| the blog of human failure
I’ve always had a weird tick in my head that likes to play mind experiments about abortion. I can only assume this comes from the time I got stabbed in the foot three or four times with a coat hanger in-vitro and was left for the rest of my life wondering, “what if?”
Let’s put it this way, in America women can have as many abortions as they like. I actually think that’s great, but it’s easy to imagine how it could spiral out of control. For instance let’s say that you get pregnant when you’re 17 years old. You’re a senior in high school with half a semester left to go. Your boyfriend is a sweetheart and you love the guy but you’ll be going to different schools in the fall and have no serious intentions to stay together past summer. “Mom, I don’t know. What should I do?” Abortion! Abortion abortion abortion. That’s the no-brainer of the century.
Ok, now, let’s say a different person, this time a woman in her late twenties. She’s married and has the beginnings of a successful career going. She’s putting in 80 hour weeks while she’s still young enough to do it and she’s planning on having a kid in four years when her work schedule will be at a more pragmatic plateau. After hundreds of condoms used successfully with her husband, one doesn’t come through for them and she gets pregnant. She’s not ready; she wants to get rid of the pregnancy. Again, this sounds wise enough to me.
Ok, now, let’s imagine yet another person. This is a woman also in hear late twenties. She’s married but unemployed; her husband supports the two of them. She gets pregnant by accident in a similar condom malfunction. Now even though she’s got no good reason, she’d just prefer not to have a kid right now. She thinks she’ll probably want one later, but doesn’t want one right now. Now she gets an abortion. And again I think that’s fine. I think having kids is like making pancakes on the griddle, where you have to burn and throw the first one away just to get the heat distribution right.
Now let’s say a woman is in her twenties and has four abortions in a row and then finally finds the right guy and settles down and gets pregnant a fifth time and decides to keep it. That seems Ok.
Ok, this time, a woman gets pregnant and actually has the kid with her husband. She has decided that she only wants one kid. She accidentally gets pregnant again afterwards, however, and decides to get an abortion. That seems fine to me.
Now let’s say the same scenario again, where the woman has the first kid but then aborts the second, but then a few years later gets pregnant again. Now she’s had a little more life experience and decides to keep this kid. Got that? Has the first, aborts the second, has the third. Does anyone see what I’m getting at here?
Let’s say a woman has the first kid, aborts the second, has the third, aborts the fourth and fifth, has six through nine, aborts ten and eleven, and then has twelve. Talk about the right to choose! It’s just fun thinking about. I can just imagine the different rationales. Some would always abort the first two and then swing for the third like some kind of gynecological Casey at the Bat. I can imagine aborting every other kid just for some vague notion like, “because it feels lucky.” I would love to be a mother in that scenario, and then when my kids are all really getting on my nerves I could blow up at them, “I wish I had aborted you evil even pieces of shit and conceived the odds. I wish I had done the exact opposite of what I did! Somewhere in heaven are my sweet, quiet, odd-numbered children who I should have had the good sense to swap you little monsters for in the first place. Who wants more cereal?” It gets a little morally hazy after a while is what I’m saying. I guess.
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When it comes to this debate, I often wonder if children should, at any time, be allowed to decide if they could “abort” their parents.
Let’s say, for instance, that parents of a child decide to abort a sibling of that child. Should the surviving child then be allowed to terminate the life of the parents whenever it becomes more convenient for that child to have parents out of the picture?
Or, for that matter, should I be allowed to “abort” someone I don’t like just because their parents didn’t have the foresight to know that their child would someday be an inconvenience to me? Why is it that the mother’s convenience is the only one that matters? Isn’t my convenience as important as hers?
A random game of choice becomes much more interesting when everyone who plays has something to lose. The debate becomes much more interesting in this scenario.
If you enter the ring, it should be a cage match.
Comment by Sota — June 27, 2008 #
reredrum…. you get the idea….don’t you?
Comment by Kevin — July 9, 2008 #