Ben DomenechVerified account

I appreciate all the heartfelt responses. Some of your stories are amazing. Others are tragic.

I knew I was pro life from a young age. But when I was 12, I read Whittaker Chamber's book, WITNESS. If you haven't read it, the chapter THE CHILD is the fulcrum of the whole thing.

“For one of us to have a child,” my brother had said “would be a crime against nature.” I longed for children. But I agreed with my brother. There had been enough misery in our time. What selfish right had I to perpetuate it?

"And what right had any man and woman to bring children into the 20th-century world? As a Communist, I took it for granted children were out of the question. Abortion, which now fills me with physical horror, I then regarded, like all Communists, as a mere physical manipulation.

"One day, early in 1933, my wife told me she believed she had conceived. No man can hear from his wife, especially for the first time, that she is carrying his child, without a physical jolt of joy and pride. I felt it.

"But so sunk were we in that life that it was only a passing joy, and was succeeded by a merely momentary sadness that we would not have the child. We discussed the matter, and my wife said that she must go at once for a physical check and to arrange for the abortion.

"When my wife came back. . .she was quiet and noncommittal. The doctor had said there was a child. My wife went about preparing supper. “What else did she say?” I asked. “She said that I am in good physical shape to have a baby.”

"My wife went on silently working. Very slowly, the truth dawned on me. “Do you mean,” I asked, “that you want to have the child?”

"My wife came over to me, took my hands and burst into tears. “Dear heart,” she said in a pleading voice, “we couldn’t do that awful thing to a little baby, not to a little baby, dear heart.”