"Good Fortune For Our Childless Year"

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Some people are addicted to chocolate. Others find comedies irresistible. Still others are hooked on series that have been on television for decades.

Me, I am compelled to read first-person accounts about abortion in the right-to-death newspaper of record, the New York Times. They come packaged under various categories, such as "Lives," as was the case with Sunday's latest episode, "Staying Home."

Usually I dissect these at interminable length. Let me just say two things about Brian Goedde's ode to self.

First, he offers this lame, brutally insensitive metaphor about being counseled by Emily, his then-girl friend, to properly wrap a Chinese dumplings dish before he drops it into boiling water. If it isn't properly sealed, it'll fall apart when it hits the water.

"If only they'd been as careful about not getting pregnant," he muses.

A few of the dumplings aren't sealed tightly, but his girlfriend, now wife (this takes place a few years ago on New Year's Eve) is forgiving, "I think." Emily tells him the dumplings are customarily eaten "on the Chinese New Year… in order to bring good fortune."

Brian adds, "Good fortune for our childless year."

Dumplings falling apart in boiling water, babies torn apart. (Not such good luck for the hapless child.) But to someone with the moral development of an adolescent male, it's six of one, half-dozen of the other. Equally disposable, equally of no value.

He ends his curious opinion piece by regaling us with how they then hopped into the sack. "I'm not going to get more pregnant," Emily says, to which Brian adds, "I've never felt pleasure more guiltily."

This makes sense when we remember that along the way, Goedde tells us that he has lied to people who call to invite them out. Emily's "got stomach issues."

Of course, he tells us in the next breath, "We're adults, we've decided. We became pregnant alone, made our decision alone and will face the aftermath alone." I wonder if he understands what he has just written--or how often the one who is left to "face the aftermath alone" is an abandoned woman?

We also learn that Emily didn't want to drink while pregnant.

"It's just not something you do," she says. Even though the pregnancy is scheduled to be terminated in two days, there's still something -- someone? -- inside of her she doesn't want to hurt. I'm utterly baffled but mask it with a respectful, if distant, "O.K." I don't want to ruin the mood. I just tell myself that we could never see this situation the same way, and that even what we decide together we'll have to experience separately. That's that.

So eager is Brian not to "ruin the mood," it does not occur to him how  convenient--and cowardly-- it is to dismiss her ambivalence as nothing more than not "see[ing] the situation the same way."

I guess in the final analysis--no matter how many of these accounts I read--there are two reasons I am fascinated by them.

First, I still can't believe that anyone can actually live the kind of astonishingly unexamined lives these stories suggest. Second, they remind me how often women subtly signal to the men in their lives that they are looking for a reason NOT to abort.

You can read the piece in its entirety at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/magazine/16lives-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

Please send any comments to daveandrusko@hotmail.com .