More Ambivabortion Rant!

I heartily recommend that everybody hasten over to The Ambivabortion Rant, Part II.

Just a few snippets of what's there. She opens with:

When I dreamt about my son, it startled me out of the unconscious assumption that this pregnancy had been my condition, my problem, my choice. There was someone else involved, someone who’d had a real, objective existence, inside my body but outside my conscious perception. Somehow I must have been aware of him, though. Or had he contacted me? And why only after the abortion? Where was the dream when that awareness might still have turned such a hideously irrevocable decision?

Moving on:

When we’re young, we ... just think about “having a baby,” and maybe raising a child, from the foreshortened perspective of our own desires and life plans. This is one of the drawbacks of living in a culture that does its damndest to stay “forever young.” Only someone older, who’s taken a step back from the life cycle, can point out to you the reality that “a baby” will, barring misfortune, become a young adult, a middle-aged person, an old woman or man. I now look at the young and see how time will change their faces; I look at the old and imagine how they looked as a child. And when I think about a new embryo, and our “choice” to uproot it or harbor it, I don’t only, or even mainly, see an “innocent child.” I see that what we hold in our hands is the power to greenlight or to cancel – to make nothing -- a potentially eighty-year human life.

Pondering more of what's lost in an abortion:

One way to measure the magnitude of what’s banished by an abortion is to try to imagine your life without just one of the significant people in it: one friend, one lover, one sibling, one child. I don’t mean if they died, God forbid; I mean what if you had never known them? What if that face and voice and humor and trouble and insight had never crossed your path or woven into the texture of your consciousness? It wouldn’t be your life as you know it. You wouldn’t even be the same you. That’s what an individual is: the most life-changing thing you will ever encounter.

Go read this, and the comments!