Why do women have abortions? What makes continuing a pregnancy hard to do? Frederica Mathewes-Greene set out to answer these questions in her book "Real Choices" and was surprised by the answers.

"While the financial and practical needs of these women are great, the surprising thing I learned while researching my book, … was that women said what they needed most was a friend. As I traveled the country holding "listening groups" with women who'd had abortions, I always asked, "What situation caused you to make this decision?" I expected to hear tales of financial or material woe, yet nearly ninety percent of the time women told me they'd had their abortion because of a relationship--because someone they loved, a boyfriend or parent, told them to. When asked what anyone could have done to have helped them complete the pregnancy, over and over the answer was: just stand by me. "I would have had that baby," I heard repeatedly, "if only I'd had one person to stand by me."

"When post-abortion women talk about the reasons for their decision, they talk most often about the failure of the baby's father to be supportive, to fill the father's role. Unexpected pregnancy can raise some breathtaking problems, but a partner's vigilant love has a way of easing them. Imagine a woman discovering a pregnancy in a difficult situation, but her partner saying to her, "I love you, I love our baby, I'll do anything I can to make this family work." On the other hand, imagine a story from one of my listening groups: a married woman with two kids, living in reasonable security, to whom her husband says, "Only ignorant people have more than two kids. I don't want this baby. You have to have an abortion." Which child will survive?

"Life outside the womb is lonely. We look all our lives for an experience of similar intimacy and safety even though many, as the saying goes, look in all the wrong places. When pregnancy begins, a woman is plunged into an experience of intimacy more profound than any of her adult life; she is knit, literally, to another human, one half-made of her own self. In the same blow she is linked to the child's father, whose half-life lives on as well within her body. Yet this being formed of two halves is more than their sum, a radical third never before seen on earth.

She shoots from her parents' bodies like an arrow from a bow, carrying their immortality into the future, beyond the reach of their crumbling arms.

Abortion-rights rhetoric recognizes the riskiness of trust and urges the woman to rely only on herself--my body, my rights, my decision. This argument twists necessity into a virtue, and offers a wry consolation prize: life as a steely atom, spinning without contact, without the dangerous and tender cloak of skin.

If pregnancy turns a wheel that draws all together, abortion breaks the wheel, spinning the participants out into isolation. It severs at one blow the woman from the child who trusts her, and from the man she wants to trust. As French feminist Simone de Beauvoir wrote, after abortion women "learn to believe no longer in what men say...the one thing they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there. It is at her first abortion that a woman begins to 'know.' For many women the world will never be the same."

"I was 21 when I had my abortion. My husband was going to school and I was home with the two kids; I got pregnant again when Rachel was not yet one year old. When I told Victor he got really upset--he has a pretty controlling personality. He said that only ignorant people have more than two kids. It was the population control idea: Two in, two out…. So at last I went to the doctor. When he asked me what I wanted to do, I said that my husband wanted an abortion, but the baby...and he interrupted me, saying, 'What have you been reading? It's a fetus.' So I scheduled the abortion. I had about a week of waiting, hoping that Victor would turn around and say, 'No, I want this baby!'"

Marie pauses, woeful. "It never took place. He never rushed in and saved me. All the prayers I said--it never happened. It never happened."