Posted on 07/16/2007 12:45:26 PM PDT by finnman69
TWO weeks after my husband and I quit our jobs, gave up our Brooklyn apartment and moved to Mexico to travel and work as freelance reporters, I discovered I was pregnant. Among the subjects I hoped to write about in Mexico was its restrictive abortion laws. Now I was contemplating an abortion myself.
Even though my period was 10 days late, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could be pregnant. I’d had late periods before. I took a home pregnancy test on a whim.
When the telltale plus sign flashed solid, I stared at it in disbelief. I had always used birth control, and the previous month had been such a flurry of packing and goodbye parties that I couldn’t even remember when we’d had sex.
As New York-based journalists, David and I decided to move to Mexico to learn Spanish and break into international reporting. David had spent more than a decade toiling as a correspondent for Reuters. Mexico was his break, his chance to rethink his career and perhaps write a book. For me, it would be an opportunity to shift from writing for local newspapers to covering international stories for national publications.
Now, living in Michoacán, a Mexican state with a serious drug war (decapitated heads had recently rolled into a nightclub in nearby Uruapan), we had no income, no permanent home and only vague plans.
Those plans included exploring Mexico’s teeming cities and hiking through its southern jungles, not scheduling ultrasounds and attending birthing classes. We didn’t yet have a map of the area, much less an obstetrician.
“We don’t have to keep it,” I told David.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The malignant narcissist bitch thinks SHE gave the baby life and a soul so SHE can kill 'IT' if she pleases or keep ‘IT’ at her whim- - note the bitch’s use of the term “it’ instead of the term ‘baby’. These people are pure evil. May her unborn child escape the baby-killer’s knife and be adopted by a righteous loving family. And then may the ever-so-cosmo bitch become a similarly powerless plaything for six or eight Mexican head rollers, that is, gentlemen involved in the distribution and export sale of recreational substances.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the child never looks at "mommy" the same way again.
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A selfish couple somehow overcomes their instinctive desire to murder their baby.
Perhaps being a Mom will make her grow into a better person. I know I was much more selfish and shallow before I had kids. After the first one was born I realized that it wasn’t all about me anymore (if it ever really was).
susie
“We don’t have to keep it.” Hope no one trots out this gem for the little girl’s seventh birthday, high school graduation or wedding shower. What vile, despicable people these are!
“they could always return “it” where “it” they’d purchased “it.”
Nowadays people wouldn’t dare be so cruel towards a sweet little puppy...why, he’s already bonded with his new family! Honestly, many people today seem to have more compassion toward animals than toward unborn humans. Sickening!
Wouldn’t they get free pre-natal care? And the baby would be a mexican citizen so they could then sign up for welfare. Oh that’s right, they’re Americans migrating legally to mexico. It seemed like a fair plan to me.
A lot of the comments are spot on, with respect to narcissism, etc.
There is a very strange bit of blindness here in addition, on the part of the author and certainly her husband, but perhaps I misjudge her. The fact that she saw so many thriving babies and people having babies and getting along without their assumed necessities (such as seat-belts, medical insurance, etc.), makes one wonder about how they expected to write knowledgably about that place and those people. It seems to me their writing project was doomed from the start, they were not getting into the local mindset, they were thinking like transient voyeurs. Maybe they will be better writers after the kid comes, that tends to help in connecting people into reality.
Me too. Children really force you to be an adult, because somebody's gotta be. That's one of the reasons why they're such a blessing.
I didn't find the article to be pro-life at all. This woman's decision didn't at any time touch on the innate human value of her unborn child, nor on his fundamental right to live. She merely weighed the relative inconvenience and "bad timing" of the clearly unwelcome event.
Her decision to allow her child to live amounted to: "Well, we were thinking about letting you come later, but you got here early. You've completely hosed our plans, but maybe we can work around you."
The poor child just squeaked in under the wire. I expect he'll be regarded as an unwelcome annoyance, for the most part.
After my fifth baby, I was worried that I might be pregnant again because I was late. When I saw the test I stared at it in disbelief and stared at it some more. I waited a good four or five minutes just to be sure. I was not pregnant and had never seen a pregnancy test that wasn't positive, so I was sure the test was supposed to do something else.
My mind is reeling at the responses to this article. Shame on you (and I mean that literally). This woman most likely comes from a milieu that surely thinks the decision she made is not only stupid, impractical, and sentimental, but a downright betrayal of the feminist/secularist/me first ethos, she is writing for the NYT for the NYT after all!
She had the courage to listen to “that still, small voice” and stubbornly resisted what she had previously, and thoughtlessly, believed to be the reasonable thing to do.
Did you notice this sentence from her essay?: “I turned to the Internet, hoping to find some clarity. Instead I found anti-abortion Web sites that terrified me with images of dead fetuses and stories of women scarred for life.” If she had had the opportunity to speak with most of (actually, all but one at last count) the thoughtless, arrogant, heartless, posters on this thread I don’t doubt that there would be one less child in this world.
No worry about dad. He'll be long gone by the time the kid can read this tale of Yuppie selfishness.
I wonder if she’ll paste this article in the child’s baby book...
BINGO! The popular Catholic blogger Amy Welborn offered some thoughtful reflections on this piece yesterday:
What is always, consistently and invariably missing from this kind of reflections is any kind of moral sensibility. There is no essential understanding of right or wrong expressed (although it's hard to believe it's not felt at some level) - it is all about what is right for us, right now, in our lives. The baby's life literally has no inherent value. There is no admitting of what "not having the baby" actually means in real life, in real time, in real actions.This is the missing piece, this is the bridge that those committed have to cross - the rhetorical work that abortion advocates have done over the past four decades has worked and worked well. Undoing that work and doing our own is the task - of example, of teaching, of love.
Maybe all three will grow up together.
Imagine their child reading this someday.....(this woman thinks it's all about her....!
I saw “Knocked Up” a couple of weeks ago.
It’s a hilariously funny, very pro-life movie, even though the characters use a lot of cuss words.
I fear for this child's future,even if he/she gets to draw breath.
This husband is not a man, he is a self absorbed child unworthy of a wife or child. They are better off without him.
I really didn’t see the woman thinking it was all about her. She wanted to protect her baby. The husband is the villain in this story. I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that their marriage will end before the child starts school.
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