Response Essay

Sample Response Essay

            We all have found ourselves in situations that dramatically change the way we feel about something we previously felt certain of.  It could be superficial: a food we eat that we assumed we would despise, or a place we visit toward which we had positive assumptions, only to find that it was less-than-enjoyable. But sometimes we experience a life-changing incident.  This is what Linda Bird Francke undergoes in her essay, “The Ambivalence of Abortion.” It is a painful, all-too-real description of an abortion, and it reminds the reader that real-life experiences often change us, and not necessarily for the better.

            Francke and her husband find themselves in a situation that many couples do—whether married or unmarried.  They are faced with an unwanted pregnancy, and a terrible dilemma.  Having another baby would disrupt their lives and at the wrong time: her “husband talked and talked about his plans for a career change in the next year…” (2) and their other children were growing up:  “our youngest child was finally school age” (3).  Francke and her husband were finally facing freedom.  So their decision seemed simple—logically.  Yet emotionally, clearly they were torn.  The profound decision they make—to terminate the pregnancy—leads to regret, a regret that will, at least for Linda Francke, last a lifetime.

            Yet it is not necessarily true that Francke’s traumatic experience of the abortion itself makes her firmly anti-choice.  She may still be politically pro-choice.  She informs us that she had always been pro-choice, reminding herself as well of “the abortion marches I’d walked in, the telegrams sent to Albany to counteract the Friends of the Fetus, the Zero Population growth buttons I’d worn…” (15). But she is anti-abortion; hence she is, as the title suggests, “ambivalent.” 

What changes is how she feels about abortion in her own life.  The story takes the reader through the painful reality of the procedure itself, and it is this which resonates the most and which holds the most powerful truth: that unless you have experienced something personally, you do not truly “get it.” And maybe this also leads to another truth: that people who have not experienced something personally have a less valid argument or even right to tell someone else what or what not to do.  It is the women in the clinic who have a more legitimate position on abortion, and their positions may be different, and all may be valid.  The women who “bounce” out of the clinic as though “they were going  right back to Bloomingdales” (22) may be strongly pro-choice, and the women who are clearly as devastated and disturbed as Francke may find themselves firmly anti-choice. 

Here you could include a few paragraphs of your own life experience that changed you or changed your opinion of something …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Who is right? Maybe both, maybe neither.  Again, everyone is entitled to her own experiences and her own points of view.  And it is our deeply personal experiences which shape us into more thoughtful and more sympathetic human beings, rather than aloof, judgmental people who arrogantly instruct other people how to feel, what to legislate for, or even what to think.