Jesus, Mary, Joseph

The Missus is not ordinarily an especially political person, but she was so aghast at an article she read on her travels this weekend that she felt compelled to show it to me when she got back.

The piece, called "Choosing Us", was written by one Alison Piepmeier and appears in the November '07 issue of some Charlotte, NC fembot paper called Skirt. (It looks as if you have to register to get it on-line.)

The sub-heading of the article is "Our abortion was a love story". It is one of the more appalling things I've read in a long, long time.

It seems the author and her husband "Walter" have been married five years, are financially successful and perfectly healthy. She gets knocked up (so we are informed) during a quicky fling on the bathroom floor while her brother and girlfriend are in the next room watching tee vee. Of course, it was only after opening the barn doors (as it were) that our plucky heroine started thinking seriously about the topic of horses:

I slowly realized that, even though I was spending part of every day trying to will my uterine lining to detach, I did probably want to have kids someday. I was really clear, though, on the fact that "someday" was not now. I thought about all the selfish reasons I wasn't ready for a child - I want to write another book, we might need to move for my job - and wondered whether it was okay for me to decide based on my own desires. Walter had tumultuously mixed feelings; he has children from a previous relationship and didn't think he wanted to be a father again, but he wasn't sure he believed that abortion was an ethical decision. I listened intently to him even as I talked back in my head: "It's not your decision to make! I can't keep being pregnant!" We talked about adoption, but I knew we couldn't do it - we can't even walk by a pet store without getting attached, so I knew if we spent nine months with this being, it would be ours for life. So where did that leave us?

There's enough material in that paragraph alone to make this normally placid Llama start spitting seriously. (Apparently the baby would have stood a better shot at survival had it been a cute puppy instead.) But it gets worse. Much worse. I quote the last quarter or so of the article:

On Sunday, the morning of the abortion, Walter and I woke up together. Over coffee at the breakfast table, each of us wrote a letter. Walter had brought me a bunch of yellow daisies, and we each took one. Then we went to the river.

Sitting on rocks on the riverbank, on a sunny, cold January morning, I read my letter aloud. "Dear potential person," I said. "Thank you so much for coming along." I started to cry. I wished it well, told it I hoped it found another home, and pulled the blossom off my flower and threw it into the river. Walter cried, too, as he read his letter, explaining why now wasn't the right time for us but inviting this being to come back later if it wanted, and then he tossed his blossom out into the current; yellow petals on the green water. Both our flowers floated away, and I was surprisingly relieved to watch them go. "I hope to God they don't wash back ashore here," Walter said. We burned our letters but kept the flower stems to take home, as a reminder. It was a good ceremony: earth, air, fire, water and words.

When we went home, I took the remaining pills, and had a little pain and a lot of bleeding, but it was over pretty quickly, and Walter was there the whole time. In the days and weeks (and now years) since, I felt a little grief, but mostly gratitude. It wasn't just the relief of not being forced to give birth (although that was considerable); it was also what the decision did for our marriage.

There are other stories that go along with our abortion - the story of telling my family, of my brothers' conflicted yet supportive reactions. There are the stories of the other women having abortions that day, women whose insurance (like mine) wouldn't cover the procedure. There are the stories of other children these women will later have. There's the story of Walter's lonely couple of hours in the clinic lobby, scanning the faces of the other men waiting for their partners, some crying, some relieved, all totally left out.

But the story I most want to tell - and one I have never heard - is of abortion as an intimate part of a couple's life together. Our abortion was a love story. I'd worried that Walter and I were rejecting a gift from the universe. What I discovered, though, was that when we stripped away the distractions of everyday life so that we could make this difficult decision together, it bound us together as surely as if our choice had been different - and as it turns out, that was the gift.

Is this woman so incredibly blinded by self-absorption that she hasn't the faintest idea what she's really saying here? That terminating a life for no apparent reason other than their own convenience is a healthy bond for a couple? That the fact that they made the choice together is far more important than what the actual choice was, as if they were deciding on new wallpaper for the front hall? That abortion equals love?

I'm sorry, but to me this is just plain evil. Baby, of course, could not be reached for comment.