What Makes People Change Their Minds About Abortion?

In the conservative Houston community where Stephanie grew up, abortion was a concept so heinous that adults almost never mentioned it by name. Both her parents are refugees from El Salvador; her father is Catholic and her mother is an Evangelical Christian. The message she received from her family, over and over again, was that ending a pregnancy amounted to “the murder of a child, the worst thing a woman can do.”

“According to some people, God forgives all, but for the people that I was raised by, God does not forgive abortion,” she says. A woman who got an abortion would go to “hell for eternity and burn and there is nothing else.”

But when Stephanie was a senior in high school, she found out she was pregnant on a dare. A high-school classmate, disbelieving she actually had a boyfriend, goaded her into taking a test in the middle of class. Sitting in the bathroom and watching the positive result materialize, she knew instantly that she wasn’t continuing the pregnancy. “In that moment, there was no other thought,” she recalls. “I thought abortion was going to leave me infertile, and that I was going to have depression and breast cancer and I would never have sex again — so many bad things were going to happen, and it was irrelevant. It was just, I’m not having this child.” 

First, something good: Ketanji Brown Jackson is officially a Supreme Court justice! And not a moment too soon, because the Court really is committed to fucking up everything they can. (Here’s the full scorecard for those keeping track.) In DCOM news, Marnie and Kal from Halloweentown just got engaged. Seriously, how are people still getting conned by Anna Delvey? The Met Museum is raising ticket prices by $5, but New York residents don’t need to worry. We’d never considered the occupational hazards of working at Medieval Times, but hell yeah, give those knights a union. Jotting down all the titles from Ottessa Moshfegh’s bookshelf. It’s no accident that Trump’s defenders are calling Cassidy Hutchinson “Amber Heard 2.0” to discredit her testimony. And Amazon wishes you a happy last day of Pride.

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