abortion stops misery

1955: a career army officer and his wife are celebrating his (their) promotion.

they get a little drunk (he’s an alcoholic) and have unprotected sex.

she gets pregnant. with their fourth child.

she is 35. she just got their third child out of the house and into school. she doesn’t want another kid. doesn’t want to deal with that hellscape again, especially in a military family with all that packing, because in 30 years, they will move 36 times.

some women talk quietly, in the corners at parties, about ways to end a pregnancy. but it isn’t socially acceptable, so the officer and his wife keep a child they do not want.

and they make her miserable (not deliberately, but who cares?).

“you’re very plain,” her mother tells her daily.

her father, when he is home, beats her. beats all of his kids. eventually she learns he only wants to make her cry. to see that she hurts. so she learns to cry early in the punishment, and that lessens it.

her other siblings are much older. they ignore her. she barely remembers her oldest brother. she doesn’t want to remember her older sister, who is inhabiting another world and disdains dolls. and her other brother is busy with that sister.

so the girl is alone with someone who doesn’t want her, who never wanted her, who doesn’t hide it.

who ignores the doctors so gravely that she gives her daughter a lifelong medical condition.

and all the while they’re moving so often for the man of the house’s work — eight times before she finishes high school.

how do you make a friend you can confide in?

how do you find permanence amid constant change?

so when she is 12, she reaches the end of her rope and tries to kill herself.

her mother spots her and gets angry at her because now she’ll have to see a specialist.

she doesn’t know it, but she is emotionally stunted. years later, she meets someone similar. falls in love. they get married. have children.

neither of them are prepared for the emotion of children. her husband figures it out somehow.

she does not.

forty years after she became a mother, she still is not emotionally available. emotionally mature. mature, at all. despite her best efforts. because she still has so much to unlearn from her toxic mother.

we are still recovering from her abusive childhood. from our neglected childhoods.

i had to learn how to not care about anyone. because if you don’t care, the things they do to hurt you hurt less.

abortion helps women and men and families avoid situations they cannot cope with.

and it helps them avoid situations they don’t want.

misery.

if you want women (or men) to be miserable by having to endure pregnancies,

you are a bad person.

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