I have never been pregnant. I have no children. I do not regret either of these things, but both of them are things that could have happened.
They didn’t happen because I came of age not only when birth control pills were available, but also at the time when it became easier for single women to get prescriptions for the pill or other forms of contraception.
Since I’ve never been pregnant, I’ve never had an abortion. However, I know that I would not have hesitated to have an abortion if I had become pregnant at many times in my life.
I can imagine more possible regrets to having a child than I can to having an abortion. Is that shocking? Perhaps it is. But I have watched the struggle of single mothers.
On the basic biological level, the purpose of our existence may well be to reproduce, but despite the many failures of human beings, I do think our current purpose is far beyond the biological. People have dreams and goals, things they want to accomplish in their short period of time on Earth. I object to people sacrificing what matters to them for their children or their partner or their parents or even the good of the world.
I was in law school when Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the United States. It was certainly something to celebrate.
I think the biggest mistake we made back then was to be queasy about supporting abortion. These days we say it is health care, but in the past all too often people said it should be “rare.”
We tiptoed around it. We should have claimed abortion a long time ago.
No one should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. Period. (No one should be forced to end one, either, but that’s part of the point.)
That brings me to two books. Continue reading “Roe, Russ, and The Baby on the Fire Escape“…