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In the summer of 1987, when I was 30, I had started a new relationship and we got a bit careless – that old story. My biological clock had been ticking, but I just wasn't ready for this pregnancy. One morning, my hands shaking, I dialled the Morgentaler clinic in Toronto and made an appointment for an abortion. Then I climbed into my bed and cried. It seems like I stayed there for days, trying to reconcile myself to my situation. I was lucky because my partner was supportive, but I knew the decision was between me and this potential baby.

In the end, I cancelled the appointment. A couple of weeks later, I had a miscarriage. It was all very dramatic, the middle-of-the-night rush to the hospital and the emergency dilation and curettage to remove the remains of the pregnancy. And in one of those fateful moments of irony, I discovered that I had been carrying a blighted ovum; there never had been a baby. At the time, it seemed like a crass joke, but those weeks were among the most intense of my adult life.

And I rarely talk about them.

With all of the controversy surrounding the naming of Henry Morgentaler to the Order of Canada, I began wondering why I, like so many other women, had been silent on the personal experience of abortion. Why is it acceptable to sit around a dinner table and talk about colonoscopies, hot flashes and Viagra, but not about our abortion experiences? Why don't I know whether any of the women in my book club have had an abortion when I'm familiar with so many other intimate details of their lives?

It has been 20 years since the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized abortion and – with a few notable exceptions in provinces such as Prince Edward Island (where it's not available) and New Brunswick (where recommendations from two doctors are required) – most Canadians have access to legal, timely and safe abortions. Almost 100,000 Canadian women each year make the decision to end a pregnancy, yet in all but a few cases they never discuss them, even decades later.

Given the frequency with which women decide to end a pregnancy – there were 28.3 abortions for every 100 live births in Canada in 2005 – why is there still such a powerful stigma around a legal procedure?

SECRETS AND SILENCE

Paige Thombs, now living in Western Canada, was attending a Catholic girls school when she became pregnant at the age of 18. The decision to have an abortion wasn't easy, and it was made more difficult by a boyfriend who put a lot of pressure on her to go through with the pregnancy.

Her condition became a complicated web of secrets and half-truths. Her school principal, a former nun, knew of the pregnancy, but no one else did – until a friend broke a confidence and word leaked out among the students.

After the abortion, Ms. Thombs told the principal that she had had a miscarriage. Not long afterward, her religion teacher invited a Christian couple into the classroom to give a talk on why abortion was a sin. Ms. Thombs knew that another girl in the class had had an abortion too. “I just remember this guy standing up there and telling us you could not in all honesty consider yourself Christian any more. At the time, that was certainly shaming.”

The secrets became silences. Her mother, a quietly pro-choice Catholic, gave Ms. Thombs her support at the time, and yet they don't talk about it. Her younger brother knew about the abortion, but they don't discuss it either.

Even now, 20 years later, Ms. Thombs still wrestles with a guilt that she senses was imposed upon her. “Sometimes you feel relieved, and you feel ashamed that you don't feel shame.

“Like, ‘I should feel bad about this, I killed my baby' – all those things the anti-choice movement tends to say.”

She says she knows that she should have used birth control, “but you know what? If it was any other kind of stupid mistake, you wouldn't spend so much time beating yourself up over it. There is so much media stuff that tells you, whispers in your ear, ‘You better not tell anybody about this.' People who are very pro-choice, who've had abortions, stay silent. People who are anti-choice are very verbal.”

Some women who feel the stigma surrounding abortion attribute it to old-fashioned chauvinism.

Catherine, a medical student in Quebec, had an abortion when she was 14. “There is still a sexual double standard. Women still get judged for having sex ‘unwisely' while men get praised for it,” she says. “The responsibility for preventing pregnancy, just like the responsibility for deciding whether to carry to term, the responsibility of giving birth, and most of the responsibility of parenting still lies with women.”

When an unplanned pregnancy happens, when an abortion happens, she says, women are judged, but “the men involved are spared this.”

Other women never feel the pressure to assume a mantle of guilt – viewing their abortion as a matter-of-fact experience. But many of them remain silent nonetheless.

Joyce Arthur of the Abortion Rights Coalition had an abortion when she was 30 and remembers feeling a huge sense of relief once her pregnancy had been terminated, partly because she had been so sick. “It was the best decision I could have made at the time.”

But it was years before she talked about it. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home where everybody around her was anti-abortion, she confided only in a couple of close friends.

A few years later, when Ms. Arthur stumbled onto a pro-choice rally in Vancouver, she joined the movement and eventually played a leadership role – yet still remained circumspect about her own abortion. When the admission did come out, it was in a spectacularly unplanned way.

She was in the middle of a live interview on national radio, she says, when “out of the blue the host asked me, ‘Have you had an abortion yourself?' and I hesitated and said, ‘Yes.' It felt good, over all. I realized that was important. Too many women are silent, and there's nothing to be ashamed of, so why not just talk about it? I was in a position to set an example.”

MOTHERHOOD, HOLLYWOOD

Of all the social issues in 1960s and 70s, none seemed more fraught and complex than abortion. It was a hot political issue – at the centre of the struggle for women's rights, while at the same time such a taboo subject that the word “abortion” was rarely used in “polite” conversation. In 1971, a group of women in France scandalized the country with the “Manifesto of the 343” – 343 women, including writer Simone de Beauvoir and actress Catherine Deneuve, declared publicly that they had had abortions.

The following year in the U.S., Ms. Magazine also published names – 53 women signed a public statement that was commemorated in an editorial on the magazine's 30th anniversary: “Imagine the shock (and relief) of seeing women publicly admit in 1972, before it was legal, that they had had abortions,” editor-in-chief Marcia Ann Gillespie wrote. But then she went on to ruefully add that the public declaration is “something that women are loath to do even today.”

Even front-line feminists, it seems, have not been able to fully address the persistent, all-pervasive stigma that still exists around abortion.

In today's supposedly anything-goes society, popular culture sends a clear message: Deciding against abortion is what decent women do – or decent and cool women, in the case of Juno, a movie in which a young woman quickly rejects the idea of abortion and handpicks the perfect adoptive mom for her child instead. In Knocked Up, a woman pregnant after a one-night stand with an unemployed boor chooses motherhood and him over her career and the possibility of a wiser choice of mate down the road.

There's nothing wrong with these choices per se – it's the taken-for-granted premise that only women who automatically choose motherhood qualify as Hollywood heroines, while women who accept abortion as a viable choice are largely restricted to such art-house fare as 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Vera Drake.

LITTLE HAS CHANGED

In her 1984 book Not An Easy Choice: Re-examining Abortion, Toronto author Kathleen McDonnell wrote that “for most women in our society, abortion is still a dark secret, a source of shame.”

Twenty-four years later, Ms. McDonnell says, little has changed: “When the characters in a hip contemporary comedy like Knocked Up can't even bring themselves to say the word ‘abortion,' something's still very wrong.”

The stigma is being lifted in small ways by some. Ms. Thombs says that the few times she has opened up about her experience with other women, barriers have dropped. “It's interesting, because if you're in a room full of women and you happen to be the one who says, ‘I had an abortion years ago,' you're going to be amazed at how many women say, ‘Yeah, me too,' or ‘Yeah, my sister did,' or ‘Yeah, my best friend did and I took her to the clinic.' ”

Others are becoming cautiously more vocal.

Wendy Chappell had two legal abortions and is married to the man who is “the father of my two abortions, the father of my two children and of the special needs child we adopted.” She had her second abortion, in the Morgentaler clinic in Winnipeg, while she was still nursing her 10-week-old infant daughter and her husband was leaving to do a PhD program. “I had this beautiful little baby,” Ms. Chappell recalls. “I couldn't ask [my husband] not to go to graduate school, although what I really wanted was to not have that abortion.” But “I couldn't see how I could do it on my own.”

Within the rural, conservative Catholic community in PEI where Ms. Chappell, a personal trainer, now lives, she is reluctant to raise the subject. Even her daughters, the oldest of whom is 20, had no idea that she had had abortions.

But Ms. Chappell was so upset by letters to her local newspaper decrying Morgentaler's naming to the Order of Canada that she felt she had to speak up. In conversation with a female client, she disclosed that she had had an abortion, and the client acknowledged to her that she, too, had had two abortions. “I don't think she's ever said that to anyone,” Ms. Chappell says.

Ms. Chappell's 13-year-old daughter, Choyce, later asked why her mother had never told her about her abortions, saying that “she is pro-choice and would have an abortion if she felt she needed one.”

BACK TO THE BARRICADES

Just as women 20 and 30 years ago publicly advocated for legalizing abortion, there are women who are now publicly advocating more openness.

In the U.S., Jennifer Baumgardner made headlines in 2004 with her design for a T-shirt that said, “I Had an Abortion,” and was marketed by Planned Parenthood. She wanted to make the point, she said in interviews at the time, that having an abortion is a medical procedure for which no apology is needed. “In any town there are women who've gotten abortions,” she said. “It's probably people we know and love.”

And in Toronto, 29-year-old Toronto photographer Kathryn Palmateer was galvanized into action after reading a newspaper story about six-week wait times for abortions in Ottawa. The tenor of the article suggested that women were not willing to fight for their reproductive rights, and that prompted her to launch the Arts4choice project. She put out a call to see if anyone would tell her their story and pose for a portrait. Women began to respond. She has taken portraits of 36 women who have had abortions and plans to do more. This spring, she mounted a show during the Contact photography festival in Toronto.

Activists may have hoped that attitudes toward abortion would change with legalization, but after the right to safe, legal abortions was won in both Canada and the U.S., it was as if the issue went away altogether. The politically based openness closed up again and the stigma became entrenched – consciously or unconsciously. Women exercised their right to choose, but then splintered off to deal with the emotions around it alone.

For many, one of the strongest emotions is ambivalence – about what they have done and then about their sense of being a traitor to the cause. As Ms. McDonnell says, “While we have acknowledged much of our ambivalence among ourselves, in the privacy of our kitchen-table conversations, we have largely refrained from talking about it publicly, disturbed that it does not appear to jibe with our stated position on abortion and fearful of how our opponents might use it against us.”

More than one woman has faced this conundrum: We think we know our position, then we're disturbed when we have to make a decision.

Melanie Bray, 33, didn't want children, but when she became pregnant in 1995 in Montreal, the choice to terminate proved more complicated than expected: “I was surprised that speaking hypothetically and having it actually happen to you are two different things.”

Ms. Bray was confident it was the right thing to do, but still suffers a sense of loss. “I'm not entitled to the grief that I have because I chose my loss,” she says. “Even though I didn't want the child, once I was pregnant it changed me and it was a difficult decision to make, and I live with that loss every day. I wouldn't change my decision. I don't regret it. I chose that loss, I created that loss. So, how do I come to grips with it is the big question that has come up for me.”

Ms. Bray has a tattoo that commemorates the episode. “My tattoo says, ‘I shall be with you in the spirit,' and it's on my belly.”

Part of the reason for ambivalence, Ms. McDonnell maintains, is that “abortion involves a web of complex physical and psychological processes that themselves pull us in two directions at once. It involves our bodies, our emotions and our spirits in a way that engages us on many levels simultaneously, and that ensures that our response will be anything but simple.”

Interestingly, the ambivalence seems to go both ways – with a number of anti-abortion women claiming their right to choose when pregnancy seems unacceptable. Some of those women were the subject of a study by Ellen Wiebe, a general practitioner who has been performing abortions for 30 years. She published her findings in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology Canada after interviewing 40 women who identified themselves as anti-abortion but who had had abortions themselves. According to Dr. Wiebe, they felt that other women should not be having abortions except in certain special cases.

“This is a real eye-opener for us working in the field,” she says, “because we had certainly met a few women who were open about it, who'd say things like, ‘I never thought I'd do anything like this because I really believe it's wrong, but now I just couldn't face another pregnancy' – as if they were special, nobody else was.

“But what happened during our study was that we discovered this wasn't a small minority of women. This is a large minority.”

THE ETERNAL DILEMMA

Some time before my own pregnancy scare, I dated a man who lived behind the first Morgentaler clinic in Toronto. From his balcony, I could see anti-abortion protesters lingering in the laneway behind the Victorian building where the clinic was housed, picketing the front and back entrances regularly. One older man in religious robes heckled women as they arrived or left.

Some years later, when I accompanied a friend to that clinic, I had to deal with pickets. This was before 1994, when the Ontario government introduced zones to keep anti-abortion demonstrators at a distance from the entrance to clinics. Before that, protesters would get right up in the faces of women who were trying to get into the clinic, and I can still feel that sense of apprehension as we walked toward the back to avoid the intimidation.

Dr. Morgentaler was leaving at the same time, and I remember how odd it felt to be thanking him for his help as we climbed through a window to the fire escape.

I have rarely spoken of this event either.

Looking at it now, I am struck by my silence: about helping someone else get an abortion and even about the abortion I didn't actually have. Both seemed so private, so sensitive, that I kept every detail about the experiences to myself – for decades. I now realize that I was responding to an unwritten rule: Don't ask, don't tell.

I'm beginning to understand my silence. I can see why anyone would be reluctant to discuss a painful decision that is irrevocable; it's about the potential for a new life. No matter how convinced you are that terminating a pregnancy is the right decision, it's still a fateful choice clouded in doubt. In the wrong situation, pregnancy can be a nightmare. In the right situation, it's a blessing.

Ms. McDonnell explains it this way: “Women still wrestle with the same (probably eternal) dilemma: Do we take care of others or take care of ourselves? So the ambivalence isn't going to go away – it's real, and I think it's a kind of healthy ambivalence.

“What isn't healthy is the shame and silence that still persist.”

Cate Cochran is the author of Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End. Families Don't. She lives in Toronto