I see and understand what she trying to do, but it doesn't work. It's as illogical as the anti-choice near abortion story.

My grandmother was a college-educated woman, yet she had twelve children and died at the age of 57 from a heart condition that was probably caused by poor diet choices and certainly exacerbated by having that many children. Access to abortion - or, better yet, birth control - would have made all the difference in her life.

100% pro choice but I think both essays are nutty.

Cienna, thank you for posting this. It’s good to see someone expressing this thought I’ve long had.

I find the arguments “but I wouldn’t be here!” to be so illogical. And not to be mean, but we wouldn’t have missed [you]. Really, we’d have had no idea.

My grandmother should not have had my mother. My mother’s childhood was terrible. My aunt, born 16 years later, also had a traumatic childhood. It’s insincere to say now, “oh, but I’m glad they were born or else I wouldn’t be here.” The world would still be spinning. I wouldn’t have known the difference. You would not have known to mourn my absence.

I will pass that essay on. Well worth the read.

Also, Cienna, thanks for showing me my new favorite website.

At the point pro-choice advocates are saying, "I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me," they have lapsed into self-parody and the pro-lifers have won the argument.

@1 What makes it illogical?

Jesus. That was idiotic. While I fully support a women's right to choose, now I wish her mother had aborted her too.

In fact all the people in here who are saying they should have been aborted— there's the door. Abort yourself now. Its not too late. Not many people will miss you now, either. I mean the world will STILL keep spinning, right?

Oh you have children and spouses? Well, heck abort them, too. Retroactivity is all the rage these days.

And collectively the world will keep spinning even after that and not miss the lot of you.

In fact, following this logic, if you're American consumers eating away at the world resources 10x the rate of every other human it probably WOULD be better for the world if you and your progeny were aborted. Heck. If that's your logic then follow through.

If we have to explain why this article presents a stupid bottomless utilitarian argument then you're probably too dumb to understand the explanation.

@9: really, tkc? How many kids do you have (or plan on having)? The utilitarian reasoning seems quite sound to me. Not reproducing is the best any of us can do for the planet, other than offing ourselves.

tkc dear, Just who "in here" are saying they wished they'd been aborted? I know people like you tend to be high-strung, but please try to stay reality-based.

Some commenters - myself included - have spoken of mothers or grandmothers who had to deal with circumstances. It's not about wishing we, or our mothers or grandmothers, had been aborted.

@8 I have to explain how it's illogical she wish she didn't exist and yet keep on existing?

Both pro-choice and anti-choice essays are stupid. You were either born and you're alive, or you weren't born and you don't exist. It's too late to not have existed if you did.

God damn post-modernists.

Wow. I had never heard of Gordon Dalbey, and now he ranks high on my mental compendium of manipulative pieces of shit. I mean, I cut him a little slack because he seems genuinely self-deluded, but you really kinda have to try to be THAT self-deluded, so basically fuck that guy. Yuck.

Wow.

I prefer my refuting the stupid "I wouldn't be here if my mom had had an abortion" with (the very true for me) "I wouldn't be here if my Dad's first wife hadn't had an abortion."

@7: Only in the mind of one as simple as yourself.

Being aborted as an embryo is not the same as committing suicide as an adult. Equating the two morally in the context
of pro-life vs pro-choice positions is begging the question.

I'm not going to lie, I was a very wanted baby. But i also wonder too, had i been aborted, would my mother's life been better?

From what i have been told, i was the only one of my mother's 3 living birthed children she planned. (I had a brother born stillborn) My my half sister (and stillborn brother) - were from a previous marriage. Neither of them were planned. She met my dad - and they wanted to have a baby together, though maybe not be married - it was the 70's, though, and they did get married 6 months after my birth.

My father, at first from what i have been told by family members other than my mother, wasn't a monster, but he quickly turned to drugs and booze after my birth. As long as I've known him, he's been a misogynistic asshole who thought he was "king'. I can't think he only thought that way just because of the drugs and booze, but he's been that way since he's become sober, as well.

He was horrible. Mean. Domineering. Controlling. And stupid as the day is long. (and still is)

I often wonder, if my mother hadn't been straddled down with a newborn infant, would she have left? She was no saint of a mother, either, mind you, but would it have been better for her not to have me? i know she stayed with my dad for *years* after she should have "for the sake of the children", and when my younger sister came along, unexpected though my mother was on the pill, that *really* cemented it.

There is a part of me that wishes she'd aborted me. Not just for her sake, but for mine too. I could have been the product of someone else - like my awesome stepdad, while being an extreme conservative, is a great person and loving father. She and my older sister could have had many more loving years - and selfishly, I could have had them too as someone else's child.

I do not want to stop existing, I enjoy my life. I have friends, a good relationship with my father, a fantastic boyfriend and a bright future ahead of me. But do I think that if would have been better if thirty years ago, instead of marrying my mother, my father had looked into her eyes, seen all the crazy, dumped her and never looked back? Even though that would mean I didn't exist today? Yes. It would have. My mother terrorized my entire family. She ruined my childhood and my sisters' childhoods and she ruined more than 20 years of my fathers life. It wasn't until after they got divorced and my father found a new woman that he told me "For the first time, I actually feel loved. I never felt loved with your mother". I wish that he could have had that when he was young, I wish he could have had a happy marriage and a happy family with well-adjusted kids. So in essence, I wish that I had not been born. But I would never, ever in a million years commit suicide. Why is that so hard to grasp? What about it is so illogical?

"as a foetus he cried out to God"

Yeah right! So for the rest of his life, he's going to wallow around in pity because his mother didn't succeed in aborting him? He needs psychological help.

@21 well, and what an ego. If he as a barely formed bunch of cells was special enough to get God to step in and save him, what does it say about a living child in danger who cries to God yet still dies by a parent's hand? Did that child have less worth to God than the unaborted fetus?

@19 I would love some planted memories, as long as they were wonderful. If I could get recovered memories of an amazing childhood and a degree from Harvard, I'm in.

Let's say a girl has sex as a teenager, gets pregnant, considers abortion, and then has the baby. Years later, that baby is this guy, saying "I'm so glad my mother didn't abort me." Notice he doesn't say, "I'm so glad my mother had underage sex." And why is that? He wouldn't exist without the sex any more than he would exist if she'd had the abortion.

Nobody says, "I'm so glad my mother was raped." Nobody says, "I'm so glad my mother had that cocaine addiction problem and turned tricks for extra money." Nobody says, "I'm so glad my biological grandfather was in the habit of sexually abusing my mother."

It has never occurred to me to wish my mother had had an abortion, but I have thought her life might have been better if she had never married my father and I had never been born. I used to feel guilty about this, but she made the choices she made, and here we are.

I am very happy that my mother, against the advice of her Dr, chose not to abort me. I am also very happy that my mother got to make that choice rather than having it dictated to her by the government.

I will never understand how anti-government/pro-"freedom" conservatives can possibly justify the government coming in to make the most personal decisions possible for people, regulating them right down to their internal organs.

@11, Well, sweetie, It's a cute and pithy table turning essay but it's not any argument to counter the Pro-life positions.

The essay, and the some comments, directly inferred by those would-be-aborted fetuses that in hindsight abortion would have been a "better" option. "Should" implies something.

If it was better for granny to have aborted mommie, or mommie to have aborted you, - and the "world would still keep turning" - then, logically, it's STILL better. What's changed? The world will still turn if you die today. What's so important about you now? Nothing if you take that utilitarian line of reasoning.

That an individual person's total contributions likely don't amount to that much is not a valid or moral argument FOR abortion. Nor is the potential contribution of an aborted fetus a valid argument AGAINST abortion.

The argument pits one set of unknowns and suppositions against another equally unprovable set of assumptions and all based on highly speculative and subjective utilitarian criteria reviewed in hindsight.

Not only that, if we set down the road to utilitarianism we basically start measuring human worth by impossibly absolutist economic metrics. So, if that's what you want - kill yourself now: A thousand people can live off the resources you as an American can consume. Positive utility established!

Abortion should be legal simply because a grown adult woman's CHOICES take precedent over a clump of undifferentiated cells that reside inside her. And abortion should be legal because the confines of your own body is sacrosanct. Full stop.

What that clump of cells might or might not become or regret in the future, or what the government wants with that clump, is irrelevant.

Abortion isn't needed in hindsight or in the future. It's needed in the present. That is where the valid argument lives.

If you think rhetoric like in this essay is convincing or compelling, then it's no wonder my fellow liberals are losing ground politically.

Debating these idiots on their level just makes us idiots too.

Also. The title of this post is "I Wish My Mother Had Aborted Me"

The title of the linked article is "I Wish My Mother Had Aborted Me", you pedantic dipshit, not a fervent wish from Cienna.

If we follow your logic, the world would keep spinning even if you were dead, so why don't you kill yourself? Wow, your argument is so foolproof even I can use it against you!

No really, you taking someone to task for using a very common expression to indicate how insignificant we all are is very persuasive. Taking literally what ought to be taken figuratively is an A++ way of spinning the argument in your favor, especially when you follow it up with some wonderful hyperbole equating never having existed with ending your life now. Which, by the way, you should definitely do. I can honestly say that I would be a much happier person with you dead right now, than with you having never existed.

Why you insist on being such a consistently wrong piece of shit, day after day, when you could just as easily stop doing that and everything else is beyond me.

I bet she listens to Evanescance.