EDITORIALS; "Goodbye, Darling Pilgrim".(abortion)

Although I have been a small part of this great Movement for more than a quarter of a century, I am humbled by how little I understand about the pain of abortion. The vivid ache of an unexpected stillbirth, yes, but not the torment that so often follows (sometimes on the heels of, sometimes years later) participation in the decision to deliberately take a child's life.

My "expertise" is even more limited because I am a man. I can emphasize and sympathize and console and even (to an extent) commiserate with an aborted woman, but I cannot see this experience through the same prism. There is an emotional terrain that I have never and can never explore.

At least at some level, however, I can begin to grasp the bitter regret and abiding remorse that a man experiences when he fathers a child whose life he then cannot protect. Every time I read such an account, the agony is so real it's as if I am reading about this for the first time.

A friend forwarded me a powerful front-page column that appeared in late March in a newspaper in Iowa. I will refer to the author by his first name, Herb.

As he would be the first to admit, Herb's story is hardly novel. The daughter that he has chosen to call Pilgrim "was the result of the carelessness and irresponsibility of two young adults in Southern California about 41 years ago."

Thinking they were in love and in possession of "all the answers," they were "not unlike many other couples of the early 1960s," he writes. They talked "in general terms about someday getting married, but it was something we would do after we had accomplished our great goals in our lives we believed were waiting for us to conquer." They reached their goals, "but at a cost so great that it destroyed our relationship, the life of our daughter and put a terrible void in our psyches."

When Pilgrim's mother became pregnant, the facade of maturity and love collapsed, "to be replaced with accusatory and sarcastic comments, and finally Pilgrim's mother declaring she was going to have an abortion - - and that she wanted me out of her life."