Quote:
Abortion - the depressing truth
By ROSEMARY McLEOD
Long ago, when sexual harassment was a given in the workplace - like overtime rates and tea breaks - I worked with a man who became highly agitated during his wife's pregnancy.
My office hours were spent listening to sotto voce rants about which positions he'd favour with me, where and how. Well actually, I exaggerate when I imply that I listened. It was more like having a radio going in the background, or the steady hum of heavy machinery.
I got rattled, though, when he insisted that what I needed in my own life was a baby. After weeks of this I finally did the arithmetic and shoved it under his agitated nose. I'd worked out that, what with loss of earnings and costs, a baby would cost me a squillion dollars - and I didn't even like babies.
That subdued him for a while.
I know more now about the costs -of all kinds - incurred in having babies. How do you quantify months of feeling hideous, the experience of birth - or surgical interventions - and the years of sleepless nights? What value would you put on having a fuzzy brain for years, not being able to concentrate on more than a Dr Seuss book - and even that on a good day?
What about the state of your body afterwards? Yes, there are skinny women who shrink back to crayon size after each birth, but they are freaks of nature. To my mind you'd have to factor in having to wear horrible maternity bras, too, and having leaky breasts. Try feeling intelligent and interesting when you're oozing all over your T-shirt.
I see no mystique, then, in childbearing. I've been there, and hobbled back to civilisation older and worn to a frazzle. The outcome of all your efforts is uncertain. The misery could well outweigh the joy. But for all that, I was a little disturbed by a newspaper headline this past week: "Women can benefit from abortions, study finds".
A treasure of research in this country has to be the Christchurch Health and Development Study, which follows 1265 children born in Christchurch since mid-1977. Its latest finding concerns a group of 492 young women from that study who became pregnant between the ages of 15 and 21. Of these pregnancies, 55% resulted in live births, 31% were terminated, and 14% ended in miscarriage.
It won't surprise anyone that the young women who went ahead and had the babies were financially and educationally worse off afterwards, and that those who had abortions became better educated than the mothers. It did surprise me, though, that nearly half the pregnancies failed, mostly by choice.
Behind these pregnancies there are questions.
Is contraception all it's cracked up to be - or did these young women conceive when they were too drunk or stoned to even think about it? Did the girls who were less likely to value education choose to continue with the pregnancy more often than the others? And - crucially - how did those who had abortions feel afterwards?
An earlier Christchurch Health and Development Study report, published last year, showed that 42% of women who had abortions had also experienced major depression within the previous four years - 35% higher than the rate of those who had the baby, and double the rate of those who'd never been pregnant at all. This was the first research I'm aware of that hinted at the emotional impact of abortion.
I wish the world was rational, and people acted only out of enlightened self interest, but it isn't, and that we were more thoughtful than biological, but we're not. Pregnancy involves lurches of emotion, feelings of fragility, tearfulness - none of which are entirely explainable by logic, and all of which kick in pretty quickly. That's unsurprising; it's full-on preparation for a new and totally dependent human being, and the end of your life as an individual.
Miscarriages, which interrupt that process, are seen as sad events, but abortions are barely mentioned by anyone, and seldom acknowledged: women are supposed to carry on afterwards as if nothing has happened.
It's not easy when their biology is seen as a handicap, and the emotional states hormones inflict on them are expected to be concealed because they're too "feminine".
They may be a drag, these flooding feelings, but they're part of the package. So, I suspect, is a degree of grief over any terminated pregnancy, however logical a woman's decision, or how great her relief that it's over. It's our feelings that make us human, after all, and there seems to be a taint of shame hanging over abortion still. No wonder women get depressed. Why wouldn't they?
By ROSEMARY McLEOD
Long ago, when sexual harassment was a given in the workplace - like overtime rates and tea breaks - I worked with a man who became highly agitated during his wife's pregnancy.
My office hours were spent listening to sotto voce rants about which positions he'd favour with me, where and how. Well actually, I exaggerate when I imply that I listened. It was more like having a radio going in the background, or the steady hum of heavy machinery.
I got rattled, though, when he insisted that what I needed in my own life was a baby. After weeks of this I finally did the arithmetic and shoved it under his agitated nose. I'd worked out that, what with loss of earnings and costs, a baby would cost me a squillion dollars - and I didn't even like babies.
That subdued him for a while.
I know more now about the costs -of all kinds - incurred in having babies. How do you quantify months of feeling hideous, the experience of birth - or surgical interventions - and the years of sleepless nights? What value would you put on having a fuzzy brain for years, not being able to concentrate on more than a Dr Seuss book - and even that on a good day?
What about the state of your body afterwards? Yes, there are skinny women who shrink back to crayon size after each birth, but they are freaks of nature. To my mind you'd have to factor in having to wear horrible maternity bras, too, and having leaky breasts. Try feeling intelligent and interesting when you're oozing all over your T-shirt.
I see no mystique, then, in childbearing. I've been there, and hobbled back to civilisation older and worn to a frazzle. The outcome of all your efforts is uncertain. The misery could well outweigh the joy. But for all that, I was a little disturbed by a newspaper headline this past week: "Women can benefit from abortions, study finds".
A treasure of research in this country has to be the Christchurch Health and Development Study, which follows 1265 children born in Christchurch since mid-1977. Its latest finding concerns a group of 492 young women from that study who became pregnant between the ages of 15 and 21. Of these pregnancies, 55% resulted in live births, 31% were terminated, and 14% ended in miscarriage.
It won't surprise anyone that the young women who went ahead and had the babies were financially and educationally worse off afterwards, and that those who had abortions became better educated than the mothers. It did surprise me, though, that nearly half the pregnancies failed, mostly by choice.
Behind these pregnancies there are questions.
Is contraception all it's cracked up to be - or did these young women conceive when they were too drunk or stoned to even think about it? Did the girls who were less likely to value education choose to continue with the pregnancy more often than the others? And - crucially - how did those who had abortions feel afterwards?
An earlier Christchurch Health and Development Study report, published last year, showed that 42% of women who had abortions had also experienced major depression within the previous four years - 35% higher than the rate of those who had the baby, and double the rate of those who'd never been pregnant at all. This was the first research I'm aware of that hinted at the emotional impact of abortion.
I wish the world was rational, and people acted only out of enlightened self interest, but it isn't, and that we were more thoughtful than biological, but we're not. Pregnancy involves lurches of emotion, feelings of fragility, tearfulness - none of which are entirely explainable by logic, and all of which kick in pretty quickly. That's unsurprising; it's full-on preparation for a new and totally dependent human being, and the end of your life as an individual.
Miscarriages, which interrupt that process, are seen as sad events, but abortions are barely mentioned by anyone, and seldom acknowledged: women are supposed to carry on afterwards as if nothing has happened.
It's not easy when their biology is seen as a handicap, and the emotional states hormones inflict on them are expected to be concealed because they're too "feminine".
They may be a drag, these flooding feelings, but they're part of the package. So, I suspect, is a degree of grief over any terminated pregnancy, however logical a woman's decision, or how great her relief that it's over. It's our feelings that make us human, after all, and there seems to be a taint of shame hanging over abortion still. No wonder women get depressed. Why wouldn't they?
What do you think?
