tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2068614204622643014.post9180339496971586157..comments2023-07-29T00:52:40.869-07:00Comments on 1 out of 3 ... is ME: There is no answer1outof3http://www.blogger.com/profile/10011842886447356352noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2068614204622643014.post-81375289576396030722009-02-03T21:41:00.000-08:002009-02-03T21:41:00.000-08:00The hardest part of dealing with my abortion has b...The hardest part of dealing with my abortion has been what you talked about in this post: the potentiality that was ended. Though I am decidedly childfree and have not changed my stance despite my experience, I did find it very difficult to deliberately end the unknown potential I carried inside of me. I couldn't help the desperate, romanticized flights of curiosity: what kind of person would it have turned out to be? Whose features would it have, whose temperament? How much like us would it have been? How amazing, or terrible, a person could it have turned out to be, and what kind of parents would we have become?<BR/><BR/>I started reading Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" shortly afterward, and it incidentally helped me to see that the biological process of bringing life into the world is not the be-all, end-all aspect of having a child. It's not the having that is ultimately significant, but the raising. What we think of as "our" genes do not describe us as individuals very accurately, nor do they persist in an especially identifiable way beyond one or two generations. Our biology mostly dictates physical characteristics, and the diseases or weaknesses that will eventually kill us. The biggest influence parents have on their children is in nurture, not nature--overwhelmingly so. And in that regard, my partner and I will always be able to nurture those around us, without needing biological progeny in order to pass on the best of ourselves.<BR/><BR/>Though I'm still curious about what a child of ours may have looked and acted like, I realize now that it's a selfish and superficial curiosity, and not a true maternal instinct of any kind. That unique and unrepeatable combination of sperm and egg was nothing more than a blank canvas that happened to be tinted a certain shade and made of a certain material, nothing more. Whatever image may have emerged there would have been painted by many hands, not just ours, and would have become an autonomous entity in its own right, to the point that its underlying base would be all but forgotten except for things like questions about family medical history on hospital forms.<BR/><BR/>I'm still curious, and I still regret a little that I could never have known what it might have been. Even at conception, it was never really a potential anything--its fate was determined. In a strange way, it reminds me a lot of a breakup after a serious relationship: it seems terrible when it ends, as if a potentially beautiful future was snuffed out of existence, but after a while you gain distance from it and can see that that future was never a real possibility. There is sadness that it didn't--couldn't--work out, but also a great, astonishing relief.<BR/><BR/>If anything, I wish I never knew this curiosity for something I will never know.Leahhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12592781344502263883noreply@blogger.com