We often need to swiftly abort a prepared response at the last moment before it is initiated. Our ability to abort a planned response is thought to be a fundamental facet of action control that is distinguished by its rapid speed, and is enabled by a specialized neural mechanism. This narrative has, however, largely been established based on experiments in which there is much greater urgency to abort an action than there is to generate an action. Here, we demonstrate that, under conditions of matched urgency, the speed at which participants are able to abort an action is comparable to the speed at which they can initiate an action. Our results challenge the prevailing view that stopping behaviors have a privileged status. We suggest, instead, that action initiation may often be systematically delayed to allow time to abort an action if needed.