I suppose I’m supposed to be uplifted by this. But every time we see a pro-life story in which a woman who actually had an abortion is quoted as saying that no one else should make the decision she was free to make, I get a little uneasy.

I’ve known women and in fact back in college dated women who had previously had abortions. At least one of them, I’m almost certain, would describe those decisions - she actually had two abortions - as a mistake today. So much of a mistake that others should be prevented from making that mistake; ideally through a law which would make it a crime for them to make that same mistake.

We all try to help those who come along in our wake avoid our errors. But when it comes to something like this - I had an abortion and you mustn’t - it sort of makes one cynical. Because freed from the need to carry a pregnancy to term, and all that comes with it; freed from the need to actually hand over a child that you’ve given birth to to someone else; or freed from the need to care for that child, perhaps in some cases a severely ill child, you have a lot of time to sit around and think about the remorse. You have a lot of time to say you should have accepted the burden; but your view might be very different had you accepted the burden. You deem what you did as the greater of two evils specifically because you can’t know what it would have been to have chosen the other path.

People describe evil lib’ruls like me as “pro-abortion,” I’m not pro-abortion. I have two kids and I love kids; I could never be party to the termination of a pregnancy. Come the end of the first trimester, and it really doesn’t even have to be that long, I do consider it a child and not a choice.

But prior to that (and particularly when we’re talking about single fertilized cells, as in the stem cell debate), no, I don’t really consider it either a child or the moral equivalent of a child; again, in my own case, I would not want to terminate a pregnancy, but neither would I have the moral audacity to insist that no one else may terminate a pregnancy at that stage, either.

And so the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade passes as it always does - impassioned folks on both sides of the fence, but most, I’m convinced, somewhere uneasily in the middle, knowing what they might do - but unwilling to insist that everyone else do the exact same thing.