The Mythology of "Choice"

When you put in the kind of hours that pro-lifers routinely do, it's not surprising that periodically your mind wanders off into contemplating "what-ifs." My favorite first floated through the canyons of my mind back in the early 1980s.

What are the absolutely indispensable linchpins that undergird the reign of Roe? Put another way, what pilings hold up the abortion superstructure, the removal of which could seriously threaten the collapse of abortion on demand?

Everyone has his or her own list. If we ignore for the purposes of this discussion seismic changes in the wider culture, we naturally focus on the mother and her unborn child. Let's take the child first.

What would be the aftershock if we were ever able to get it across to ordinary people that abortion hurts an unborn child -- that he or she suffers horribly beginning at some point at pregnancy. Neurologist Dr. Paul Ranalli, writing in NRL News, has observed, "Careful anatomical studies reveal, in fact, that the ascending pain fibers reach the cortex by 20 weeks. ... Allowing some room for individual variability, the brain of an unborn child will begin to register pain impulses just after 20 weeks, with ever-increasing amounts of pain reception reaching millions of surface cortical neurons between 20 and 24 weeks."

What if that became common knowledge? At the same time Americans are watching ads on their television sets for four-dimensional ultrasounds that produce images of unborn babies nearly as good as photographs?

What about their moms? We've talked for years about the physical and psychological aftermath that leaves many women floating aimlessly about like survivors on a life raft. As we've written extensively in recent issues, well-respected organizations are beginning to assemble in one place all the disparate evidence demonstrating beyond a quibble that abortion hurts an unknown but considerable percentage of women. (See page three.)

But what if, in addition to all that, the conventional wisdom about "choice" got turned on its head? That the gauzy, warm picture

of autonomous women freely choosing to abort were replaced with the dark, brutal truth that very often women are coerced into killing their babies in a manner that resembles something we've come to associate with China's savage one-child-per-family, forced-abortion regime? I thought of this once again when I read a piece in the July 7 New York Times Magazine titled "Family Planning." Curiously, at the end we're told that the name of the author, the father of a pregnant girl who eventually aborted, has "been withheld." But if you read this incredible saga, you understand why. If any morally sentient dad acted the way he did toward his daughter, he would do everything possible to keep his name a secret.

This first-person account details how the father, his wife, and their older daughter rolled out all the big guns to "persuade" his pregnant teenager to abort.

That this anything-but-subtle campaign to compel her to abort appeared in the New York Times Magazine is about as surprising as learning that the United Nation's Fund for Population Activities pooh-poohs China's coercive abortion policies. (For other stories on this, see pages 7 - 8.)We learn by the end of the first paragraph that as early as when she was five years of age, there were predictions his daughter [whom I will call Nadine] would wind up pregnant at 15. The action that provoked that curious and wholly inappropriate response from a family friend illustrated only that Nadine was a bit of a class clown. But the dad "thought of that" when his daughter did, indeed, become pregnant at age 15.

By paragraph two the father is telling us that faced with the unenviable task of following in the footsteps of a perhaps "too-good," Dean's-list older sister, Nadine had followed a predictable path of rebellion. However, when she becomes pregnant, there is not a syllable that suggests the parents feel any responsibility.

One searches in vain for the slightest clue they regret not figuring out a way for Nadine to "carve out her identity" beyond becoming pregnant. There is only the intimation that the "curse" had come true, like something out of Sleeping Beauty. Nothing they could have done, of course.

When the parents and the older daughter learn Nadine is not only pregnant but wants to keep the baby, swearing she will be a good parent, they "freaked out." Luckily for them, the boy lives with his grandparents who share their "supportive" instincts. They have a meeting where everyone decides they'd be better off minus the kid--everyone, that is, except Nadine.

Plausibly, however, following this circle of negativity, Nadine decides she can't go through with the pregnancy. But fate throws them a curve. The day before the scheduled abortion, the mom and daughter meet with the school counselor and the county probation officer on the subject of her truancies.

Implausibly, when the officer learns Nadine is pregnant, she orders the mom to take the daughter to a counseling center. "Like Planned Parenthood?" the counselor asks hopefully. No such luck. Nadine is taken to an "anti-abortion propaganda center."

Drats. The father whines that Nadine is soon "back on the teenage- mommy track" and the parents, he tells us, feel like "we had been sentenced to 18 years of hard labor."

But not to worry. They run in progressive circles. There is no shortage of women eager to tell Nadine about their abortions - - presumably how much better off they are for having exercised their "choice."

Everyone--Nadine's friends, her sister, and her sister's friends - - tells her abort, abort, abort. But it isn't working. "She wouldn't listen."

Loving papa that he is, "We decided to stage an intervention."

"When my daughter came into the living room there were 15 women waiting for her, including four mothers. They asked me to leave. I listened from the kitchen, and though I couldn't hear anything other than sobs and laughter, I could feel the gravity."But even that didn't work. Not about to make the same mistake twice - - using amateurs - - the father takes Nadine to experts: Planned Parenthood.

"That night when we got home and my wife asked our daughter what she was going to do, she blurted out, 'I don't have a choice.' The next day, she turned on Saturday-morning cartoons, as if she'd decided to be a kid again."A less charitable interpretation would be that her life had turned surrealistic and that the world of cartoons would seem safer than the real world where those closest to her circle around her like a pack of wolves.

The dad ends his account by telling us they had worried for a week that Nadine would change her mind - - and then worried that she wouldn't consider changing her mind. Had she "easily and immediately decided on an abortion," the father later decided, that might have been reason to worry too.

But as bad as all this is, the truly heartbreaking part is his conclusion; "I still have hope for this daughter." After all, this is the child who, at age of four, held the hand of her best friend who was dying when other parents wouldn't allow their children even to play with the child.

"I know that person is in there, and someday, when the fever [of adolescence] breaks, I pray that I'll see her again," he writes.

But what exactly was it that the father admired in that four- year-old? A fearless willingness to stand up for a dying friend abandoned by others. Deep wells of compassion. The morally admirable ability to empathize with another in terrible straits. These were exactly the qualities that 11 years later she displayed in abundance as she courageously fought for the life of her unborn child unwanted by everyone but Nadine.

However, I agree, prayer is needed. Prayer for the child whose life was snuffed out. Prayer for her teenage mother who doubtless will live forever with the memory of not only her lost baby but also her own battered conscience.

Prayer is needed as well for this narcissistic father, a man so blinded by his own self-absorption he can't see that the very daughter he thinks is "lost" stands before him the very model of integrity that any father would die to have for his child.

Prayer is also needed, I suspect, for that fateful day when Nadine looks deep into her father's eyes and asks quietly, "Dad, why weren't you there when I needed you most?'

And when she does, he will learn that he lost something almost as important as his first grandchild.

dave andrusko can be reached at dha1245@juno.com