What Happens When a Preacher’s Son’s Girlfriend Has an Abortion?
On difficult choices, the complexity of mourning, and the difference between loss and regret
There are two stereotypes of a preacher’s kid: the good and the bad. The strait-laced and the screw-up. Aziraphale and Crowley.
It doesn’t matter who was worse growing up, my sister or me (she was, of course). What matters is we each appeared before the parental tribunal to admit the same accident.
My sister got pregnant by her boyfriend Ian, which ended in an abortion. Two years later, it was my turn. I was older: 26. I stood before my father, told him the woman I was seeing was pregnant, and felt his ruined gaze travel over me.
As an English teacher, I read abortion essays all the time. Anti-abortion essays, actually. The undercurrent through my students’ pro-life papers is the assumption that women who have abortions do so gleefully.
They rarely acknowledge the mothers’ struggle, and the sense of loss that many of those mothers feel.
Fathers feel it too. In the movie Se7en, Detective Somerset (played by Morgan Freeman) tells Tracy about convincing his former girlfriend to have an abortion:
