My Clock Was Already Ticking

Margaret Gunther wrote an interesting essay/testimony in the New York Times recently, titled "My Clock Was Already Ticking." Here are a few especially powerful quotes from her true story.

When she discovered she was pregnant at 34, she told her boyfriend. He told her to get an abortion.

"From the moment I told him I was pregnant, it became my “problem,” as in “What are you going to do about the problem?”"

"The truth, which came out after I’d expressed my desire to keep the baby, was more simply stated: “If you go through with this,” he said, “I want nothing to do with it.”"

She did it, even though she didn't want to, in order to save the relationship. "But I still wanted something to do with him, and I thought if I were to deal with “the problem” the way he wanted me to, we could go back to the way we were. "

Instead, he immediately gave her a clock as a gift and broke up with her.

She says, "It isn’t very often that you’re called upon to make a decision that you know will affect the rest of your life, a decision that is irrevocable and defining. I chose to end the pregnancy for what I thought were good reasons, chief among them being my boyfriend’s emphatic unwillingness to be a father. Although his initial reaction to the news was muted, he came out strongly against it once I announced my desire to keep the baby."

She continues, "I argued weakly with him that we could make it work. Without him, I didn’t see a way forward. I had no savings, and no family around to support or encourage me. I was terrified, and not just about being a single parent. I was afraid that with a baby I’d be off the market for good. And I wanted a husband as much as I wanted a baby, if not more. Maybe I knew instinctively that I wasn’t cut out for single parenthood. And I wanted what I wanted: husband, home, baby, in that order."

"What he didn’t have was an appetite for a family, at least with me. I was desperate and deluded enough to think I could change his mind."

"The payoff I’d hoped for, that we’d stay together and the [abortion] wound would be healed by his love and devotion, never came. I raged and wept and raged and wept for my stupidity, my failure, the betrayal of myself."

Later, she moved out of Los Angeles and married another man, who wanted to start a family right away. "The family did not come right away. In fact, the pregnancy I terminated at 34 turned out to be the last that would occur naturally. And none of the expensively produced pregnancies I managed after lasted longer than three weeks."

Margaret is one of the approximately 5% of women who will only conceive ONE child on their own in their entire life. If that ONE child is aborted...then how must she feel! "The children I did not bring into this world are ghosts, and they are symptoms. I’ve learned to live with them the way you do with the phantom pain of missing limbs."