What Kind of Life?
The best research to date suggests that the vast majority of women who have abortions aren't plagued by regret. One tells her story

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: "While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexcep­tionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow."

It is unexceptionable to conclude that Justice Kennedy and his four concurring justices have never created and sustained an infant and do not have degrees in psychology. They do admit that they have no reliable data, but apparently base their "unexceptionable" conclusion on the old norm for determining what is pornographic—that is, they know it when they see it.

Having personally created, sustained, and aborted fetuses myself, and further, having talked with many women who have done the same, I'd like to offer my own reliable data for the Court's future forays into the tricky realm of female mental health, and—let's face it, because this is what they are alluding to—female spirituality.

I begin with a June evening in Salamanca, in western Spain. I am sitting in the late light with a man I love. Families stroll aimlessly, casting shadows onto the sand-colored stones of the plaza. We are sipping vino tinto at a small round table, watching the remains of the sun turn the dust golden. I feel the future in that light, a realm of glorious possibility. In the years to come, I will go to Paris, to Istanbul, to the shores of the Indian Ocean. I will have countless transcendent moments, including the births of our children.

Rewind about two years before Salamanca. I am five weeks pregnant with an embryo created with a man I'm not sure I love. What I know with certainty is that I face a life that looks something like this: I marry a man who doesn't inspire me. We buy a stroller and a crib. I tether myself to diaper bag and stroller. Together, we three share a roof until death do us part. Or: I don't marry him, but I have his child. I tether myself to stroller and crib, and when I can get away, it is only to scrape and scratch out a living as a single mother—a role I've never wanted, although I know many women eagerly choose it, or gracefully accept it.

Either way, I'm bitter, unfulfilled, driven mad by the crushing weight of the parenthood I didn't want. Severe depression and loss of esteem (in the eyes of the world or the self—Kennedy curiously makes no distinction—but what difference does it make at this point?) follow. That's my parallel universe, the realm of quiet desperation, suffocating sacrifice, a place where to long for the transcendent is to wish for death. My version of hell.

Many foes of abortion believe in a heaven after this life, a heaven where I will meet my aborted fetus again in a glow more golden than that late June light in Spain, and where this vale of tears is but a dim, dark memory. With all due respect to their beliefs, I believe in transcendence here on earth. It exists in independence, self-determination, and love, none of which is possible in the universe Justice Kennedy and friends are crafting. For the psychological record, I don't regret that abortion; it has not depressed me, nor lowered my worldly or self-esteem. (I'm not putting my name on this essay, but I'd proudly do so if it weren't against my employer's policy to express political views.) On the contrary, it was a crack in a wall that I found in the nick of time, fleeing an infinitely depressing place.

I know that I transmit my notion of the joy inherent in this world to the children that I did choose to have. And I know that my children are better, more hopeful, and healthier people for it.

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