (I think something like 15 years ago), she was too self-punishing to allow anyone to help her (or even know about it, probably). So she insisted on driving herself there and back. Normally they would have given her some sort of anesthesia, but they couldn’t because she didn’t have anyone to drive her home and she didn’t want to leave her car there and call a cab. She now thinks she was perversely using it as a way for her to punish herself – don’t know whether for getting pregnant, having the abortion, or something else. I don’t know what kind of abortion this was or how far along she was, so I don’t know if most women getting abortions get it. (This was also 15 years ago; procedures might have changed.)
And Ellen, that’s one of the reasons that I don’t think we’ll ever totally eliminate the need for abortion, even with perfect sex education, awesome social services, etc. We’re human, and humans aren’t going to use birth control 100% of the time, even if they are well-educated. (Not to mention bc failures, but that’s another story.)
Ellen, if that wasn’t a D&C what was it? Because I know early abortions are usually medical, and if they have to go in there and suction you out it’s a D&C. Later is a D&E.
Ashley, it’s because it’s not a D&C. It’s a vacuum tube aspiration abortion, which is a far less invasive procedure than a D&C. For a lot of women, it barely hurts at all, and feels like a menstrual cramp.
Should abortion become illegal again, doctors who do them on the down low will have to do a D&C, because you can always chart that as done to correct menstrual problems, which I suppose is true in its own way.
Er, just vacuum aspiration. It’s actually the preferred method of underground abortion rings, because you can make a machine yourself with rubber tubing and a mason jar. (No joke.) Of course, the fancy electric machines are preferable because they work faster.
medical abortions use medicine within the first 7 weeks. 6 to 12 weeks is still considered an early abortion (probably because it was the earliest you could get one before medical abortions existed). Those use suction aspiration. D & C is used at 12 -15 weeks. Then D & E at 15-20 weeks. After that you have the controversial partial birth abortion which is really only ever used when the health of the mother was at risk.
And Betsy you’re right. It’s ridiculous. Especially considering that most of our birth control options are inadequate. I think it is part of our personal responsibility bootstrap mentality. It’s funny, now that I am in public health, I am even more embarrassed to admit I had an abortion.
This was a great read. I hate the politicization of an issue that is fundamentally private and individual.
Thanks for posting about this! I saw the article in Glamour too and was very impressed because we so rarely hear about women’s personal experiences with abortion. Bravo to Glamour for paving the way to end this “culture of silence” around abortion that is so dangerous!
I came across http://www.abortionchangesyou.com after reading the article accidentally today when I saw an ad on the subway. I’d be interested in your thoughts. It seems to me that, unfortunately, this site portrays abortion as something every woman regrets which it equally as dangerous as silence since this is not always the case and paints a very negative light of a right many women exercise.
I regret none of my reproductive decisions. I regret the necessity for some of them, but I also don’t as a rule play “what-if” games.”
Abortion, eldest son, abortion, one boy adopted at birth, miscarriage, abortion, youngest son, tubal ligation. Seven in six years.
Newsbusters, Brent Bozell’s group that exposes “liberal bias” in news (yeah, right) has a piece on this. The writer claims that the article, which documents the experiences of women who have had abortions, says abortion is “an A-OK option.” The author cites bias in that the abortion counseling services that are referenced in the article are “pro-abortion” (not true) and that mention should have been made of Rachel’s Vinyard and Care Net. Of course, she didn’t mention that these two agencies actively dissuade women from obtaining abortions. As if that wasn’t enough to get my aging Irish dander up, the comments certainly were – and then some. From what I could tell, the majority of the posters were very rightwing, fundamentalist males who kept alluding to the “murder” of innocent babies. This is the kind of rhetoric that breeds abortion clinic violence. It also suggest an extreme misogyny that sees women who have abortions as sexual libertines (yup, one comment) or silly things who, if forced to see the remains of the abortions (yup, several comments) would realize the error of their ways. I actually suspect that they would love to jail (and possibly execute) women who have had abortions. These guys (whom Susan Falludi wrote about 20 years ago in “Backlash”) are so threatened by women who make their own decisions as it implies the demise of the patriarchal power structure. Every sperm is sacred! Anyway, read at the risk of increasing your blood pressure.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/colleen-raezler/2009/02/12/glamour-magazine-delivers-one-sided-pro-abortion-take