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From: saquigley@watmath.UUCP (Sophie Quigley)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: My Abortion Views
Message-ID: <8912@watmath.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 9-Sep-84 03:16:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: watmath.8912
Posted: Sun Sep  9 03:16:10 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Sep-84 07:22:22 EDT
References: <988@pyuxa.UUCP>, <3534@cbscc.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 38

I would like to see some real statistics on this issue of "abortion being
used as a birth control method" because I personally do know a few women
who have had abortions, and for some interesting reason, they are not at
all like the ones described by TCWheeler and Paul Dubuc.  All of them have
had ONE abortion which was caused as a result of contraceptive failure and
most of them did not feel very confortable about the fact that they had
an abortion, but were happy that they made the decision to have one.
Some of them had a very hard time deciding whether or not to have an abortion,
some of them had a more easy time, which seemed to me to have been related
somehow to the age of the fetus when the pregnancy was noticed.

One of the women (my cousin as a matter of fact) felt so bad about her
abortion that when her IUD failed a second time she decided to keep the child
rather than abort it, even though she was not really ready emotionally
to do so (after just finishing raising her two children singlehandedly - she is
a widow - she thought that she could finally start relaxing a bit at the age of
45, but instead she had to start all over again).

What does this prove? nothing much except that anybody can provide
anecdotal evidence to support any claim (my story is true btw). 
I have only heard of one real study on the ethical beliefs of women who had
abortions, that done by Carol Gilligan in "In a different voice", and her 
findings  seem to coincide more with my observations than with TCWheeler's or
Paul Dubuc's.  So please people, before you start pulling out your old
cliches about women in fur coats and mercedes having their abortions
before going to have tea with their friends, could you please make sure you
have a way to substantiate your claims.  Otherwise, you are resorting to
cheap slurs to insure that other people agree with you.

Also if you are really interested in finding out how women feel about having
abortions but are not willing to wade through tons of research (which I
doubt very much exists anyway), why don't you simply ask someone who has had
one?  are you so much afraid to find out that women who have abortions are
people too, with feelings like everybody else, or do you not want to hear that
having an abortion is not a barrel of laughs?

Sophie Quigley
...!{clyde,ihnp4,decvax}!watmath!saquigley