Chapter Thirteen: PREGNANCY!

This is the bad luck chapter, so no point wiping the disease slate clean. Three weeks later, the tide goes out for Jane and doesn't come in again. She's pregnant. She had been so ashamed she didn't know how to explain to Dick. Dick found out by the nature of his infection and came back to her to talk it over (these contrived examples are so easy.) Being a stand-up guy, he had marched her down to the school nurse, and she just got done with a course of antibiotics, and now this.

Her thoughts are a smoking engine, racing in neutral. She's got to tell Dick she’s pregnant now. How can she possibly tell Dick? Can we have this discussion without enunciating the dreaded question “Abortion?” Would Dick want her to keep the baby, or abort it? What kind of man would ever council her to abort a baby? God, why are you doing this to me? Why me and not somebody else? Dick already despises me. How could I tell him this? Easy: It's HIS baby! It's not my fault; he did this to me. I'm going to call him right now and tell him what for! The girl who could not bear to share the embarrassment of explaining an STD is no longer the gentle creature that admired the Chess Club President from afar. She has not become a mean vengeful aggressor, but she has nature's fire of DESPERATION kindled in her belly. There is no deescalating this tension. There is no retreating or moving on. The urgency of her decision cannot be averted.

At this point, if she tells Dick, he is no longer a stand in cut-out for all men. He is legally responsible, and there will be no do-overs. An upright guy wouldn’t be in this position, but Dick is. He can choose to marry her or pay child support for eighteen years. He can choose to represent his sex badly, and desert. If she decides to get an abortion, the law precludes him over-riding her unilateral decision. If she decides not to, whatever gyrations she puts his brain and emotions through are a mere exercise. He can't make her. Any council he offers to that end is mere weakness of character. His decision not to wear a condom has now become her catastrophic dilemma. If this event catapults her into motherhood, she will likely make a decision never to depend on a man again. Partnership is better than trying to go it alone, and that outcome will hinder her indefinitely from enjoying a healthy loving relationship with Dick or anybody else.

What she does not know is that if she exercises her prerogative to terminate the pregnancy, the self loathing that she felt as she hid her STD while Dick mounted her, is merely the lapping waves of a sea of despair that she will sail if she kills her unborn child. True, it will come and go, but she will always wonder what could have happened IF she had taken the other fork in the road.

In this example, Jane is not the kind to build a long-term relationship with a guy she realizes she is not really matched to anyway. His idea of a date is to hang out at the Zoo and watch them feed the animals all afternoon, and she wants her own career, as a Financial Consultant. Being an intelligent girl, she makes use of the available social safety nets, and finds out at the counseling center that there is a negative population growth. They council her (this is a contrived example,) that there are psychological penalties to abortion, as well as potential infertility, so she determines to bring the baby to term, and put it up for adoption. This has the built in problems of wanting to know what happened to the child, a legal impossibility. Furthermore, the child may feel that his/her birth mother didn't love him/her... s/he is statistically likely to seek her birth mother out in tortured rejection of her adoptive parents. But then this was an unwanted pregnancy, not the launching of the Space Shuttle. She hopes that s/he will understand that while all other children are the product of nature's necessity, s/he was actually CHOSEN by her adoptive parents, over and above other children, and was sought out, not thrust upon them.

Forget Dating and the “no big deal” of a role in the hay. Dick is definitely better off never fishing with that kind of worm. Hopefully things will go better with Jill.