I’m a man, divorced, and I have never fathered a child – none of which prevents me from believing unshakably in a woman’s right to an abortion. There have been a few occasions in my life when I considered becoming a father. The closest I ever got to the opportunity was when I came home on leave from the Army in 1998 to a wife who had told me she wanted to have a child.
I was stationed in South Korea and for weeks prior to my leave I lightened up on my drinking and went to the Army aid station to request a sperm count. The only reason that I did it was because in the three years of our marriage neither my wife nor I had used any birth control. My wife suggested that I was “shooting blanks,” if not in those exact words.
But then my mother had a stroke the day before my departure from Korea and she died a few days after my arrival in Aurora, Colorado. I’m not sure if this had any effect on my wife’s decision, but she informed me that she didn’t want to go through with a pregnancy in my absence, since I had to finish my tour in Korea without her. We were divorced – childless – in 2002.
After leaving the Army and separating from my wife, I met a young woman on the fourth night of a 30-day vacation in the Philippines. From then on, we were inseparable until I flew home to Des Moines. She was a waitress in a club called The Jungle whence I had gone one mid afternoon. The loud music hadn’t started yet and there were no other customers, which allowed the two of us a space to talk. As was usual in those clubs, she was allowed to leave early provided I paid what used to be known as a barfine. It’s compensation to the club for what revenue they stood to lose without a waitress – or a dancer, for that matter.
As soon as I paid the barfine, the girl changed clothes and we were out on the street together just before nightfall. We bar hopped together for awhile and I discovered that she enjoyed drinking as much as I did. The difference was she weighed a hundred pounds and she got drunk rather quickly. While I enjoyed being with her, she formed an attachment to me that took me by surprise. Since the time allotted to us was limited by my return ticket, the progress of our liaison from A to Z had to be accelerated. While I believed that our relationship, such as it was, had run its course by the morning of my departure, I soon realized that, for her, it extended well beyond the end of my vacation. When she accompanied me in the hotel limo to the airport, I will never forget our parting on the curb. After a goodbye embrace, she got back in the limo and as it drove away from me, her anxious face appeared in the rear window as she watched me recede, standing alone with my bags on the sidewalk.
We promised to stay in touch via email, and we did. After a few months had passed, we got around to the subject of having children. I told her what my ex-wife had told me, that I was shooting blanks – I was impotent. To this she quickly corrected me, telling me it wasn’t true, that just a few weeks after my departure, she discovered she had become pregnant – but that she had “taken care of it.” Alone, and not knowing if she would ever see me again, she had got an abortion. So, in the space of two sentences, she had informed me that she had been pregnant with what would’ve been my only child, and that she had ended her pregnancy.
She had no way of knowing what effect her news had on me. While it had surprised me – and not surprised me – to realize that my ex-wife had told me a malicious lie and that I was perfectly capable of fathering a child, and that I actually had, and that a girl I barely knew and would never see again had come the closest I had ever come to making me a father – only to arrive at the conclusion that she couldn’t go forward with it, I was left astonished and saddened.
I went back to the Philippines two years later for another 30-day vacation. While the girl and I had stayed in touch, she was nowhere to be found in the town where we had met. I later learned that she had met a man from Austria, that they were married and living in Linz. The last time I heard from her was on New Year’s Eve 2003, when she told me she regarded her marriage to the Austrian fellow to be “on paper only,” and that she would always love me.
Despite the sad ending of my liaison with this young foreign woman whom I had no reason to disbelieve had carried for a few short weeks what would’ve been my only child, I have nothing but respect for her decision, and that even if I had known ahead of time of her plan to end the pregnancy, it was her decision to make. No one has the right to take that decision away from any woman. I should add that abortion is a criminal offense in the Philippines and that the girl’s abortion had legal on top of medical risks. I will never forget her for our brief time together and for her courage in deciding on an abortion.
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