It took a decade of therapy and psychiatry for me to recover, and I was 35 before I had an entire healthy year. I have always thought it would make no sense for my parents to give birth to me if it happened today and they had a choice. It is not a favor or something moral to give birth to a child you cannot properly parent or care for or who will suffer from completely predictable inherited family diseases.

God gave us intellectual reason so that we are not forced to breed mindlessly like rodents. If I had the power to choose as a fetus, I would have chosen to be aborted if it meant even a chance of improving my mother’s miserable life.

I have always found it odd that folks assume a fetus would choose its own life over the life and welfare of its mother and family. Why do we make that assumption? Would such a choice be moral? Is it not incumbent on a parent to make the moral choice for the fetus?

I have always been more comfortable with the Buddhist approach. Taking any life is always bad karma, even if unavoidable. However, causing the death or disability of your mother by your birth is much worse karma and constitutes the worst possible rebirth for the child’s soul. If a parent can avoid it morally, they should do so for the child’s sake. The soul of the fetus simply remains in its pre-birth state and is subsequently born into another child.

Although we kid ourselves otherwise, concepts of morality are highly subjective. That is why attempting to legislate it is so fruitless. Every human should have exclusive legal right over their body and its contents. Anything less is slavery.

I had an abortion at 30 after a reckless sexual encounter because I was single, not well enough to care for a child, did not believe knowingly passing on bad genetics made moral sense, and I would have had to stop my medications and further ruined my own health. I was also severely depressed and thought life was not worth living.

I never doubted my decision. I believe it was a sin and bad karma, but much less than bringing a child into the world under those circumstances. Life is often about choosing the least of all evils. I believe I am forgiven by a merciful god and thankful that I can spend what is left of my life striving to generate good karma and be of service to god and mankind.

On the bright side, my mom was finally successfully treated in her 70s and I had the opportunity to dote on her during her very happy second childhood as a result of Alzheimers until her death.

I am pro-choice, but I support a local pro-life group whose focus is on providing positive spiritual and practical support for women facing crisis pregnancies as opposed to passing laws. Solving very real practical problems eliminates the need for an abortion for many women.

The real tragedy is how many woman must choose abortion because of finances, homelessness, or other problems solvable with a little help from others. How many cannot control their sexuality or reproduction because of rape, incest, forced prostitution, or drug addiction? It is not really a free choice if you have no personal or financial power.

(Privacy is my personal choice, so please do not post my name or email ID in your reader series.)

He thought a child might be what was missing in his life and might make him happy. Incredulous, I told him there’s no way I’d have a baby under our current circumstances, just because he “might” like it.  

So he sabotaged the birth control. After one of the rare occasions we were still having sex, he told me “the condom must have fallen off and I didn’t notice.” I was naive and took him at his word. Because there was no morning-after pill in those days, so I just used more foam and hoped for the best.

It was years later before I had enough life experience to realize: men know when they’re wearing a condom. It doesn’t slip off and you don’t notice, any more than you lose a shoe and don’t notice. He either intentionally removed it, or it came off accidentally-on-purpose, and he chose not to say anything.

I did get pregnant. He was furious: “You can’t have an abortion, we’re married, that’s not fair to me.” I pointed out that he’d been pushing for a divorce for months, our marriage had failed, and I wouldn’t bring a child into this situation—period.

I went alone to the doctor’s office, taking a taxi because he refused to drive me. Fortunately during these times I lived in an urban area in a state that had plenty of clinics and medical facilities, and I had the money to pay for “optional” health care like abortions.  

End of story: we got divorced. I finished grad school and build a great career.  Along the way I met a wonderful man and have been happily married with a family for many years now.  If I had been a divorced mom with a baby, I wouldn’t have been able to finish graduate school, would not have met my future husband, would not have my career, would not have my life as it is today.  

I wasn’t an alcoholic when we fell in love, and I still loved her very much, but the booze got a hold of me and was destroying our lives. We had sex infrequently because of my drinking. I remember noticing how her skin changed to my touch. I don’t know how to describe it; she felt different.

When I shipped out to sea, it was a low point for us. I knew there was something going on, but we could not talk about it because everything was colored by my drinking. We needed to be together, but I couldn’t just quit my job, since we needed the money.

When I was back in port visiting, I called to meet her at a joint in town. When I got there I waited, and waited, and waited. I finally packed it in and took a cab back to the dock. She did arrive at the joint and saw my cab pull away and tried to follow, but she gave up and went home.

I called later that night and knew something had happened, but she didn’t say what. Whatever it was, I could tell in my calls home for the rest of the voyage that things had been resolved. I had a hunch she had been pregnant and had an abortion.

When I finally got home, her skin and her touch was back to normal, and it was then that I knew. I think I was the one who asked, and she said yes. We didn't talk about it much. We both hurt badly, but my drinking just fucked up everything. I wasn’t angry; I understood. I felt very sad for both of us. At that point in our marriage, it was pretty bad.

I did quit drinking about a year later, doing the AA thing, and I’ve done so for 34 years now. I’d like to say things all worked out, but that’s not what happened. We divorced a few years after I quit drinking. The patterns of behavior between us could not change even with me sober, even with marriage counseling.

Turned out she got endometriosis and became barren. She would have been a great mother. Me, I just went to sea, made bad choices in women, and never did have kids. Now I’m a retired old man and live alone. She is remarried and happy. Life is good for both of us, and we’re still friends. I still love her very much.

I often wonder what would’ve happened if we had had the child, but it was the wrong time, and to have brought a child into that mess would have been disaster. I believe she made the right choice for the time, but it still fills me with sadness, that I couldn’t be there for her, that the booze had driven my life.

P.S. I don’t know why I wrote this. I have only told this to my first AA sponsor, and he is dead.

At 20 weeks, I had several severe nosebleeds that required ER intervention, failed episodes at cautery, and eventually painful nose packing for several days. By the end I was getting severe headaches.

We checked for bleeding disorders and none were found. I chalked it up to a fluke. Her birth was beautiful and uncomplicated.

But my second, much-wanted pregnancy 4.5 years later was harder. I had more joint and ligament pain, and had it earlier, which took me off work or on modified duty several times. And the fluke nosebleeds returned, earlier and worse. This time I was 16 weeks. We called 911 because blood was pouring down my face and down my throat, making it hard to breathe. Again, they were hard to stop, and I had several re-bleeds over three days. The pain from the packing this time was excruciating and constant for five days. Strong opiate painkillers only helped somewhat.  

I thought about abortion then, but I wanted this child so much. I was afraid I might be forced into the decision if my health worsened.

The pain only stopped when the packing came out. I was weak and dizzy for months and never felt recovered. For months afterwards, my husband would sometimes wake up terrified in the middle of the night, because he thought he heard me choking. I had one repeat bleed, which we were able to stop late in pregnancy.

My daughter was born easily and healthy. But my husband begged me to never try this again, as did my family. My midwives agreed.

I tell this story in this context not to complain about my pregnancies (which I do not regret), but because this is one of those situations where my health was in danger. I have never had a nosebleed when not pregnant. But it would be beyond irresponsible to put my body or my family through that again.  

We use birth control and are seeking a vasectomy.  But until then, pregnancy is possible.

You might be asking yourself, as I did, if nosebleeds are more common during pregnancy. Yep:

When you become pregnant your circulatory system must expand in order to accommodate your baby. With this expansion, your body creates more blood and the circulation of blood increases. These changes may lead to some problematic side effects such as more frequent nosebleeds while you are pregnant.

Furthermore:

About one in five pregnant women have nosebleeds, compared with only one in 16 women who aren’t pregnant. Nosebleeds are so common [especially from the second trimester onwards] because the pregnancy hormones progesterone and oestrogen make your blood vessels open wider (dilate).

I had an abortion when I was 22. I was three weeks pregnant after a contraception failure, single, waiting tables for a living, and studying to apply to law school. At the time, I did not have the mental, emotional, or perhaps most importantly, economic resources to have a child. Living in New York, I was fortunate to have easy access to the services I needed. However, because of the arbitrary limitations Pennsylvania put on abortion coverage in health insurance plans, my Pennsylvania-based health insurance did not cover my abortion and I had to pay for it on credit. The following spring I was admitted to Yale Law School. . . After graduation, I served as a law clerk to [a Judge on the federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit] . . . and worked as a Skadden Fellow at a legal aid office in Los Angeles representing . . . victims of wage theft. During that time, I collected hundreds of thousands of stolen wages for individuals workers and worked with litigation teams that collected millions more for low-wage workers and victims of human trafficking. Both NPR and the L.A. Times chronicled my clients’ stories. I have been published in the Yale Law Journal and the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law. . . The foregoing is not meant to congratulate myself for my achievements but only to highlight all that would have been impossible if I became a mother before I was ready. I cannot imagine that I would have gone to law school in that circumstance. I now look forward to the opportunity to have a family and encourage my children to follow their own dreams and work for the public good. I can lead by example. I am thankful every day for that opportunity.

I have never regretted it. I will say, however, that the experience was extremely difficult for me. It was not difficult because I felt guilty, but rather because I felt acutely that society now judged me as a woman that must shamefully hide my experience. As a young woman, I did not have the emotional resources to process this sudden transformation into a woman societally marked for shame. It was particularly difficult because it was so obvious that the man involved did not feel marked in the same way.  I recently wrote about this feeling in an essay on Medium:

What was very difficult, however, was suddenly finding myself a person with something to hide. I had always prided myself as being someone willing to be honest about who I was, mistakes and all, of which my abortion was, as I understood it, not included.

But the first rule of abortion (for women) is that you don’t talk about your abortion. As far as I can tell, this rule applies even to women who are otherwise proud, confident, and pro-choice. They are happy to shout about women’s right to have an abortion — just not their own.

I felt, too, this obligation to shroud my abortion in private remorse. It was as if we’d all struck some sort of societal bargain that women could have the right to choose so long as they were properly ashamed. But I didn’t agree. I still don’t. It struck me as particularly unfair that I was saddled with the weight of this perverse social contract while the man involved was not. While the right lies with the woman, the decision to have an abortion is, often, made by men and women alike and together. Mine was. Yet, the vitriolic, slaveholder comparisons, are graciously reserved for the women who have abortions, not the men by their sides. Abortion is considered a women’s problem, for which women must pay the price.

Thanks for drawing attention to this important brief. If you have any questions for me, I’d be happy to talk further about this topic.

If you have a question for Ms. Lang, let us know.

I was never uncertain of my choice. Because I had an IUD, there was fear of an ectopic pregnancy, so I had to get an ultrasound (something not normally required in my state, among the more progressive in these matters). The technician didn’t know that I was going to terminate and asked me what I wanted to know. I wanted to know nothing.

But by chance, I caught the briefest of flashes of her screen as I left the room. I was three months along and this necessitated a surgical abortion.

The question of dissonance is interesting. I was told throughout the process that it wasn't my “fault,” that I had done my “due diligence” by taking preventative measures. I had been “responsible” and this would soon “be over with.”

It doesn’t make me feel better. I’ve been alternating between feeling numb and feeling pain. I’m experiencing grief! I’m experiencing loss! My child.

I can’t help but cry for the life that I knew couldn’t be. I've thought a lot about what color eyes he or she would have had, how precious, how completely lovable she would have been—and, in a sense, still is.

To me, the question of embryonic development and personhood is beside the point; it would have grown into a human being and it would have been my child. I am not a religious person, but I do recognize how beautiful the gift of life is, and I hope to have a large family one day.

But I knew that this was not meant to happen, that at this stage in my life I am not mature or selfless enough to be the mother I want to be. I couldn’t afford to raise a child and live my own life—my family is poor and could offer me no assistance. (Even with my school health insurance, the hospital bill is an extreme financial hardship). I am confident I made the right decision and that my child would understand.

This reader’s experience is fairly rare. To offer some perspective: Mayo Clinic reports that less than one percent of women who use an IUD get pregnant in a year of typical use, a figure which applies to both the ParaGard/copper and Mirena/hormonal versions of the device. No form of birth control is completely foolproof—even tubal litigation, in which a doctor cuts or ties off a woman’s fallopian tubes, comes with a very slight risk of getting pregnant afterwards. But sterilization, and use of an IUD, are just about as close as you can get.

It’s interesting that the people this reader encountered—presumably doctors and nurses, but also maybe friends and relatives—suggested that her efforts to prevent pregnancy should be a source of comfort, moral or otherwise. The implicit suggestion is that intention matters; that if you do your best to avoid the position of having to make the choice, the choice itself becomes different.

This reader wasn’t persuaded by this notion. And the inverse is troubling: that women who don’t use birth control, or who aren’t otherwise “responsible,” somehow deserve pain more than women who do use birth control, or perhaps even have a greater obligation to carry the child to term.

If two women, one who used birth control and one who didn’t, end up pregnant and facing the choice to abort or not, it seems like their choice is pretty much the same at that point. The woman who used birth control might take comfort from knowing she did, but if she had consensual sex, she’s also not a total victim of circumstance, and she still has to decide what to do next.

This is another awkward, and maybe not-often discussed aspect of contemporary abortion: Birth control means that sex can be almost entirely separated from child-bearing and reproduction. But only almost. Any woman who has sex is implicitly embracing this risk: Even if I try my best to prevent it, there is a small, small, chance that this act will mean making a choice about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.

The reader closed with a thoughtful note about why it’s important to share these stories:

As someone who hopes to be an artist one day, I think sharing our stories is important—a radical act when we are told that we and our stories should be kept quiet and hidden (even by pro-choicers). We are taught by their absence that painful, complex (or ambiguous) experiences are to be kept from public conversation. It's vital we change that.

Finally, to a point a reader made in a previous part of this thread—that our “request seems to be limited to the perspective of only half of the people affected by abortion”—we welcome all perspectives on abortion, whether you had one or chose not to, or you know someone who had one or chose not to, or anything else. As always: hello@theatlantic.com.

I wish I could remember every single word the receptionist said to me, but I don’t. What I do remember very clearly is that she made me feel comforted. She helped me calm down after the harassment I’d just endured, and I was grateful. I remember thinking, this woman is perfect for this job. It was a weird thing to think, but I did. Something about her demeanor, like she was sorry for what you were going through, but rooting for you, like a sympathetic sister. No judgment, no pity, just kindness. I’ll never forget it.

The waiting room was small and crowded, and my seat faced the door. I went alone that day, but other patients had brought boyfriends, husbands, friends. Friends had offered to accompany me, but I’d turned them all down. One woman in the waiting room was upset; she seemed to be struggling with her decision. I’m pretty sure she changed her mind. Contrary to anti-choice propaganda, Planned Parenthood does not push their services on anyone.

They called me to the back after a short wait. I had to have an ultrasound, because I was a participant in the clinical trials for RU486. The doctor inserted the probe, and I debated whether I should look at the screen. He told me I didn't have to look if I didn’t want to, which I appreciated.

Whether I looked or not, I don’t remember, because my ultrasound was interrupted by screaming. It was muffled, but I heard thumps, banging. Chaos. The doctor left the room, and then a nurse came in and told me, with tears in her eyes, that a gunman had shot up the waiting room I’d just left. The lovely receptionist, Shannon Lowney, was dead. John Salvi, domestic terrorist, murdered her, then drove up Beacon Street a couple of miles and murdered Lee Ann Nichols, a receptionist at another clinic.

It was terrifying, and sad, and every other awful thing you can imagine. The time passed in a blur, and all I really remember is that the staff, all of them, were incredible. I’ve never see anything like it. They carried on, wiping tears, and did their jobs. I was amazed that they didn’t immediately shut down and clear the place out, but they didn’t. I can still see the nurse, wiping her eyes as she handed me the cup with the pills. We had to stay for hours as the police did their work, and as the day wore on, it sunk in that these workers, who were so professional in such horrible circumstances, had been prepared for this—expecting it even, on some level. And they did their jobs anyway. I still think about that a lot, 20 years later.

Other readers have shared their reasons for seeking abortion services, but my story isn’t about agonizing decisions. My reason was simple: I wasn’t ready. I have twin daughters now, and they are the children I was meant to have. I don’t regret my decision, although I did feel guilty for a long time, in large part because of the culture of judgment and shaming that surrounds this issue.  I don’t dwell on the clump of tissue that I saw in my toilet a day after the shooting. But I think about Shannon Lowney a lot.

What I still wrestle with today is not the fact that I had an abortion. It’s the fact that strangers—women among them—will go to such lengths to intimidate patients and providers exercising their constitutional rights. My experience turned me strident; I make very few distinctions between “peaceful" protestors and the John Salvis of this world. I could never be friends, real friends, with an anti-choice person. The issue is too fraught for me.

I tell few people about my experience, and I’m ashamed of my cowardice. The women who share their stories with the world are doing god’s work, and I applaud them. I wonder what it would be like, to feel like I could talk about it freely, to help normalize it, put a face to it. But I’m afraid, too. I’m too proud—too closed off, maybe.

And then I get angry all over again, because I think, why should I have to tell? Does my husband have to tell his boss about his prostate exam? Is it fair that women's private healthcare decisions have become political theater, even on the micro level of day-to-day life? I’d like my daughters to grow up in a society where they would no more think of telling random acquaintances about an abortion than they would a pap smear. But the anti-choice crowd, from the voter to the gunman, will never allow it to be so.

So for now, I’ll tell your readers. For me, that’s a start.

I was born and adopted in February 1968. My birth mother was an unmarried 16-year-old Catholic girl in Syracuse, NY. I was adopted by a married couple who had been told they couldn’t have children of their own for medical reasons.

I have had a great life, and I am grateful to my adopted parents and my birth mother for it. I am fairly confident that if abortion were legal and accepted at the time of my birth, I would have been killed before birth.

I am never going to identify with either the mother or the father of an unwanted child; I will always identify with that child. Legalized abortion is normalizing the murder of an innocent human life.

Another pro-life reader:

I had two children out of wedlock. I’ve never really considered abortion a choice. No, I’m not a religious fanatic.

Background is important. In brief, I am the product of Navy date rape, born in 1966. My mother was an OB and labor and delivery nurse. She was once fired for refusing to do second-term abortions, leaving her a single mom unemployed. We are Irish Protestant, but marched in the 1970s with Catholics against abortion.

I had a hellish childhood and stereotypically made bad men choices. After a divorce and while in the service, I fell in love with a bad boy and got pregnant at 24. Birth control of all sorts never worked. I had an old white man randomly tell me I should get an abortion because the child would be biracial and have a hard life. This was 1991.

I went through college and bought a home but struggled in raising my son. I got pregnant by a horrible person. This time I wished to some degree I believed in abortion because I was just getting my footing with my six year old and finances.  I had my tubes tied after my daughter was born.

My kids are now 17 and 24. It has been hard. I worked hard. Things haven’t turned out as I hoped.  But my kids wanted for nothing (material). I am a GS-13 and make attorney wages.

Life and morals aside, I view abortion as quitting on your kid. I hold my head up as a fighter. I don’t respect the view of someone who is an attorney because she had an abortion; she took the lazy way. With age and disappointment, I understand the why of people having abortions. It is hard to be strong. No one respects those who keep their kids and do their best. And for those like me with no responsible fathers and family, it is exhausting.

Children with lissencephaly have painful seizures that are often very difficult to control with medication. Most have problems breathing and swallowing that result in frequent respiratory infections and choking episodes, even involving their own saliva. They often require a feeding tube to survive.

Many have no cognitive development beyond three-to-five month milestones and cannot even track motion with their eyes or smile socially. They typically have little to no control of their bodies and cannot lift their heads or roll over, let alone sit or crawl.

In some less severe cases, children with lissencephaly have the ability to learn a few simple hand signs and, in very rare cases, learn to walk. However, even in those abnormally mild cases, the children still suffer from seizures, respiratory infections, and choking fits. The maximum life expectancy is six to ten years, so most of them die much younger than that.

The folding of the cortex largely happens during the second trimester, so lissencephaly is almost never diagnosed before 25 weeks of pregnancy and often isn’t diagnosed until after birth. My baby's condition was only detected because the ventricles in her brain were measuring on the upper end of the normal range at my second trimester anatomy scan (at 18 weeks) and the examining doctor decided to have me come back to check on the brain development.

The follow-up at 22 weeks detected further abnormalities, but at that point we were told there was still a 70 percent chance our baby would have normal cognitive development or only minor developmental delays.

They were not able to diagnose her lissencephaly until 28 weeks. Given the relatively early presentation of the folding issues in her case, our doctors predicted that she would be on the more severe end of the spectrum. But even the best prognosis for children with lissencephaly is bad enough that if I were facing the same prognosis, I would not want my own life prolonged. My own medical advance directive stipulates that I do not want a feeding tube or artificial respiration if I would be in severe pain or not be able to recover basic life functions, such as being able to communicate and perceive much of the world around me. I thought it would be immoral to bring my baby into the world knowing how much she was likely to suffer.

I was past the legal limit on abortion in my home state of Michigan, so my husband and I made the decision to travel to one of the four clinics in the country that perform later abortions for fetal medical indication. We paid $12,500 out-of-pocket for the procedure. Dr. Hern at the Boulder Abortion Clinic stopped my baby’s heart with an injection of digoxin on December 16, 2014 and began a three-day process of dilating my cervix with expanding seaweed sticks called laminaria. I delivered her intact and still on December 19.

As the reader mentions, Hern is one of the four openly advertising late-term abortion providers in the United States. Boulder Abortion Clinic is in Colorado; the other three doctors work at clinics in Bellevue, Nebraska, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. The four doctors were featured in After Tiller, a documentary inspired by the murder of late-term abortion provider George Tiller in May 2009:

A few things strike me about the way this reader describes her and her husband’s decision-making process. She focuses on the level of suffering that the child would have experienced if she had been born, suggesting that prevention of pain is her highest moral priority. She employs empathy—“if I were facing the same prognosis, I would not want my own life prolonged”—in trying to figure out what’s best for her unborn child. And most strikingly, she doesn’t shy away from using “person” words—“she,” “her,” “baby.” There’s a reason for this, she writes:

I refer to her as a baby and as my child because the pregnancy was planned and wanted, I loved her very much (and still do), and at the point where we got her diagnosis and chose to end her life, she was likely “viable” in the sense that if I had gone into labor spontaneously, she would have had a chance of surviving, at least for the limited duration a child with her condition can survive.

She may not have been able to do what most people probably mean when they use the word “think,” but I don’t think that means she did not have a moral identity. Indeed, one of the primary reasons I chose to have an abortion was because I did not want her to suffer the way she almost certainly would have if she had been born alive. Is there any reason to care about the suffering of an entity that has no moral identity?

The decision to have an abortion was also based on considerations about my health, lifestyle, and career. Having a late-term abortion was the best way to protect my health and especially my chances of being able to get pregnant again. Although there are some risks associated with a late-term abortion, they are much smaller than the risks associated with a full-term birth, particularly when there is a chance the baby’s head will swell with fluid, which is always a risk in the case of brain abnormalities.

My husband and I also considered what our lives would be like if we had to manage the care and supervision of a severely disabled child. We likely would not have chosen to welcome another child into our lives in that situation, and I would have had to leave my job permanently.

The entity I aborted was a human child—my child, my much-loved, much-wanted, first baby. But my choice to have an abortion and my ability to do so was also a health, lifestyle, and career issue. I don’t see why those things ought to be seen as mutually exclusive or the source of any “cognitive dissonance,” as you put it.

To me, the most interesting parts of this story are the alternate-scenario questions: What if … ? If you believe that a fetus has a moral identity—which not all women, and certainly not all philosophers, do—what are the boundary lines of a mother’s (and, to add more complication, father’s) moral right to make decisions about the life of her child?

For example: How much anticipated future pain and suffering for the child is enough to justify eliminating that life? How much anticipated risk to the mother’s health is enough, or projected suffering in carrying the child to term?

If disability-based suffering isn’t the main factor in making the decision—such as in the amicus brief filed by female lawyers who said having an abortion was a crucial factor in their career success—is there more dissonance in deciding to end the future life of a human with a “moral identity”?

Finally: What are the shades of moral difference between terminating a fetus that could not survive outside the womb vs. one that can, even if, as in this case, it would suffer from significant disabilities? What’s the difference between those decisions and the decision to kill such a child after it has been born, or let it die? That last question, about infanticide, is particularly charged, not least because of the common-sense “disgust” factor. As Jeff McMahan, a former Rutgers professor who’s now at Oxford, wrote in 2007:

Although philosophers have conducted a wide-ranging debate about the morality of abortion for more than thirty years, generating in the process an extensive literature on the topic, they have, with very few exceptions, shrunk from extending the debate to include a discussion of infanticide. I know from discussions with prominent writers on ethics that some have been deterred from writing on the subject by fear of possible consequences for their reputations, careers and even physical security ... My own experience is much more limited, but tends to confirm that discussing infanticide is not the best way to win friends or secure admiring book reviews.

More on that here. In the meantime, send thoughts to hello@theatlantic.com, along with more of your stories—particularly ones that show some of the moral ambiguity in these choices.

I am now 28, but I was 25 when I got pregnant for the first time. My husband and I had been married three years and decided together that this was the time, since we were financially stable enough to afford a child. Not that our background matters, but we are everyday people. We are your neighbor or the happy couple in the grocery store. My husband was in the Air Force and I had just quit my job selling high-end furniture. He has his Master’s degree and I have an AA in interior design. We are intelligent, thoughtful people who care about others and our country. Unfortunately, I felt failed by my country in 2012.

We were stationed in Oklahoma when we found out we were having a baby. I’ll never forget how my husband literally clapped with happiness when I told him I was pregnant. We both were so happy! At 18 weeks 5 days, we were “going to find out the sex” of the baby (it’s actually a scan to search for fetal anomalies).

Immediately after telling us we were having a girl, the ultrasound tech stopped speaking to us. She would respond with yes or no and was taking so many pictures. She quite literally ran out of the room after handing us our pictures. I told my husband that something doesn’t feel right, but he assured me it was fine.

The tech walked back in and said the doctor was on the phone for me. I picked up the phone and the doctor said a term I had heard before—spina bifida—and others I hadn’t—“ventricles” and “hydrocephalus.”

We had an emergency appointment the next morning with a perinatologist where the doctor brought us to a tiny room after scanning me himself and confirming everything. My little girl was sick. She had the worst form of spina bifida—hydrocephalus—and her cerebellum was “smashed like a pancake,” as he so elegantly put it, while just generally having some open spaces in her brain.

He told us everything that she would certainly suffer: paralyzation, pain, headaches, incontinence, surgeries upon surgeries upon surgeries, and mental retardation. Other symptoms that were likely were blindness and deafness and being in a vegetative state.

WHAT?! But I had done everything right! I’ve never smoked or done any drugs, I don’t drink, I took all of my prenatals, I’m healthy and I’m young! This wasn’t supposed to happen!!

Between my sobs, he gave us our options: keep the baby as is with no intervention, go to the East Coast where they perform surgeries in-utero to close the opening on the spine—but that’s all; the damage is done … or “some people choose to abort these babies.”

I was appalled at his suggestion and said I couldn’t kill my baby and left.

After about 30 minutes of my husband and I crying together and holding each other in our bed, we both decided that abortion was the most humane option for our daughter. We loved her, I felt her move, but she was going to suffer greatly. She would not know the pain that life had waiting for her; I would take it all. She would only know the warmth of my womb, the sound of my heartbeat, and the freedom of movement she would never experience after birth.

This is where we were failed. When my husband called the perinatologist to tell him of our decision, we were given the number for Whole Women’s Health in San Antonio EIGHT HOURS AWAY. At 19 week, I did not have a right to have an abortion in Oklahoma. I was sent away. My Air Force husband fought for the rights of others, but not us apparently. If he had not been stationed in Oklahoma, we could’ve been home in California, where I wouldn’t have been sent away like some dirty, shameful mother.

I was forced to have an ultrasound by some politician and in that ultrasound the doctor revealed that in just a week my daughter’s bones in her legs were becoming deformed. I knew what I was doing was even more right, but a forced ultrasound is cruel to those who weren’t  in my exact situation. I do not support them at all.

I was never so desperate for a miracle as I was that day. I’ve never wanted to wake up from a nightmare so badly. As I was strapped to the operating table, I asked to please let me see her one more time, so the nurse turned the ultrasound screen toward me and I cried my eyes out as I said goodbye. The nurse teared up and rubbed my arm and tried to comfort me. I’ll never forget that gesture of kindness on her part.

And then, with a hard poke of my belly, my daughter was gone. She no longer moved. I had to carry my baby girl’s lifeless body in my belly for 24 hours before labor was induced. I’ve never wished to die before, but I just wanted to end my pain and to be with my daughter somewhere where she wasn’t in pain. I’ve never apologized to someone I had never met so much. I think I apologized to her a million times, but I’ve never regretted my decision.

Do you know what it’s like to see the love of your life in fetal position bawling so hard that he sounds nothing like himself because he just lost his daughter and watched his wife die on the inside? To ever think that this kind of decision is taken lightly is ignorance at its worst.

I am thankful everyday that my daughter wasn’t born. I made my first and only decision as her mother not to allow her to suffer and I am the only person who should ever have that right.

After she was gone, I learned from my perinatologist that he never thought she was going to survive her birth, but he was afraid to suggest abortion because we lived in Oklahoma. I’m sure that if word got out that a Oklahoma doctor was suggesting abortion, then the nation’s most hateful people would go insane. I felt so betrayed by him, but mostly by where we were forced to live because of the military. His hands were tied and he couldn’t tell me his professional opinion and let me believe she COULD’VE lived. She would’ve had a miserable existence, but she was going to be alive, according to him. To let me make the decision to abort without telling me she was most likely going to die anyway is cruel.

I was pregnant for the second time six weeks later out of desperation. I was watched closely and put on folic acid, and now my son is two and a half and amazing. I suffered depression from my loss and severe post-partum depression after the birth of my son, but I knew that I was sacrificing my mind and body for my children. That was the decision I made.

My cousin’s oldest son impregnated a girl while he was in high school, and dropped out of college—despite having an athletic scholarship—after suffering some kind of breakdown. The other two children have struggled with mental illness as well. Last I had heard the oldest son didn’t have a job and blames my aunt for his breakdown, despite the fact she effectively raised all three of her daughter’s children while struggling to remain employed in low-paying jobs and never did anything but support his interests and efforts. She has expressed to my mother that she wishes she had just had an abortion, because her life, despite all her effort, has been a string of tragedies.

As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, babies are not guaranteed to grow up to be good people. They are not guaranteed to make life better for others, or to be happy, or to do anything positive whatsoever. Many people, despite receiving love and care from their parents, will make society worse.

My aunt’s case is anecdotal, yes, but it is impossible for me to view it as anything other than evidence that an abortion is often the least costly option in terms of impact to society and simple human life. How much poverty, how much crime, how much misery would be eliminated if some people had simply never existed? To raise a child is a gamble, and if a woman does not, for whatever reason, wish to upend her life on that chance, it can only be to our benefit as a culture.

I can’t help but think of the famous hypothesis in Freakonomics about how Roe v. Wade contributed to a steep reduction of crime a generation later:

John Donohue and Steven Levitt point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.

The authors argue that states that had abortion legalized earlier should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. Further, states with a high abortion rate have experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income. Finally, studies in Canada and Australia claim to have established a correlation between legalized abortion and overall crime reduction.

To counter the reader above or tackle the topic in general, drop me an email. This next reader pushes back on our previous one:

I think people frame this issue all wrong. A reader wrote, “Surely ‘but getting an abortion allowed me to continue living as I pleased’ must rank somewhat low on the scale of moral arguments.” Prior to viability outside the womb (a moving target to be sure), women shouldn’t NEED a moral argument to have an abortion. They are not required by law or morality to ever bear children. It is society that needs a moral argument for denying women bodily autonomy and forcing them to bear children they don’t want and/or can’t have for whatever reason.

When you frame it like that, I think it becomes pretty clear that the current compromise we have with Roe v. Wade makes sense. In what situation is it moral to make a woman give birth against her will?

People will argue that if women don’t want to be pregnant, they should either abstain from sex or use birth control. I can tell you that both of these “methods” fail pretty regularly despite everyone’s best intentions. In those scenarios, do people find it “moral” to have an abortion? Is it suddenly ok if you can prove you were actively avoiding pregnancy?  And if you WEREN’T actively avoiding pregnancy, does it make sense to treat pregnancy like a punishment?

Everyone has the right to determine if, when and how they become parents, and the moral arguments in support of that are numerous.  Isn’t “wanting to have an established career in order to give my future child the best possible life” a moral argument? Isn’t “not wanting my future child to have an abusive parent” a moral argument?

I’m so tired of this debate. Oh, and to state my bona fides (as we all apparently must do to have any authority to speak on these topics): I have had an abortion, I have a beautiful baby boy, and I’m adopted, so I think I have my bases covered.

More of your personal stories of confronting abortion coming soon.

In reducing abortion to (selected) anecdotes, Americans rely on the unwillingness of nice Americans to make serious challenges to the moral argumentation of individuals. It would be churlish, for example, to suggest sexual prudence to the end of obtaining one’s paramount goals of education and career. Surely “but getting an abortion allowed me to continue living as I pleased” must rank somewhat low on the scale of moral arguments.

It ought to be possible to set up abortion laws that deal with the most widely repugnant cases while leaving abortion mostly available—the sort of laws that prevail in most of those more enlightened Western European countries. The problem, it seems to me, is that we keep coming down to cases that are either easy to deal with as exceptional (the rape cases) or which are easy to criticize as (a) defending irresponsibility and (b) too dismissive of the weight of fetal life. Both of these enable an absolutist right-to-life response: the first because it trivializes its own cause, and the second because it surely must be the case that an argument against such a right-to-life needs real moral substance.

What do you think? Email hello@theatlantic.com. Update from the second dissenter:

I should add that my wife and I were put up to the abortion decision. The AFP test for our third child came up low, showing a risk for Down’s. The test is not conclusive, and we would have had to do amniocentesis to confirm, which we declined, since the procedure has a significant miscarriage risk. (Abortions of Down’s pregnancies range from 60 percent up to 90 percent, depending on the study.)

Our son was born and, after some months of substandard growth, was diagnosed with Down’s. While we are fortunate he has no substantial health issues, our lives have to be planned around the requirement that someone be with him and that there are many places we cannot take him. But we simply could not contemplate destroying him because he was going to be deeply imperfect or because his birth would make our lives difficult.