Following on from my previous rant, I wanted to talk about the other topic that's been on my mind — this idea that a potential child IS a child. You hear about this a lot from the pro-life movement. Abortion is killing a baby, etc., etc. You're even starting to hear the same thing about birth control. Where does this come from?
I have a theory, now backed up with experience, at least partially. Humans tend to project into the future. You get a job, you wonder where it will lead you. You meet a cute guy or girl, you wonder what it would be like to kiss him or her. After a couple of dates that seem to have gone really well, you may start picturing a lifetime with that new person whom you barely know. If a new relationship crashes and burns, you mourn the loss of your future together.
And (this is where my experience kicks in) when you get pregnant, your brain starts racing. You imagine what the baby is going to be like, and then what the toddler after the baby is going to be like, and what preschool will you send your child to, and, oh dear, public or private school? And so on and so forth.
So projecting into the future can be a good thing. While it's easy to get ahead of yourself, on the other hand, you shouldn't just plan on having a cute little baby, an attractive accessory you can play dress-up with. That baby is going to change and g-d willing, grow up, and you have to change along with him or her. Anticipating and accepting change is healthy.
But it seems that some of us get stuck. We project into the future — but only to infancy. So every pregnancy, every embryo is a baby — but ONLY a baby. (So you don't have to worrry about funding schools, or after-school activities, or worrying about them after that point. By the time they're teenagers, they'll be irredeemable sinners anyway.)
The other thing I want to say is that now that I've been pregnant myself, it really seems to me that growing another human is a gradual process. At the beginning, it was like there was an alien growth in there, but I couldn't see it or feel it — it wasn't real. Now, at seven-plus months, there's something squirming and hiccuping inside of me, occasionally stretching out and making a bump appear on my abdomen that I recognize as a foot. I lay down on my right side last night, and I swear she started kicking furiously to get me to move. I do think of her as a baby now.
But there was an earlier time when I didn't. A potential baby, sure, but I also knew that miscarriages in the first few weeks or months are fairly common, and that there was a risk of the fetus having problems. A lot has to go right between conception and birth.
I've been lucky in my life — I was never faced with the need to decide whether or not to have an abortion, because I never got pregnant before I was ready. And in this pregnancy, my tests came back OK, so I didn't have to make any hard choices this time either. But I am the product of decent schools with excellent sex education classes, and more importantly, of parents who didn't make me feel like sex was a dirty horrible thing. From a fairly young age, I had access to books, and later on, magazines (you can learn a lot from Cosmopolitan!) But a lot of women aren't so lucky.
