Abortion was a rite of passage for most of the girls I knew in the small Southern town where I spent my teenage years. If you knew about it, the Pill was available at the local health department but you had to drive two towns over, which required a car and a good excuse for disappearing after school.

Even if you knew about the health department, where the mother of one of our most popular loud-mouthed football players worked, there was the whole issue of admitting to having sex. No one did it. Only sluts went on dates planning to have sex. Many of us were saving ourselves for marriage and, if that didn’t work out, we could always ask for forgiveness. But birth control was a premeditated sin.

Some boys may have carried condoms but I suspect many of them thought having one might insult the girl’s virtue.

So teenagers did what teenagers have been doing forever, they pulled out. Since teenage boys and girls, for that matter, aren’t known for great control over their bodies, this meant most girls I knew ended up pregnant at some point.

Back then teenage pregnancy wasn’t a glorified star-studded alternative. Despite the suffocating milieu, many of the girls I knew had dreams of college. They wanted more than what our town offered. So they made the trip to Birmingham to have an abortion and get their first prescription for birth control pills. No dreams deferred.

But here’s the rub. These very same girls who lives were literally handed back to them because they were able to have an abortion would become consistent anti-choice voters each and every election.

I’ll never forget one shopping trip in 1984. We were circling around the Limited’s sales rack, searching for deals and talking Ronald Reagan. We’d all just turned 18. I said, “But Ronald Reagan is against abortion.” One of my two Ronald Reagan loving friends who had had an abortion at 16 (they both had) and was blissfully shopping for cute shorts before going off to college, turned and said to me with the roll of an eye, “Paige, that’s just one issue.” Oh really, I wanted to say, where would you be without it.

Hypocrisy knows no boundaries. The year I moved to New York City for graduate school, I was assigned a Roman Catholic suitemate. She told me she’d marched for life in DC and written her undergraduate thesis against abortion. She was in law school, living her second generation Italian immigrant family’s dream.

One night she came to my room and told me her period was late. She told me emphatically that she was not giving up her dream. She and her boyfriend had decided to have abortion. In fact, they had already been through this once. They got pregnant as undergraduates and chose an abortion then. I don’t know if she had the abortion before the March for Life or after the anti-choice college thesis but she managed to work it in.

She got her period the next day and told me that it must have been the confession.

Abortion is a life-giving back, life-saving, dream granting, human mistake forgiving medical procedure. And, I’m sick of the hypocrisy.

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