Reclaiming Our Children: A Blog About Healing After Abortion

This is the fourth contribution to the Intercollegiate Review symposium “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.” 

It was two days before my seventeenth birthday, a Saturday morning, the day after a football game in which I’d played. So I was tired and sore, but I could smell breakfast coming from downstairs and somebody was walking up the stairs. I was half asleep. The door opened: it was my girlfriend, I smiled, of course—but from the look on her face I could see that this wasn’t called for. This was a serious moment. I steeled myself.

After a few long seconds, she looked up at me and said, “I’m pregnant.” That woke me up quick. We sat there in my bedroom, two young teenagers. My room was still a boy’s place, hung with football posters, sneakers, and baseball gloves strewn across the floor. But there I was, sitting next to my pregnant girlfriend. I knew all of a sudden I’d lost the right to keep on being just a boy. My girlfriend went to an all-girls Catholic school and looked ahead to college, while I was dreaming of college football and a career in the NFL. We each had a plan for our lives. It was time to scrap those plans.

We strategized together figuring out how to take care of the new life we created. It felt completely natural and, incomprehensibly, even a little exciting: Our adult lives were starting much sooner than we had planned, but we’d figure it out. So here’s what we decided: I could drop out of high school to join the army (a friend of mine had just done the same). My girlfriend would keep things secret, wear baggy sweaters and take vitamins until I got back from basic training and then we would be together—and I’d take care of all three of us.

the rest is here:http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2013/12/08/i-lost-my-daughter-to-the-culture-of-death/