HERE’S A LITTLE QUIZ.
Assume you’re a feminist who is pregnant with triplets. What does hell look like?
Give up?
Answer: Costco. On Staten Island. The mayonnaise aisle, to be precise.
This is pretty much how Amy Richards sees it, if her guest column in the Sunday New York Times Magazine is any indication. And it’s also pretty much the least of her problems.
Rarely have I read anything so chilling as Ms. Richards essay titled “When One Is Enough” – on the subject of what is euphemistically called “selective reduction.”
Who is Amy Richards? Well, to judge from the piece, she’s simply an average citizen, sharing her firsthand experiences with abortion. Only later, prompted by revelations on the Internet, does the New York Times bother informing its readers that Amy Richards is, in fact, a longtime abortion-rights activist, a little piece of information that might have, as the Times put it, “she light on her mind-set.”
In her essay, Ms. Richards tells us that she is thirty-four years old, lives in Manhattan, went off the Pill because it made her “moody,” an became pregnant. Her boyfriend, Peter, whom she’s been with for three years, is the father. At the doctor’s office, she the gets the unexpected news that she’s carrying three fetuses.
“My immediate response was, I cannot have triplets,” Ms. Richards tells us. “I was not married; I lived in a five-story walk-up in the East Village; I worked freelance; and I would have to go on bed rest in March. I lecture at colleges, and my biggest months are March and April. I would have to give up my main income for the rest of the year. There was a part of me that was sure I could work around that. But it was a matter of, DO I WANT TO?”
What do you think?
“I looked at Peter and asked the doctor: ‘Is it possible to get rid of one of them? Or two of them?’ The obstetrician wasn’t an expert in selective reduction, but she knew that with a shot of potassium chloride you could eliminate one or more.”
Which is just what Ms. Richards decides to do – “get rid of” one or two of them. After all, she writes, if she kept all three … this is where the mayo at Costco on Staten Island come in.
“I’d have to give up my life … I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to take care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.”
She would have to move to Staten Island and shop at Costco and buy big jars of mayonnaise! Oh, the humanity!
The point is not that Amy Richards is in favor of abortion, an issue as complicated and contentious as any in our public life. The point is that this woman is the poster child for all those who so easily reduce the procedure simply to a matter of personal convenience. Amy Richards is not even embarrassed to let the world know she would rather croak than leave her five-story walk-up in Manhattan … for a place like Staten Island; that she’d rather green-light a couple of shots of chloride to the hearts of the twins …than give up her biggest income months on the college-lecture circuit. This is a woman, despite her matter of fact tone, who is dripping with contempt – not for the twins, of course, for who she apparently feels nothing at all – but for basic decency, not to mention for all those pathetic, ordinary Americans who don’t think it’s so terrible to live in the suburbs and who actually like shopping at Costco and who have lives that include Little League and Girl Scouts; the ones who would feel something (other than relief) if they had to get rid of a set of twins they were carrying.
“When we saw the specialist,” Richards goes on, “we found out that I was carrying identical twins and a stand alone. My doctors thought the stand alone was three days older. There was something psychologically comforting about that, since I wanted to have just one.”
Psychologically comforting? Well, yes. Because, armed with this new information, the choice was easy: The twins go, the stand alone stays, “a shot of potassium chloride to the heart of the fetus” takes care of the whole thing, she writes without a hint of emotion. So, how does the Amy Richards saga ends? She tells us that she had a boy “and everything is fine.”
Really? I think the jury is still out on that one. Who knows what her son will think when he grows up and finds out about the siblings that his mom “got rid of,” the ones who were so efficiently “eliminated”? Who know what he will think if he ever reads her frightening essay in the New York Times. If he has a shred of humanity his mother so proudly lacks, he’ll be sick.
It’s amazing to me people can commit murder so off-handed and expect others to condone their actions. How far off is “eliminating” our parents when they’re old and it might be inconvenient to take care of them? Sure, we might say our parents took care of us so we would never to that to them. So what about some stranger who is after a job we want? They’re inconvenient, so should we be able to “eliminate” them too? Oh, maybe that’s why the prisons are so crowded.
But maybe if we didn’t promote such self centered behavior and expect others to approve, we might reduce the number of murders committed each year . . . “fetus” or otherwise.
Terry,
I could hardly believe this story when I ran across it. My blood ran cold.
How is it that Amy Richards wasn’t vilified in the press and excoriated by her peers?
The scary part of this whole thing is that Ms. Richards’ actions aren’t that ‘abnormal’ to the press nor her like-minded associates.
Sick, isn’t it.
You’re absolutely on track when you suggested that we shouldn’t promote self-centered behavior – but isn’t that what our liberal schools, liberal politicians, liberal society is fomenting?
Thanks for stopping by.