Filling in for a vacationing Thomas Friedman as a columnist with "The New York Times" in 2004, Ehrenreich wrote about how, in the fight for women's reproductive rights, "it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me," and said that she herself "had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years." In her 1990 book of essays "The Worst Years of Our Lives", she wrote that "the one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks."