MISTAKE

Jack didn’t bother to use a condom properly, which I was too inexperienced to realize. Not only would he wait until he’d completely lost his erection to remove it, he’d wash it out and use it again, which made what happened next practically a foregone conclusion.

When I discovered I was pregnant, I sank into an even deeper depression. With no way I could see to support a child, I would have to give it up for adoption, but without a support system, carrying it to term felt like more than I could do.

Despite my despondency, I do remember standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom one afternoon and stroking my belly, thinking, “There’s a new life growing inside me,” and feeling, however fleetingly, what a miracle that was. Actually, I regarded myself as such a failure at the time it seemed all the more miraculous that I, of all people, could be carrying a child.

Nevertheless, I scheduled an abortion at the local clinic. Later I would comfort myself with the thought that many pregnancies end in miscarriage and maybe mine would have too, or by telling myself that there was no guarantee that adoptive parents would be good parents and that my child might have wound up suffering as much as I had.

In later years, though, I felt if I were to get pregnant again, I wouldn’t choose to have another abortion, and I’d grieve whenever I thought about the child I might have had.

And here I would like to add that I believe abortion is such a deep, personal issue for a woman that the state has no right to interfere. Besides, the human race has already overrun the planet, driving a mass extinction of all else that lives, despoiling and destroying the natural world on which our own future existence depends. To me, those who call themselves pro-choice, are pro-lifers in the broadest sense.