Yesterday, I came across this passage…the protagonist meets a woman who had an abortion as there was some genetic problem. The baby would have been profoundly retarded like a 6-month-old, forever. This is what the lady says:
“Here’s what no one tells you…When you deliver a fetus, you get a death certificate, but not a birth certificate. And afterward, your milk comes in, & there’s nothing you can do to stop it…You can’t win. Either you have the baby & wear your pain on the outside, or you don’t have the baby, & you keep that ache in you forever. I know I didn’t do the wrong thing. But I don’t feel like I did the right thing, either…They gave me a choice & even now I wish they hadn’t.”
Different people suffer in different ways & beyond any doubt, suffering has innumerable faces. It’s another thing that everyone cannot understand. And then it’s hard to change the way you’ve always thought about things.
Pain is something that is experienced by almost everyone in one way or the other & yet people fail to recognize it when it has not touched them. Compassion is such a rare commodity. We can’t face every adversity to know how terrible an experience it could be.
I don’t have kids & I do feel the emptiness, but when I read this, I felt so sorry for this lady, even though she’s a fictitious character. But someone out there must have experienced this & it hurts.
