*"Mr Right" who told her that he loved her, wants to get married and have kids, when faced with an unplanned pregnancy, says "your going to have an abortion aren't you?" *

Gawd, if they only taught basic biology to kids at school, we might
have far less of these dramas in society.

No matter how hard they try, women will not turn men into women.
Its a basic biological fact that most men have an innate urge to have
a woman in their bed occasionally. If that only happened when they
had found the perfect woman, their sex lives would be pretty crook.

So it won't happen in the real world. Men will say things to follow
their biological urges, that is the reality. The best thing that
parents can do, is to educate their daughters about such realities.

Women OTOH in this case, can be torn between that ultimate of
dichotomies, what they think and what they feel. Pregnancy triggers
the release of all sorts of hormones, designed to bond the mother
with the potential future offspring.

So women may rationally think through the ramifications of having
a child and realise that its not a good idea, yet emotionally feel
churned up about the thought of an abortion. What we think and
feel can be direct opposites.

Reason will never dominate emotions, the endocrine system is too
powerfull. But it helps to learn to think about what we feel and
why, it leads to understanding.

At the end of the day, women have around 400 chances to have another
cute baby, no doubt loved with all that motherly love. Nearly
all of them are flushed down life's toilet, that is the reality
and it's also part of the the basics of Darwinian evolution theory.
Ignore it at your peril

RD:”The part that has always stuck with me was the 95%+ of the over 100 000 women interviewed, who gave "inconvenient time to have a child" as the reason.”

Bloody hell, really? Was it in like a list of questions like list A had “inconvenient time” + other stuff? It was the only reason for that many? Wonder what the word inconvenient meant to them…

Yabby did you just say women can’t overcome their emotions to make rational decisions?

Jewely - as I said, I will try to find the research, though it is a bit old now. My recollection is that people were not asked to tick a box from a list, rather, give the reason for the abortion which was then categorised by the study author.

That's not surprising- lots of women need to abort a baby they don't want to due to risk of their own lives, or the baby may have been found to have some terminal development that would make continuing the pregnancy pointless due to likely death or disability preventing functioning.
Others might have simply not been able to care for a child due to social/obligations/financial constraints.

These would cause a lot of grief, but at the end of the day these are still babies that they would not have been able to care for anyway, so they did the right thing by terminating their pregnancies.

Having said that, strong counseling before and after is absolutely vital, and personally, something I consider should be a basic right subsidized by the taxpayer.

*Yabby did you just say women can’t overcome their emotions to make rational decisions?*

No Jewely I did not, for that would be a foolish thing to say.
For a start, we are all just a little different in terms of genetics
and experiences and all those things will effect the final output
of the brain.

So let me try and explain it to you this way. The brain is made
up of different centres, for want of a better word. Long term
memory, short term memory, emotional centres, the amygdala which
stores past traumatic experiences, plus a heap of biochemicals,
all interacting and competing.

Every thought that you have, is coloured by all these things, aware
of it or not.

When it comes to rational thought, women have a whole bunch
of extra hormonal inputs, such as motherly love, which help
cloud and confuse the picture.

So a decision like abortion is more difficult for alot of women.
Alot of women commonly also go through life, following their
feelings, with the inevitable disaster that follows. Emotional
engulfment has its consequences.

But there are also plenty of women who have learned to understand
the dichotomy and have learned to think about what they feel and why

Yabby that is what confuses me because surely only the super rational/hormonally challenged ones would choose an abortion because wouldn’t the hormones etc be in full force?

They’d be fighting that motherly love in the midst of a chemical rush?
Maybe the hormone that rejects being inconvenienced is a stronger one or it’s a natural fear of the unknown (or the known) hormone which I could understand and then their rational bits change it all around to sound more… rational.

I’ve slipped there and suspect I’ve probably insulted females somehow.

KH:”These would cause a lot of grief, but at the end of the day these are still babies that they would not have been able to care for anyway, so they did the right thing by terminating their pregnancies.”

I think us humans look back with the whole ‘if we only knew then…’ and wonder if we did do the right thing. I don’t know how abortions work or who sits down with the women and talks to them about what they do know now.