The Well of Sorrow

For some women who have an abortion the hardest thing is finding anyone to sympathize with their pain, says Felicity Dargan.

“I grieve and see no end to the grief because what I did, rightly or wrongly, was irreversibly and irrevocably permanent. Do you see? I cannot, for all the riches in the world, get my child back.”

Melinda Tankard Reist knows abortion is a taboo subject, but she wanted women who had had abortions to tell their stories. “In all the polemic of the abortion debate, we never hear women’s lived experiences of abortion,” the Canberra-based writer and researcher said.