I'm a man, but abortion changed me too... specifically, a botched, then-illegal abortion that led to the death of my high school girlfriend's best friend. It was the late 60's, when abortion was still illegal, so fearsome to acknowledge that her cause of death was listed as sudden, undiagnosed "ovarian obstruction." But we all knew. And I - a 17 year-old high school kid - was asked to be a pallbearer and carry her coffin.
Forty years later, and I still remember it as if it were yesterday. And as I remember it, I can recall a number of young women, crying with friends by their hallway lockers, then suddenly disappearing from high school, never to be seen or spoken of again. Where did they go?
Abortion changed me, and made me a man committed to choice - to the right of women to choose what to do with their bodies and their lives. No young woman should have to live with the fear and danger that my girlfriends faced before women won the right to choose. I'm Pro-Choice forever!
A. in NYC