Karen Samuels’ story is a troubling reminder of just how ingrained abortion has become in feminist thinking.
Writing at the parenting website Baby Gaga, Samuels said she was shocked by the negative attitudes of many of her friends and co-workers toward her pregnancy.
They encouraged her to have an abortion, telling her she should enjoy her 20s. They questioned her mental health and told her to think about her career. Thankfully, she rejected them all and chose life for her baby.
“… is there really a right or wrong time to have a child? No, there isn’t,” Samuels wrote.
A feminist focused on her career, Samuels said she was not planning to have children in her 20s. Though she eventually wanted a family, she said she was focused on advancing in her career and becoming financially stable.
But at age 27, she said she found out that she was pregnant. Samuels did not consider an abortion, but her friends certainly did for her.
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“… when I started telling my friends, they were shocked and asked whether it was planned or when I would have an abortion,” she remembered.
Their attitudes troubled her deeply. She was not homeless, jobless or financially unstable, she was not even that young – all reasons people frequently give for aborting an unborn baby.
“And as a career-focused feminist, the idea that I couldn’t be a mom without giving up my ambition was absolutely abhorrent to me,” she wrote, pointing to the successes of mom celebrities like Adele and Hilary Duff. “Yet here were my peers making me think that I was about to make the dumbest decision in my life.”
Samuels said her first year of motherhood was a little rough, but she would not trade it for anything.
She wrote:
Unlike my colleagues and friends, my life is no longer a cycle of emails, gossip bar dates with my colleagues, and hanging out every weekend with my friends’ sipping sangria and dancing the night away.
Instead, I fold onesies, wipe food smears off sweatpants and seats, and nurse at wee hours of the night while catching up with some reality show, and waiting for my baby to lock eyes with me and feeling my heart shatter into pieces when she finally does.
Samuels said she makes sure she has time to rest, and she still gets to spend time with her friends. But her daughter’s life has been worth all the sacrifices and changes.
She said having her daughter “was the best decision I ever made.”
