Know What you are Doing
MY WIFE AND I just had an abortion. Two, actually. We walked into a doctor’s office in downtown Los Angeles with four thriving fetuses — two girls and two boys — and walked out an hour later with just the girls, whom we will name, if we’re lucky enough to keep them, Rosalind and Vivian. Rosalind is my mother’s name.
We didn’t want to. We didn’t mean to. We didn’t do anything wrong, which is to say, we did everything right. Four years ago, when Tina and I set out on this journey to have children, such a circumstance was unimaginable. And yet there I was, holding her hand, watching the ultrasound as a needle with potassium chloride found its mark, stopping the heart of one male fetus, then the other, hidden in my wife’s suffering belly.
Some philosophers think that people only did things that were wrong because of a lack of knowledge. While the Beatific Vision, for instance, would be so good as to overwhelm the will making it impossible to choose anything less than God, we can’t attribute every sin to a lack of knowledge.
It is very sad when we know what we’re doing but do not do the right thing. What a failure of Charity we are all capable of, what a failure of even natural love.
