"I had an abortion," Ms. Magazine urges its readers to declare. How about "I wasn't aborted"?

A powerful essay by one Julia Gorin over at the WSJ.  An emigre from Russia, where abortion commonplace, Gorin discusses the personal ramifications of the abortion culture.  Her essential points are that you never know what great things the aborted child may have achieved and also that, in her experience, the regret over children aborted is considerable in later years.  I note that her essay is on the personal costs of abortion, which does not necessitate any particular legal regime. I also note, by the by, that Russia's population is currently dropping at an average of 750,000 people per year.  Here's a sample from Gorin, but read the whole thing:

My husband, also a second-born, and I were lucky to have been two such afterthoughts, each brought into the world thanks to one of two parents' change of heart. (Actually it was Anya Isaakovna, my mother's usual at the public clinic, who sensed a tinge of reservation and kicked her out.) Coincidentally, both my husband and I were to be the third abortions, each of us having had two siblings who weren't so lucky, which unfortunately was lucky for us.

Not quite so for my parents. Life's turns dealt them a hand they couldn't have foreseen 30 years ago while aborting, an act that people living in a nation of miserables can't exactly be judged for. Indeed, among Soviet émigrés from the 1970s and '80s, it's very rare to see families with more than two children, the self-imposed quota among Russians of that wave. But in hindsight, as my mother said a few months after my newlywed elder sister and her husband died in a five-vehicle collision in 2000, had she known she would outlive one of her only two children, she would have had more.

In America there is room to judge, despite what the "sanctity of choice" crowd wants us to believe. Yet rather than do that, my intention is to plant a seed of consideration that may otherwise never occur to America's reluctant with-child women and even girls. It's a consideration that, for all our endless debating, goes unspoken, but that could alleviate heartache in later life and enrich our lives in ways we can't predict.