In the Forward’s opinion section, you’ll find analysis and essays from diverse corners of the Jewish world.
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Opinion
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Opinion
Double Jeopardy for One Teenager
I am 56 years old, a wife, mother and soon-to-be grandmother. I’ve just retired from a joyful career as a teacher’s assistant in an elementary school in Georgia. This wonderful life of mine was made possible by two abortions in my teens. My first abortion was as a ninth grader. None of the adults in…
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Opinion Not Worth a Gamble
What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? Those four words went around in my head in the spring of 1973. I was 28 years old, wife, mother of two sons and I was pregnant. Being an only child, my dream was having a house full of kids with all the…
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Opinion Silent No More, Forward Readers Tell Their Abortion Stories
Inspired by the moving teen abortion tale of 1960s Chicago, told by Larry Cohler-Esses in these pages in May, many readers wrote in to tell us how the story resonated with their own experiences. So we decided to throw open our pages to share readers’ stories of the abortions in their lives. We received dozens…
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Opinion From Generation to Generation
I recall sitting on the bed next to my mother during her final days, watching the Senate confirmation hearing of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. My mom commented how happy she was that she had lived to see women in such positions of power and respect, as well as how relieved she was that in her lifetime…
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Opinion I Was Almost Aborted Before the Holocaust
I am a 74-year old man, and I can look back at a life that someone sometime in the future will call a life well lived. But were it not for a mother who, against the urgings of her doctor, had refused an abortion, I might not have lived. By rights, I should be a…
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Opinion In a Back Alley of Tijuana
It was 1964 in Southern California. I was 23, in a committed relationship, and even though I was using birth control, I found myself pregnant. I had vowed I would never have an abortion. Not because of religious or moral issues but because a 15-year-old high school friend of mine had died from an illegal…
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Opinion In Brazil, Abortion Is Still Illegal
I never again had that feeling of total integration of conscience and body as at the moment it dawned on me I was pregnant. It was eerie: I found myself standing in front of the window of a very upscale baby shop, with my head turned, observing a man holding his child up in the…
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Opinion A Masked Man at a Farm Near Baltimore, Then a Happy Ending With Boxer Shorts
The dictionary defines regret as a sense of loss, disappointment or dissatisfaction. I do not regret my abortion, the illegal one I had shortly after my 20th birthday, seven years before Roe v. Wade became law. I didn’t regret my decision then, and I don’t regret it now. I do regret the humiliation of having…
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Opinion Remembering My Abortion Every Yom Kippur
My cisgender male partner of seven years and I had sex, and the condom we were using for safer sex and birth control broke. Within the hour, we called our friend who was a nurse practitioner at the Feminist Women’s Health Clinic and got a prescription for Plan B (a prescription was needed at that…
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Opinion How Orlando Can Come Together To Be Symbol of Coexistence — Not Hateful Violence
Orlando, “the City Beautiful” as it is officially known, a city known to most around the world for Walt Disney World, Harry Potter and being the place “where dreams come true” is now on the map as the site of the single largest mass murder in U.S. history. Yesterday in Orlando, a different history was…
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Opinion Is Orlando About Islamist Terrorism, Homophobia, Mental Illness or Guns?
Was the hideous mass shooting at an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub due to Islamist terrorism, homophobia, mental illness or guns? All of the above — and that is precisely the problem. In the short time since the attack — the 49 victims have only just been identified — politicians and pundits of all stripes have…
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