"I Don't Have a Choice".(Brief Article)

A story in the New York Times abandons a woman's right to choose in favor of being pro-abortion.

Editor's note. This article is reprinted with permission of The Weekly Standard.

Last Sunday [July 7], the New York Times Magazine published a remarkably chilling essay entitled "Family Planning." Penned by an anonymous father - - let's call him Mr. X - - it described his family's efforts to convince his pregnant 15-year-old daughter, against her own better instincts, to have an abortion.

Doubtless, the Times published it as a shining example of how families should persuade pregnant teens that abortion is preferable to bringing an "unwanted" child into the world. But in many respects, the essay actually serves as a damning rebuttal of arguments commonly made by true believers in abortion on demand.

According to Mr. X, his younger daughter has been a challenge for many years. Unlike his well-behaved eldest daughter, the young one "smokes cigarettes and marijuana and doesn't care who knows," among other things. Mr. X hypothesizes that this behavior is a response to some sort of identity crisis - - in contrast to the goody-two-shoes older daughter, the 15-year-old "feels she has to carve out her own identity by doing what she pleases."

After learning she was pregnant, the girl said she wanted to keep the child, and promised she would be a good mother. In response to this, Mr. X and his wife "freaked, and not just because of our dashed aspirations for this girl. We were too old to want to raise another baby--and we felt sure the raising would fall to us."

The belligerent selfishness of this statement is nothing less than breathtaking. Upon hearing that their daughter, faced with the difficult circumstance of a teenage pregnancy, nevertheless courageously desired to raise her child, Mr. and Mrs. X couldn't bear to think about how to help her cope with the inevitable challenges ahead. Instead, they worried about what a royal pain in the - - - the child would be for them. As Mr. X whines later in the essay, "We felt we had been sentenced to 18 years of hard labor."