In the past six months, I’ve learned about scores of abortions. I’ve learned about legal abortions and illegal abortions. I’ve learned about abortions that were performed with respect and support, and others that were humiliating or even excruciating. I’ve learned about women who bought lottery tickets on their way to the abortion clinic in hopes that a winning number would allow them to cancel their procedures, and I’ve heard about women who went dancing the evening after their abortions. I have heard about women who felt empowered by the sense of control that being able to choose an abortion gave them, and I have heard about women whose relief at being able to stop a pregnancy they felt unable to support was tempered by a deep sense of loss or even grief.

These are all true stories, told to me by the women themselves, women ranging in age from teenagers to grandmothers, some of whom I’d met only minutes earlier and others who are dear friends I’ve known for decades. I’ve been entrusted with all these stories because six months ago I published a novel in which one of the characters has an abortion.

Because her abortion plays a significant part in my character’s experience as a young woman, I deemed it a necessary scene to include in my book. When I made the decision to write about that fictitional abortion and its aftermath, I had expected that it might disturb—or even offend—a few of those readers whose vision of abortion differed significantly from my own, either because they considered abortion to be a sin or because they feared that my character’s feelings of regret could be used as ammunition by those who wish to curtail our reproductive rights. What I had not expected was that my scene would move so many women to relate their own experiences to me, sharing with me the circumstances of their own untenable pregnancies, their own experiences of the procedure, and their subsequent thoughts and feelings about what they had done.

On the surface it might seem a little odd that I had not anticipated such an outpouring of stories; after all, over a third of all American women currently of reproductive age will have had an abortion before their fertile years are over, and a great many women tend to find satisfaction and sustenance in talking about their experiences with each other. Many women use conversation as a way of bonding, as well as a way of sorting out our feelings and making decisions and coming to deeper understandings about our lives. When women are together, our conversations can range over an vast landscape of topics, morphing easily from the mundane to the profound, and covering such potentially intimate and revealing ground as our families, our loves and our sorrows. As we tell our stories to each other, we confess our failures, disappointments, and embarrassments. We describe our ambitions and insights, and we try to sort out our personal responses to any number of perplexing problems, from how to toilet train our toddlers to what should be done about the war in Iraq.

Although in the right situation most of us are not very reticent about discussing almost every other aspect of our reproductive lives, from sex and birth control to childbirth and menopause, it would appear that most of us are very reluctant discuss abortion; although 1.3 million American women underwent abortions last year, I was not told about a single abortion last year until after Windfalls came out.

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