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It’s Personal
Sometime in the mid-1970s, when I was in college, the realization dawned on me that, as an adoptee, I had been somebody’s “unwanted pregnancy” once upon a time. In the fullness of time, especially after my wife and I got married and began having children together, that realization became one of my strongest motivations to search for my birth-mother—I wanted to thank the woman who, though I had never met her, had carried me in her womb for nine months and seen me through to the beginnings of my life in this world (and for me as an adoptee, even such a basic concept as that I’d been carried in someone’s womb once-upon-a-time could be disconcertingly abstract).
Along with that realization came the understanding that, all things considered, I was probably fortunate to have been born before 1973 and Roe v. Wade. I had never staked out a firmly held position on abortion, but once I understood that if I had been conceived in a later time, I would have been a likely candidate for abortion, the question took on an entirely different, and personal, aspect.
Feeling Trapped
I recall a conversation I had with my birth-mother some time after our reunion. She was talking about her life as a pregnant-and-unmarried woman in the 1950s, and how difficult it had been for her, and she said, “I just wish I’d had the choices that women have today.”
I nodded sympathetically . . . until the penny fell all the way to the bottom. “You understand,” I said, “that we’re talking about me here? We’ve had a really happy reunion, and both of us are glad for the opportunity to know each other and our respective families. If you had exercised the ‘choice’ you’re alluding to, none of that would have been even a remote possibility. You might still wonder who I’d been, but without any possibility of ever knowing.”
She understood. She wasn’t wishing that she’d aborted me; she’d simply felt so trapped when she was pregnant that she wished she’d had anything at all she could have done to mitigate that feeling. I could understand how trapped she felt. Frederica Mathewes-Green has written and spoken insightfully about women who “want an abortion the way an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.”
I get that. I have the utmost compassion for women who are pregnant when it is nigh unto catastrophic for them to be so. My own daughters have been among those women. And my heart ached for each of them, wishing there was something, anything, that I could do to make it easier for them.
Ripples
But, back in 1955–1956, that was me in my birth-mother’s belly. Not a mere clump of cells, or a faceless “fetus.” It was me, with my own genetic code, distinct from my birth-mother’s. And if my birth-mother had had an abortion, I was the one who would have died.
And the ripples go out from there. My adoptive parents might have adopted someone else; who can say? But they wouldn’t have adopted me. My classmates and friends and Little League teammates could scarcely be said to have missed me—how do you miss someone you had no idea ever even existed? But something of the life we shared together would have been missing from their lives. My wife most likely would have married someone else (she’s an amazing woman; she would have had men standing in line for her). But she wouldn’t have married me, and who can say how life with a different husband would have turned out for her? Our children would never have come to be—her children, if she’d had any, would have been other people entirely.
And on it goes. Those of you who were born after 1973: have you ever wondered how many children who might have been your friends or classmates or Little League teammates, or even your husband or wife, were never allowed to be born? Cold statistics tell us that, in the U.S. alone, the number is on the order of 60 million by now—a fifth again of the population of our country. Do you ever wonder who those people might have been?
Craig Kellogg Galer is a retired automotive engineer. He and his wife Jennifer have eight children and eight grandchildren. Roman Catholics, they do marriage ministry for their home parish, Church of the Resurrection, in Lansing, Michigan, and are members of the Work of Christ, an ecumenical charismatic community in Lansing.
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more on feminism from the online archives
14.6—July/August 2001
Three Bad Ideas for Women & What to Do About Them by Frederica Mathewes-Green
33.1—January/February 2020
on the Consequences of One Birth Before Roe v. Wade by Craig Kellogg Galer
more from the online archives
29.5—Sept/Oct 2016
on the Loss of True Community & Rising Political Desperation by Karl D. Stephan
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