After tallying more than 2 million votes for and against an abortion, Pete and Alisha Arnold say they plan to have a baby.
The Apple Valley, Minn., couple put the decision to a vote on a website, birthornot.com, that they say got hundreds of thousands of duplicate votes, drew criticism online around the world and got her fired from her job.
"There's always a cost to speaking out," Pete Arnold says.
He says that when the 2,006,363 votes were limited to one per IP address, or 278,084 individual computers, 74% were for having a baby and 26% for an abortion. The duplicates, he says, made the vote 78%-22% in favor of abortion.
CNN had raised the question of a hoax, quoting Pete Arnold as saying they never intended to end the pregnancy. He says CNN failed to quote his wife's contrary view.
Critics such as Jeff Fecke of Lakeville, Minn., author of the Blog of the Moderate Left, pointed to Pete Arnold's conservative blogging and opposition to abortion. Fecke asked whether Arnold's response to his wife's qualms about the pregnancy "was to put up a website that would minimize her role in deciding whether or not to have an abortion."
The Arnolds, both 30 and childless, say the site grew from a real disagreement.
Alisha, who says she believes in a right to abortion, says the pregnancy came shortly after two that ended in miscarriages, and she didn't feel emotionally or physically ready to try again.
An abortion "was on the table for me at first," she says. "Pete was against it. That's why we put it to the website."
By mid-October, when she went to the emergency room with fears of another miscarriage and before the website had gotten much attention, her mind was set.
"I realized I had become attached and couldn't go through with" an abortion, she says.
Comments on the site from women who had had complicated pregnancies and went on to have healthy babies "gave me the courage to make the right decision," she says.
They let the vote run its course rather than give in to the negative response, she says. They also wanted to promote a thoughtful debate, he says.
Pete Arnold says the website did unintentionally "minimalize in some regards the whole choice thing," but it also "put a face on it. It's not a random statistic," he says of the fetus that already has a nickname. "It's baby Wiggles."
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