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5.0étoiles sur 5
What sort of "choice" is abortion?, Juil 16 2002
"No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg."With that line, Frederica Matthewes-Green has opened up a new line of dialogue about the tragedy which is abortion. Whether pro-choice or pro-life, everyone agrees that abortion should be rare. But the debate about abortion has rarely moved on to ask what we might all do to make abortion rare. Matthewes-Green has continued on in this direction by conducting an extensive research project inquiring into the circumstances which lead women to choose abortion. REAL CHOICES presents her findings, which should serve as a basis for dialogue about what we all can do change a world in which 1,500,000 women every year seek abortion in the United States alone. She used a combination of surveys, and most poignantly, discussion groups to listen to women reflect on the life situations that forced them into abortion. The stories are heart-rending. Too often, women are forced into abortion by the fathers, by their parents, by their counselors, and by their friends. The procedure itself is violent, not just for the life which is destroyed, but for the woman who experiences it. Many women seek out abortion because they feel they have no other choice. REAL CHOICES asks us to think harder about ways in which we could offer women more positive options. We are all complicit in the abortion tragedy - when we assume that problems can be disposed of (without asking what consequence this has for the woman and her child), when we allow fathers to shirk their responsibility to the mother and her child, when we allow parents to pressure their children to get rid of "embarrassments", when we look askance at the girl in the class who is actually pregnant, we collectively create a climate in which women have no real choice at all. If we all agree that abortion should be rare, then we should all be passionately interested in understanding the situations that force women to abort. The irony of the pro-choice movement is that it has created a climate in which many women feel they have no choice at all. The tragedy of the pro-life movement is that by pitting the life of the unborn against the needs of the mother, it has forced troubled women to refuse to acknowledge the reality of what they are doing. Matthewes-Green suggests that more compassion on both sides would go a long way towards healing our nation of its greatest wound. REAL CHOICES is essential reading.
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