A Letter To My 1-Year-Old Son About His Abortion

Son, one day you’ll ask us what it was like when you came into this world and for years, we will lie. We will say it was joyful and wonderful and beautiful and all the other -fuls we can think of, because the truth won’t be easy to tell.

That the story began nearly two years before you were born, when your mom’s obstetrician confirmed she was pregnant. That appointment was two days before my 36th birthday, and one day before your grandpa, Pop Pop, was diagnosed with incurable cancer.

We will fib, skipping over the parts about joy, wonder and beauty being clouded by a fear I was too afraid to speak of — that Pop Pop wouldn’t live long enough to meet his grandchild.

We will wait until you are older to tell you how that fear was upstaged by another, when a doctor explained the terms “nuchal fluid,” “chromosomal abnormality” and the three different trisomies: Down’s, Edwards’ and Patau’s. These are chromosomal conditions that cause severe and sometimes fatal birth defects.

The doctor presented us with options — options I was scared to share with Pop Pop because he was raised Catholic in the ’60s, which made him pro-life by default.

We will tell you white lies until you are grown, because we can’t share your story without mentioning Kate Cox, Nancy Davis or the Dobbs decision. We will only share the good parts, and none of the bad, because we won’t know how to explain to a toddler the simple fact that you might not be here if we had lived somewhere else.

We will tell you the view from the labor room overlooking the Hollywood Hills was beautiful on the day you were born, but nothing about the previous pregnancy 22 months before. We won’t explain what “chorionic villus sampling” is, a FISH test, or the agony of waiting for that