Would you be here if...........

[TexasSky]

I was conceived and born to my parents when it was one of the worst possible times to expand their family. When I was conceived, my Dad's employer had gone belly-up, so he was taking odd jobs out of state, only visiting home when he had holidays. My mother's brother had just died, and that had caused all kinds of health issues for my grandmother, so mother was trying to work as a registered nurse, care for a toddler (my older sister), and care for her own parents. Money was tight. When I was actually born, a flood took out their house.

But, mother didn't have the option of an abortion, and swears she wouldn't have done it if she had had that option.



My best friend was the second-to-the-last child in a house full of children. Her parents were dirt poor, and they used birth control, but it kept failing. Her parents were struggling with marriage and job issues too. Abortion wasn't an option.


My grandmother tells me that she and my grandfather used to laugh and brag that they were not going to be foolish and have children "too soon" when they married. It was the Great Depression. God suprised them with my Uncle, and then my mother.

A lot of people love Oprah Winfrey, but her childhood was horrid.

My sister was told that the baby she was carrying was going to be born retarded. The tests they do all showed "something was wrong". She had to wrestle with whether or not to have the baby or have an abortion. She had the baby, and it turned out the tests were wrong. The baby, (not a beautiful 16 year old teenager) is not only not retarded, but she is highly intelligent, and totally healthy. No deformities about her.

So, I'm just curious.

Do you think if your parents had the choices we have today - - - (some of your are young enough that your parents did have the choice) ... that you would be born or aborted?

 

[WatersMoon110]

My mother is Pro-Choice, she chose to keep all four of her children. I was a planned child, she wanted a second daughter to keep my older sister company. So the answer is, yes, I would.

 

[selfinflikted]

Do you think if your parents had the choices we have today - - - (some of your are young enough that your parents did have the choice) ... that you would be born or aborted?

It really doesn't matter, none of us would have known the difference anyway.

 

[GrayCat]

I was born through that test-tube fertility treatment thing where they take a sperm and an egg from the parents, grow the embryo in a lab, then plant it in the Mother's womb so it will have a better chance of sticking.

So obviously i would have been born because my mom wanted a baby that much to have had fertility treatment.

 

[quatona]

Do you think if your parents had the choices we have today - - - (some of your are young enough that your parents did have the choice) ... that you would be born or aborted?

Y
You make it sound like abortion has been around only a short time. While in fact it´s an age-old phenomenon.

I don´t know whether my parents would have aborted under different conditions, and, frankly, I don´t care at all.
Non-existence is not really a problem for the person who doesn´t exist.

But once we are at funny "what if´s":
It did not only require my parents not to abort for me to come into existence, it also required generations upon generations of my anchestors not to abort their child - without one single exception in the very long chain. Amazing, huh?

 

[flicka]

My parents tried for both me and my brother so there was no question.

It's also interesting to think about who wouldn't be here if their mother hadn't aborted an earlier pregnancy.

What if's are interesting but useless.

 

[JadeTigress]

Well, my parents did have me, so I guess it's pretty well a non-issue. But my mom got pregnant with my oldest brother at 18, just shortly after she got married. My mom was catholic at the time, so I doubt that she was using birth control. Anyway, she and my dad were dirt poor. Less than a year later, my second oldest brother was born. And this was at a time in their life when my dad was working at a gas station, and made such a small amount of money that she only had $12 a week to buy food for the four of them. She had my third oldest brother and myself several years later, at a time when they were still pretty poor, but not quite as poor.

So I guess either my parents wanted four kids, or they were too poor to pay for abortions.

 

[Patashu]

My parents tried for both me and my brother so there was no question.

It's also interesting to think about who wouldn't be here if their mother hadn't aborted an earlier pregnancy.

What if's are interesting but useless.

Hell, if my parents had sex at just the slightest different moment I would never have been born.

 

[gwenmead]

When I was born, my parents had a host of family planning tools to choose from - namely, a broad variety of safe, reliable contraceptives. A year after I was born, Roe vs. Wade passed, and another potential family planning tool was available to them. My sibling was born a few years later.

My parents (my mother in particular) wanted to have children. They used the first set of tools to choose the timing. Since they actually wanted children, to the best of my knowledge they never felt compelled to use the second tool.

Unless something had gone seriously, seriously wrong with either pregnancy, both myself and my sibling would have been born, as - of course - we were. I don't know that my birth would have been my choice, but it was the choice of my parents. So here I am.

 

[QuakerOats]

Do you think if your parents had the choices we have today - - - (some of your are young enough that your parents did have the choice) ... that you would be born or aborted?

I was planned, so yes I would still have been born. I think that, if she had known how I'd turn out, she may have went ahead and aborted me though.

 

[Domenico]

Although I was unplanned (I was my mothers third child in two years) my parents were desperate for a second daughter, and I doubt Mama would have given up that chance.

 

[PurpletheHeathen]

Do you think if your parents had the choices we have today - - - (some of your are young enough that your parents did have the choice) ... that you would be born or aborted?

Um I do know, if my mother had had the choice she would have aborted me, she told me so. I'm still pro-choice, surprising? I guess.

I've felt the wrath of prolifers and I hope they never get what they want, from their actions I fear they really do want the blood of all women who might even think abortion, AND to limit healthcare, non-abortion, but sexually related healthcare.

I never intended to have an abortion, but with my third child some tests came back showing a possibility of a problem, other tests just made it look worse and the doctors wanted to do more tests, an amniocentesis test. Not so I could abort if there was a problem, but to determine the best way to deliver the baby if such problems were in fact present. All I did was ask for prayer, and got yelled at for an hour about being a baby killer. Again I had NO intention of having an abortion. The self righeous irrational anger from the prolife camp scares me. I remain pro-choice.

After my daughter was born healthy, which is what the amnio came back and said anyway. I shared this with a Christian friend, and before I could get through sharing was told I was stupid, she said doctors ALWAYS do this, and the only reason to have an amnio was so they could talk the mother into an abortion. She said they had said the same thing about her son, but that she, because she would NEVER have an abortion refused the test. Repeating how STUPID it is to EVER have an amnio, and it's ONLY purpose is to talk mothers into killing their babies. When I started to tell her my doctors, yes plural I spoke to 3, reasons, she called first me, then them liars, then she had the audacity to call me irrational.

 

[flicka]

Um I do know, if my mother had had the choice she would have aborted me, she told me so. I'm still pro-choice, surprising? I guess.

I've felt the wrath of prolifers and I hope they never get what they want, from their actions I fear they really do want the blood of all women who might even think abortion, AND to limit healthcare, non-abortion, but sexually related healthcare.

I never intended to have an abortion, but with my third child some tests came back showing a possibility of a problem, other tests just made it look worse and the doctors wanted to do more tests, an amniocentesis test. Not so I could abort if there was a problem, but to determine the best way to deliver the baby if such problems were in fact present. All I did was ask for prayer, and got yelled at for an hour about being a baby killer. Again I had NO intention of having an abortion. The self righeous irrational anger from the prolife camp scares me. I remain pro-choice.

After my daughter was born healthy, which is what the amnio came back and said anyway. I shared this with a Christian friend, and before I could get through sharing was told I was stupid, she said doctors ALWAYS do this, and the only reason to have an amnio was so they could talk the mother into an abortion. She said they had said the same thing about her son, but that she, because she would NEVER have an abortion refused the test. Repeating how STUPID it is to EVER have an amnio, and it's ONLY purpose is to talk mothers into killing their babies. When I started to tell her my doctors, yes plural I spoke to 3, reasons, she called first me, then them liars, then she had the audacity to call me irrational.

It's difficult to take some people seriously isn't it? It's a shame because it's people like that who prevent others from ever having meaningful dialog about controversial issues.

 

[Soul Searcher]

Yes I would still be here, no doubt about it.

 

[Pogue]

I wasn't born into ideal circumstances (not horrible either, just not ideal. It was in Essex, for a start ) but there was no way my mother would ever have gone for an abortion, pretty much no matter what the circumstances. She was, and remains, staunchly opposed to abortion.

 

[Chajara]

My mother went and got one abortion after my dad kept pressuring her for a baby... and then after finding herself pregnant (before she even got a chance to tell him) she caught him cheating. I don't know what exactly went through her mind, but it must have been utter torment.

Unfortunately, she was so entrenched in the abuse my dad dished out that instead of leaving him she promptly got pregnant again... with me.

 

[yasic]

Actually it would be the opposite for me. My mother had an abortion a year before I was conceived. If she did not have this abortion, then I would have never been born as she would be taking care that that other child.

 

[Robbie_James_Francis]

I would never have been born if the US military hadn't existed, because my dad would still be in California instead of being in the UK 20 years ago. I would never have been born if there hadn't been better job prospects in the East of England for Irish immigrants 80 years ago.

Does that affect the morality of foreign military bases or immigration?

An unfathomable number of imaginary people aren't born every day because certain men and women happen not to meet and have sex. So?

 

[TexasSky]

We were all born when abortion was a choice. Our mothers could have aborted any of us, regardless of what age they were when they concieved, or what time it was in the nation. The only difference is some of us were born before abortion was a legal choice, some of us after.

My mother got pregnant at 18 the second time she had sex. This was pre RvW. She talked about her experience at finding herself pregnant at 18, thrown out of college (pregnant women didn't go to college back then), parents not speaking her, broke and alone... She said that she considered abortion and even had an appointment for it, but changed her mind. When I pointed out that my sister was born pre RvW, she just looked at me dumbfounded and said "Do you think that meant nobody could get abortions? Or didn't know where to go or how to go about getting one if they wanted it? I knew where to go and how to get one, and it wasn't hard to set one up. If I had wanted it, it would have happened."

Besides which, pre RvW doesn't mean that abortion was illegal in all of the US, only parts of it. NH, my home state, has never in its history made abortion illegal. Pre RvW, people travelled from Mass and Maine and NY to have abortions in our state because it was legal. RvW didn't overturn a federal law, it overturned the state laws that had outlawed abortion. Abortion was, however, legal in quite a few states and quite easy to get... And in the states that outlawed abortion, abortion was still quite easy to find and get. That's why I love the push to overturn RvW. If RvW is overturned tomorrow, abortion will still be legal in states like mine with no laws against it.

We are all here because our parents chose us to be. There isn't a single one of us that predates the technology of abortions. Somebody claims that they didn't have the choice back then? Pish, posh. They did, they just chose not to, for whatever reason.

That's why I'm pro-choice. Abortion will always be a choice. I want abortion to always be a safe choice, a legal choice, a choice that people can make with information and education and knowing all the facts. Not like it was before where people were so uneducated about it, but still so desperate to not be pregnant, that they used coat hangers and bought vials of draino for $200 to inject into their uteruses to induce an abortion, and kill themselves at the same time.

Anyway, to answer the question... If we're here, it's because our mothers chose to have us, and it has nothing to do with if abortion was legal or not at the time.

Actually,

For a great many people in this world, "Illegal meant no choice," and certainly "unChristian," and before RvW, the view of ALL churches was that abortion was a sin.

 

[TexasSky]

Okay,

Let's "Reverse" this question.

What circumstances would lead you to have an abortion? (If you are male, what circumstances would lead you to encourage a woman to abort a child you fathered?)