It’s impossible to open a magazine or turn on a TV show without hearing someone yammer on about when it’s best for women to have babies. Do it too soon, and you’ll basically be poor forever and your kid will end up becoming a Florida carnie when he grows up. Wait too long and your husband has to inject hormone shots into your ass every night and you cry every time you get your period (that is, if you’ve got good enough insurance to be able to afford fancy ass-shots). Ideally, somewhere along the sparkly pink timeline of a woman’s life, there’s a point where she’s financially and emotionally mature enough to support a child and her body is still capable of making babies — but what about the alternative? When’s the best time to have an abortion?
One of the perks (well, side effects) of writing publicly and frequently about how women should be able to control what happens inside their own skin is that every time a friend gets knocked up and wants to end her pregnancy, she ends up confiding in me, a person she knows will not tell her she’s going to hell for choosing abortion. “You’re going to hell for other things,” I’ll say, to make her feel better. “Like the time you peed in that litterbox at a party because the line for the bathroom was too long. Also your engagement ring is made of a conflict diamond.”
The other week, after talking to yet another friend who had seen the plus sign on a pregnancy test, I started thinking about how many women I’ve known over the years who have chosen to end pregnancies. They’ve ranged in age from 17 to their early 40’s. There have been so many, in fact, that a clever anti-abortion rights/baseball fanatic might nickname my phone’s address book “Murderers’ Row.” (and I’d be fine with that, because while I take issue with abortion being equivocated with actual murder, I respect the reappropriation of baseball slang). So when is abortion the best? If I remembered how to use a graphing calculator, I’d make a chart on an X-Y axis. But since I don’t, here’s a weighing of the pros and cons of abortion at almost any age, in listicle form.
Under 18
Pro: Well, duh. This one’s a no-brainer — teenagers aren’t, as an almost universal rule, equipped to be mothers. And pop culture abounds with living, breathing DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN WHEN YOU ARE A TEENAGER warnings — Teen Mom, Bristol Palin, Justin Bieber’s weird mom who went out on a date with Chris Harrison, host of The Bachelor (not to be confused with Chris Hansen, host of To Catch a Predator). When it comes to giving birth as a teen, it’s not a question of IF you’ll experience massive hardship as a result of bringing a child into the world before you’re old enough to legally buy lottery tickets; it’s a matter of how much of a lasting lifefuck will result.
Con: Expense, awkwardness, access. Teenagers don’t tend to have several hundred dollars lying around for an abortion, and having the “Mom, can you drive me to the abortion clinic?” conversation is probably the most awkward talk a teen could have. And (pushes up glasses on nose) 88% of counties in the US don’t have abortion clinics, so a teen with limited resources might have difficulty accessing abortion services until too late. Further, kids still living under their religious parents’ roof may have some Bachmannian hang ups about when life begins and how totally damned they’d be if they ended their pregnancies, making the decision logically sound, but morally difficult. Hell, when I was a teenager, I chose “Madeleine” as my confirmation name and had a button that read VOTE PRO LIFE on my bulletin board in my bedroom.
18-23
Pro: Early twentysomethings still have their whole lives ahead of them, including many years of fecundity. But having a child at this age is less life trajectory-altering than teen motherhood, but young mothers still end up in poverty with greater frequency than the rest of the population.