Excerpts from...

Papa's Post-Operative Blues; A Father Looks At Abortion

I'd never really thought about abortion much. The great Pill had come along, and that was quite a boon to an 18-year-old midwestern boy in search of adventure; and in search of girls too, of course. Eighteen-year-olds are always pretty interested in cracking those mysteries, and the Pill made it a lot easier to cut down the resistance. Janice, as I shall call her, lost her virginity in 1968, began living with me in '69, but in 1970 we broke up. Although not entirely, as it were, and she became pregnant. I was against abortion, though not enough to sound as if I meant it.

The pressure on us to have an abortion was relentless. It may be that there were voices raised against it, and I simply refused to hear them; but I don't think so. I know there was not one person who said to me: Be a man. You have been a boy, and have, as boys will, stumbled into a reality wherein now people need you; so now be a man." It was not the spirit of the age.

Janice, too, needed someone, needed me, to tell her to be strong, to tell her that all the joy she would know, all the suffering, was not worth denying this child the chance to see the color green, or to eat an orange. I didn't tell her that, though, maybe didn't even know it; and eventually she succumbed.

I'd like to be bitter about all this, and am some, except that my own bitterness fares poorly against that to which my child seems entitled. It occurs to me that my child had the right to expect I would even die for its sake, and so what sort of explanation is it to say, you died because I was young and a little confused? There is no easy exit from that guilt, or from that sorrow.

Richard Cowden Guido