ye gods & little fishes....

It's amazing the amount of life that can be boiled down into 3 paragraphs.

Regina, 28, blamed a faulty contraceptive Depo-Provera shot from an Army nurse in Iraq for her pregnancy. In Arkansas, she receives the injection in her hip, where it is most effective, but in Iraq she got it in the arm - she remembered by the soreness she felt slinging her rifle. "I was in Iraq 13 months," she said. "I guess I got a little happy when I got home."

She arrived at the [abortion] clinic with a cut on her nose and bruises on her forehead and lip, which she sustained after telling her boyfriend she was pregnant. "He flipped out because he wasn't ready," she said. She had thought, upon learning of the pregnancy, that she "was about to get married," she said. She came in with two fellow sergeants, who wore their uniforms. Her boyfriend was in jail, she said.

"I've done this once and swore I wouldn't do it again," Regina said. "Every woman has second thoughts, especially because I'm Catholic." She went to confession and met with her priest, she added. "The priest didn't hound me. He said, 'People make mistakes.' "

I think it was the dispassionate tone that got me. This is from an article on abortion at 'ground level' in the New York Times: matter-of-fact reporting about women having abortions & clinic workers, interspersed with various statistics. Apparently I'm not quite the anomaly I thought I was: "[abortion rates] are lowest among educated, financially secure women." ( Read more... )