I confess to having been a tad relieved–that’s not really the right word here–when I saw that the New York Times mother who “reduced” was Amy Richards, a prominent “third wave” feminist activist. (She co-authored the book Manifesta.) Ironically, this is what her friend (and co-author on the book) Jennifer Baumgardner wrote in The Nation about Richards in a piece about the tragic “I’m Not Sorry” movement:
If abortion were connected to actual women–people like my friend Amy Richards, who had an abortion at 18 and a selective reduction last year when she found she was pregnant with triplets, or Nancy Flynn, who was a single mom finishing her BA at Cornell when she had an abortion and who told me she would “never have been able to have the rich life I’ve had and help my son as much as I have if I’d been the single mother of two children”–perhaps the mounting restrictions wouldn’t pass so handily. To paraphrase the late poet Muriel Rukeyser: What if women told the truth about their abortions? Even if the world didn’t split open, this paralyzing issue might.
I don’t know about you, but stories like those make me want more restrictions, not fewer–and I don’t think you have to be a dyed-in-the-wool pro-lifer to have that reaction.