Me, me, me.

When people subscribe to the pervasive cultural mentality that an unborn child is simply and "it", an object, then they are able to find such easy reasons for not having their baby.

I was sent to Manhattan a couple times this week for the first time and met with some clientele that were very different demographically from those I'd been accustomed to in the other boroughs. One couple in particular stuck out to me. They had a nice place to live, good job, were engaged...but their reason was that they simply were not planning on the pregnancy. It was not the time they had been thinking it would be best, they said. They thought there was a chance of the baby being unhealthy because of their substance usage and they didn't want to have an unhealthy baby. Not now anyway. They thought it better to abort it. I said, you don't want your baby to be unhealthy so you'd rather terminate it? They said yes. What they were saying was, they'd rather have a dead baby than a potentially unhealthy one, in order to offer the least amount of inconvenience to their current lifestyle.

Who are they really concerned about here: their child or themselves? Their baby's life or theirs? If the baby is not recognized as a human being on some deeper level, it becomes equivalent to the decision of whether or not to buy a dog or paint the house. Even there, there is a difference because they already have it. It's a question of whether they'll keep it. Everything around us tells us to look out for #1, don't worry about anyone else. When we get that wrong, we get everything else wrong too.