If you keep tabs on this blog with any sense of frequency, then you should know where I stand on the abortion issue, so I won't go into it now...anyhoo, I ran across the following article by a Sydney Morning Herald columnist, and it is a very honest, not overly preachy take on where a guy fits into the whole equation.  I find it a rather refreshing read as supposed to the dense philosophical papers I read in my Bioethics and Medical Ethics classes...and I like how unlike most abortion debates, it's not really judgmental, more a relation of rational thoughts and ideas, as supposed to a salvo of inflexible, inflamed rhetoric...it brings to light what I believe is truly needed in this debate, coolheaded discussion and more open minds on both sides...

"Confessions of an Abortionist"

I should have two children; one of them would be turning 17 this year, the other should be 11 years old.

Both the kids would have been striking; their mothers were olive-skinned, long-limbed and brunette, with more than enough natural beauty to dilute the genetics of my rough head.

I'd like to think they'd also have been intelligent, as well as naturally athletic, ambitious and happy. But I'm never going to find out.

That's because both of these kids were aborted in-utero ...

I don't need to tell you that abortion is one of the most divisive issues on the planet, with opponents on either side of the philosophical spectrum more than happy to question the morality and intelligence of the other.

In Australia, the Federal Government is happy to leave the issue up to the states, which means we have a hodge-podge of laws that see women in some states treated as criminals for acts they can legally request a hundred kilometres away.

Whatever your take on the debate, it's a fact that abortion is widely available in this country and most young women have some knowledge of the procedure, either through direct experience, educational materials or the stories of their female friends and relatives.

For a lot of young men, however, it's just a word, perhaps even a punctuation mark, a full stop if you will, that sits heavily at the end of the sentence "I'm pregnant".

If you're a man and your partner conceives but decides to terminate, a lot of time that's where the conversation ends; it's her body, so it's her decision.

Both times I was involved in an abortion, I felt relief when the women involved chose to have terminations. On the first occasion, I was young, just 20 years old, and terrified how much my life would change if the girl chose to have the baby.

The second time, the girl was the young one, and it seemed an impossible arrogance on my part to make her do something I'd considered impossible just six years before.

Having been brought up to believe that this was a woman's choice, that I had no right to tell her what to do with her body, I kind of slept-walked through the process: helped with the costs, drove the girls to and from appointments and was as supportive as I could be.

Abortion is a traumatic experience for any woman, but then the medical support, the grief counselling, the social sympathy is weighted in a woman's favour.

If you ever want to feel like a criminal without having committed a 'crime' per se, go sit in the waiting room of an abortion clinic: it's deadly quiet, no one wants to make eye contact with you and the staff give you smiles you could filter krill through.

About 80,000 men go through this every year in Australia and I wonder how many of them truly consider the ramifications of the act?

As the years have passed since my decisions, a kind of phantom history has spooled out behind my two kids: birthday parties that never happened, schools they didn't attend, fun they never got to have because I found them inconvenient.

I can't tell you how many times I've wondered what they would have been like. The more I've thought about it, the more unsettled I've become about the flippancy with which I made the decisions.

I'm friends with a solid 75 per cent of my ex-girlfriends, but I never or rarely speak to the two women with whom I shared this experience.

One of them has married and has kids of her own and I'm glad I've not met them because I reckon I'd throw up seeing their faces, knowing I'd rubbed out two just like them.

You may accuse me of having a bob each way here, but I'll be honest, I don't regret my decisions, just wonder what sort of person it makes me.