This Is The Perfect Reason To Have An Abortion

Article originally appeared in Refinery 29 on October 20th, 2020.

There’s a good chance that you support abortion rights if you clicked on this story. You may already suspect that the title of the article is purposely attention-getting and even mildly tongue-in-cheek. You understand that there is no perfect reason to have an abortion; or, rather, that every reason is the perfect reason — as long as the person making the choice was able to decide for themselves, and follow through on that decision without unwanted interference.

And yet, even within communities that ostensibly support the right to abortion, there exist pervasive and damaging stigmas against certain “types” of abortion. “We’ve found that when people share their abortion stories, they often hear: ‘Well I’m pro-choice, but — I think you waited too long.’ ‘I think you had too many.’ ‘You didn’t use birth control’,” says Renee Bracey Sherman, a reproductive justice activist, author of Saying Abortion Aloud, and executive director of We Testify.