I think people should, in general, choose not to have abortions

[LiberalEsto]

10. I agree with you

because you feel the choice should be left up to the woman.

My mother had an abortion.

She was a WW2 refugee living in a displaced persons camp in Germany in the late 1940s. She and my father and her mother were trying to avoid being sent back to Estonia because it could have meant death or deportation to Siberia at the hands of the Stalinists.

They were trying to emigrate to the UK, because they both spoke English. Unfortunately, my mother was pregnant, and the UK would admit married couples with only one dependent. So either my grandmother had to be left behind to starve in Germany or be deported to Estonia to an uncertain fate, or my mother would have to get an abortion. She loved her mother very much, and chose to have an abortion. Heaven only knows what risks she took to undergo it. She only talked to me about it once.

As the fates would have it, before they could get papers to go to the UK, they managed to find a sponsor to come to the U.S. I don't know whether the U.S. would have allowed two dependents or one, but the three of them came here in 1949 and I was born a few years later.