Last week, I joined a (pro-choice) online support group for women dealing with unplanned pregnancies. I’ve been a member of this group in the past, both when making the decision to have an abortion and making the decision to carry my pregnancy to term. It’s a helpful place to be, a space in which other women are struggling with the same issues and going through the same process to come to terms with their own decisions. That is, until you get attacked by a troll.

Trolls aren’t present on the list; the moderator does an excellent job making sure the listserv itself is free of judgment and coercion. However, some people join the list under false pretenses (you’re supposed to tell your own story to the moderator before being approved for membership, and some people simply lie) and use the list as a means of mining e-mail addresses for the purposes of sending confused pregnant women nasty e-mails. And lo and behold, after I signed one of my posts to the list Namaste (I’m not Hindu, but I appreciate the concept of “I honor the divine in you”), look what arrived in my in box:

Hi Vegan. I couldn’t help but notice the irony of your signing off with “Namaste”, and so casually discussing the termination of your own child. I assume you are a vegetarian and possibly Hindu. You put so much importance on the lives of animals, yet you are going to kill your own baby? Do you not see the hypocrisy here? And I know that the Hindu faith teaches the sacredness of all life. That includes your unborn son or daughter, who is alive and kicking, heart beating and brain waves. What are you doing with your life that you keep putting yourself in the position of having to tear your own children apart limb from limb?

I know what I say will make you very angry. Do you really know why? Are these words touching a sore spot, a wound on your conscience? I am truly so sorry – I don’t want to cause anyone undue pain. But you need to see the reality of your actions, or you will continue to cause harm to your children and your own soul. Please reconsider. I would do anything in the world to help you give life to this baby. You say the birthfather has come around and is now supportive. I think he will also come around to loving this child as he does his older son. Please give him this chance. You can also consider adoption – as hard as it is, it is a choice that you can feel good about, not guilty.

Please prayerfully consider these words, not as a personal attack, but as the God’s honest truth. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help you let your baby live. There is support out there. You don’t have to do it alone.

My response is simply, Ugh. Two things strike me as dishonest: “having to tear your own children apart limb from limb” and “your unborn son or daughter, who is alive and kicking, heart beating and brain waves.”

I’m not an expert on anatomy and physiology, but I have miscarried a child when I was 6w4d pregnant and, when I passed the embryo, it wasn’t anything with the capacity to kick. I’ve read — and looked the pictures in — Lennart Nilsson’s A Child is Born. I’ve seen the ultrasounds when my sister began spontaneously bleeding at at 7w6d and no one could figure out why. To put it bluntly: characterizing what is growing inside of me in the above manner is not only dishonest, it’s morally reprehensible (and cruel).

I am not saying abortion is an amoral issue. Indeed, it is something that deserves careful consideration, and as a vegan I see the moral connections probably a bit more distinct than most (see Gary Francione’s essay in Animals and Women). But the guilt I feel or the anger at the e-mail I received isn’t a “wound on my conscience” — it’s part of a struggle to do the right thing, which isn’t always the easy or most comfortable thing.

Many years ago, when I thought I might be pregnant (I wasn’t), I visited a crisis pregnancy center. I didn’t realize they were a front for pro-life groups. While they were performing the pregnancy test (a urine-based test that takes no more than two to four minutes to get an accurate result) whose results “wouldn’t be definitive for 20 minutes” I was locked in a small room with a television no more than a foot from my face. There was no space for me to turn away, and the volume was turned up so loud it gave me a headache. The graphic video showed dead fetuses from second- and third-trimester abortions in explicit detail. The whole thing horrified me. Their scare tactics worked; had I been pregnant, I wouldn’t have had an abortion. I suppose they “won” that day.

Now, older and a bit wiser, I see abortion as a moral issue, but not the same way that pro-life activists do (and I definitely don’t equivocate the images from that video I saw with early first-trimester embryos). I see unplanned pregnancies not as inconveniences but as sad events that bring us to the point of being unsure what the next step is. I don’t believe pregnancy in general should be treated flippantly — but how is it that a 16-year-old girl who has a baby because she wants a living doll can be judged “good” and a 33-year-old woman honestly assessing her capacities and abilities is branded “evil”?

There are good and bad reasons for doing everything, and the best I can do right now is not engage with people who aren’t trying to be helpful. Want to say I’m discussing these things “casually”? You don’t know what I’m feeling or not. Want to say I’m a bad person? Go ahead. The truth of the matter is that if I were a “bad person” I wouldn’t be having this struggle. It’s the good people in the world who aim to make thoughtful decisions based on valid reasons, who seek to cause the least harm, who strive to be responsible — who want desperately to do all of these things without falling back on knee-jerk reactions predicated on half-truths and mean-spirited accusations.