Now HERE’s a story

What a great piece the Wall Street Journal ran on August 17 titled “Petitioning for Life” by Julia Gorin of the Jewish World Review.

Here’s how it begins:

The Web site of Ms. Magazine–yes, it still exists–is calling on readers to sign a petition: “I have had an abortion. I publicly join the millions of women in the United States who have had an abortion in demanding a repeal of laws that restrict women’s reproductive freedom.”

Well, so much for the right to privacy. If Ms. readers hadn’t had so many abortions, there might be more Ms. readers. As for the rest of us, here’s a petition we could all sign: “I wasn’t aborted.”

Having narrowly escaped being aborted, I’d be the first in line.

Like most Soviet-era fetuses conceived in Russia by couples who were already parents, I was scheduled for abortion as a matter of course. In a society where abortion was the only form of birth control, it wasn’t uncommon to meet women who had double-digit abortion counts. Often a couple would schedule the appointment before they even stopped to remember that they wanted a second child.

My husband, also a second-born, and I were lucky to have been two such afterthoughts, each brought into the world thanks to one of two parents’ change of heart. (Actually it was Anya Isaakovna, my mother’s usual at the public clinic, who sensed a tinge of reservation and kicked her out.) Coincidentally, both my husband and I were to be the third abortions, each of us having had two siblings who weren’t so lucky…

It’s a compelling, powerful personal story well told. That’s just the kind of startling clarity we must have to turn around hearts and minds that are convinced that abortion is a necessary right, and use all kinds of euphemisms to fool themselves and others that it’s not what it is.

Soon after arriving in Israel, a family friend named Zoya discovered she was pregnant with a second child and went in for the abortion routine. She was dumbfounded to encounter the following whispered line of questioning from the admitting nurse: “Do you not have a roof over your head?” There was a roof. “Do you not have enough food on the table?” There was plenty of food. Then an altogether alien concept to Zoya: “So why kill it?”

“I was shocked,” Zoya recalled. “No one had ever told me I was killing anything. I’d never thought of it as a person. As soon as someone told me I was killing something, I didn’t even consider it. I left.” Much like my grandmother, today Zoya is the mother of a master violinist.

There’s more of the miraculous truth in this piece.

My father was another abortion-to-be. In 1941, my then 17-year-old aunt Dina barely managed to convince my grandparents that the invading Germans meant to kill Jews and that the family needed to evacuate from Odessa. They got onto literally the last ship out of the city, an overcrowded barge that had no food or clean water. Dina’s 2-year-old brother, Rudik, didn’t survive the journey to Uzbekistan. Heartbroken and shunning the idea of any “replacements” for Rudik, Grandma didn’t think twice before setting out for an abortion when she became pregnant at 42. But through very insistent implorations, her Uzbek landlady talked her out of it.

That fetus went on to become a world-class violinist, first for the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra and later the Baltimore Symphony. He blazed one of the earlier trails out from behind the Iron Curtain to America, inspiring and facilitating many relatives and friends to abandon Russia for the free world.

As Julia Gorin points out so clearly in this story, even young mothers-to-be who are afraid (or are told) their lives will be ruined if they keep the baby have every hope of fulfilling their dreams. Nothing can stand in the way of ingrained ambition. So change the debate.

Rather than debate what it is we’re killing, we should consider what we may be saving–for our sakes as much as for “its” own. When you choose to abort, you alter the course of history. While the child up for abortion may or may not be the next Einstein, saving his life could one day save yours.