I know post-abortion grief is real, and I liken it to a 1995 meeting of a 75 year old RAF Lancaster pilot meeting a 60 year old German whose father had died on the battlefield and whose mother was killed in a bombing raid and who suffered severe burns and the former thinking, "My God, I know we were at war, and we couldn't think of the women and children, but meeting a survivor has filled me with remorse."

A cause that is close to me and why I will ALWAYS advocate for abortion is this: if a woman has been raped and falls pregnant due to that rape (now, I don't care whether this makes up 1 or 100% of abortions), she is NOT, as right-wing evangelists, like Robertson, will have you believe, carrying "a gift from God," she has been the VICTIM OF A CRIME! If a woman, who has been raped, CHOOSES not to have an abortion, fair enough. (Okay, Ian Smith (Harold Bishop in Neighbours) was conceived due to a rape and given up for adoption. On the one hand, I say, Australian TV would be poorer without him on it (Harold was a much-loved character and Ian Smith is a character himself) but he doesn't want to know anything about his father. But this is written in retrospect (we can look back and say that, but, in 1938, it wouldn't have been fair) but conversely, I an Smith was not told he was adopted until he was 51 and his adopted mother was told that she had twelve hours to live and wrote a letter to him to say that he wasn't her birth son, and he felt as though his life had been a total lie).

Yes, I know adoption is hard, BUT, you have to think of it in this way. Okay, Ian Smith's birth mother was willing to meet him, and she even said to him, "No, Mum put iodine on your knee when you fell over when you were little, and read you bedtime stories. My name is Peg, so you call me Peg." So, just imagine you're a woman who was raped and you were forced to have the child and you couldn't put it behind you (or maybe you had) and the agency sent you a letter saying the child wanted contact with you).

Fair enough, if you were a 17 year old girl who got pregnant at Schoolies Week and your boyfriend wouldn't stick by you, so you had the baby and gave it up for adoption, and the reason was that you loved the baby but couldn't provide for it. And, I went to school with someone whose brother got a girl pregnant and he spent a year doing crappy jobs to save money. Yes, he went on to university later, but it can interrupt your life.