Opposing Viewpoint

It's easy to hate a choice you don't understand. And maybe all hate is love misguided.

the mother

Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,   
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,   
The singers and workers that never handled the air.   
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,   
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.


I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.   
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?—
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?   
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.


Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.




"You remember the children you got that you did not get." I feel stricken by the power contained in those eleven words, written in 1945.


To the best of my knowledge I don't personally know anyone who's had an abortion. Work like this reminds us in Terence's famous words, "I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me." It's harder to carry signs or yell in the face of someone who speaks in words you can understand and must accept, improbably, as somehow true.