All my friends have miscarried. Or almost. Most, when they were students. In the Spanish university in the seventies, the stories of unwanted pregnancies were constant and traumatic. I remember Marta, taking a plane to go to London, clutching a piece of paper with an address, not knowing a word of English. To Ana, who, being a minor, could not get a passport, which required the permission of her parents. She miscarried in a back room and was left sterile. To Laia, whose parents, Catholic and anti-abortion, swallowed her principles and took her to a clinic in Amsterdam. To Neus, who couldn't have an abortion, and that's where her life turned upside down: boyfriend dodging the buck, interrupted studies, any job to raise the child, parents looking after him reluctantly, reproaches... I also remember a girl whose name I don't know. I came to know, desperate, asking in a whisper, to strangers, in the bar of the law school, if we knew of a place to...
True, in the 1970s, birth control was illegal, and not now. But they have contraindications, side effects, failures... How easy it is, from the outside, to accuse women who terminate their pregnancy (that's how one in four ends) of "not having been careful". And even if it were, does a simple failure, such as forgetting the pill one day, deserve a punishment for the next sixty years?
A pregnancy is not a matter of nine months and a delivery: it is a total change of life, for the rest of life. Those of my friends who had an abortion as adults, having a house, a partner, a job... had everything, yes, to be good mothers, except the main thing: wanting it.
Let them have it and give it up for adoption, say some. But that cannot be the general rule, because the figures do not add up: every year 90,000 pregnancies are interrupted, while adoptions are around 1,000. And it must be very difficult to give a person to strangers –which is not the same as an embryo– for whom one feels responsible.
The decision to become a mother or terminate the pregnancy is very serious and must be taken responsibly, that is, with a cool head. Without emotional blackmail, without protecting us as if we were children. You know why I say it.
