Unless you have been living under a rock in a cave on Mars, you know of the never-ending debate in America on the subject of abortion.

I have been on both side of this debate. I started out as an unwanted pregnancy, and I had and unwanted pregnancy. To all the “True Believers” with your obvious, unoriginal and completely worn-out arguments against abortion, I politely ask that you promptly get bent. That being said…

On being unwanted

My parents got pregnant the way many couples do; they were horny and stupid. They were in their early twenties, uneducated, unskilled, without plans for a family and without means to provide for one. They should have aborted me. They didn’t. Now, I was luckier than many unwanted children because my parents always loved me and to this day they are a happy couple. Even so, life was so much harder than it needed to be. They couldn’t afford day care, so my mother stayed home with me and without her income, my father had to work sixteen hour days in various trades for much of my childhood when he should have been in school and building a career that he enjoyed. I still can’t remember him ever coming home happy. The financial stress in my family was obvious to me even when I was very young. To this day my father still works in the trades and it is killing him.

On getting knocked up

In high school, I was involved with a boy as so many high school girls are. We remained a couple until graduation when he moved away to go to college. He was home visiting the following Christmas, and during that time we slept together. Though I was on the pill, I still got pregnant. I was eightteen, not yet in college, still living at home and even less prepared than my parents were when they had me.

Neither the father or myself had any means to provide for this child. Neither of us wanted this child. I did have thoughts of motherhood, who wouldn’t, but they were little more than charming fantasies of what parenthood should be in a Hallmark commercial. I have just enough maternal instinct not to eat my young shortly after birth.

This child would have deserved a yard with a fence and a dog in a nice neighborhood, and play dates, and a nice big room with colorful wallpaper, and seeing mom and dad holding hands on the porch swing. I had no yard or fence or dog or house or a job that would allow me to acquire these things, and the father and I were as far as two people can be from a healthy relationship.

I had an abortion. I went alone because the father was no longer in town. I did it all on my own, went home in a cab, sat by myself and mourned alone, and I’m not sorry. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, and I’d do it again. I was lucky; my parents loved each other and loved me but they barely pulled it off.

The father of my child and I were not in love. In fact, we hardly even liked each other. We simply had an itch to scratch and opted to scratch it. I could never ask a child to pay a lifetime of difficulty because one night mommy didn’t ignore an impulse. I had no love for that child, only resentment, and the desperate kind of affection brought on by hormones triggered by a genetic program to ensure the survival of my species. A child needs more than that, so much more than I could, or would ever give. I had an abortion, and it saved more lives than just my own.