Is it worse to have two, or four abortions than it is to have one? That is the question Jennifer Baumgardner (co-author of Manifesta) tries to answer on AlterNet today.

She notes that the abortion-positive message behind films such as ‘Speak Out: I had an abortion’ and the I’m not sorry website tend to falter when a woman has more than one abortion.

Is this because it is more complex? The movement to take the stigma out of abortion has a very important place. But is there a limit, perhaps when abortion ‘becomes’ birth control?

“‘There is something in that moment where you are supposed to smarten up,’ agrees Jenny Egan, a twenty-five-year-old ACLU staffer who had an abortion at age sixteen. ‘That is your one fuck-up. [After that,] birth control can’t fail and a condom can’t break.’ But, as Jenny points out, the shame is often not the abortion itself — it’s not the idea of killing a second baby when we are only allowed to kill one — the shame is the shame of getting pregnant. It means that you don’t having enough control and power to take care of yourself.”

Posted by Jess McCabe on 21 November 2005, at 9:13 PM