25: The best age for an abortion

Or so says Jezebel:

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.

There’s also a “pros and cons” section for the age groups which is actually somehow worse than the article itself.  If the article alone wasn’t enough to make you lose faith in humanity, check out the readers comments, that’ll do it.