The “she” in question is Madeleine Albert Berenson, a freelance writer living in Boulder Colorado. The “what” she says better than I ever could is explain why a woman’s decision on whether to have a child when she becomes pregnant should be her business, and hers alone (via The Washington Post):
Twenty-eight years ago this month, I was 19 years old, single and six months pregnant. […]
I’ll never forget coming home from the People’s Community Clinic in a daze the previous December — disbelieving and terrified by what I’d just learned and completely unprepared for my boyfriend’s reaction to the news. When I told him the test was positive, that I was, in fact, pregnant, I saw myself disappear from his view. He looked through me, past me, as though I were no longer in the room. […]
I left, naively believing that in a week or so he would be sorry and come after me and that together we would work through the unexpected challenges of our newly defined and shared future.
To make a long story short: It didn’t happen. […]
[N]o one knows better than I do that an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy is an experience that should not be wished on — let alone mandated to — a worst enemy. The fear, isolation, financial hardship, emotional sacrifice and physical danger involved simply can’t be quantified. Sometimes they are all severe, sometimes only some are — every woman is different, and every situation is different.
But all of these factors are always there. And no one has the right to tell any woman faced with this profound circumstance how she should feel, what she should endure and what she must do. No matter how reasonable or justified or righteous any course of action may seem to someone in his or her own house, office, church or courtroom, at the end of the day, it is your own house you come home to, your own night you stare into and your own future you are choosing. Not theirs.
What was her choice? Does it really matter? It was her business, not mine.
