The Life of the Almost-Aborted

My entire life abortion has been a topic I’ve worked hard to avoid. Because my entire life, abortions have happened, people have argued, and abortions just keep happening.

I distinctly remember being in debate class my junior year of high school when the topic of abortion was announced. I sat and listened as the “right wing” and “left wing” of the classroom yelled back and forth about women’s rights and the definition of life.

Usually a very outspoken member of the class, I didn’t say one word that day. I put my head down to join the “sleepers” in the classroom, giving me an automatic zero.

But I wasn’t sleeping. I was crying.

I listened as my closest friend in the class, easily one of the brightest students and best debaters, gave an emotion-filled defense of a woman’s right to choose and how women shouldn’t be forced to pay for their mistakes, or the mistakes of a man.

It silenced the class. It was certainly the most well crafted argument of the day.

But my friend didn’t know that the topic of debate wasn’t really over a human rights issue that day. It was over me.

“If only she knew that she was arguing over my life,” I thought.

But she had no idea. She didn’t know that mom got pregnant with me when she was 19 and unmarried. That I wasn’t planned. That I wasn’t hoped for. That by her definition, I was a mistake.

So all I heard that day in debate was my friend tell me that my mom had every right to get rid of me. And that maybe she should have.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my mom did decide to get rid of me.

She certainly was faced with that option.

I guess another student would have simply filled my chair. Someone who was more worthy to live than I.

With tears streaming down my face, I still wonder the same thing now as I did then:

Do you know you are arguing over my life?

I cry because I’m one of the unplanned people on earth still given the chance to live - a chance to love and to be loved. And I also miss the other unplanned people that aren’t with us today. Whose lives have been ended and are being ended in this very moment.

Our world doesn’t even know what we are missing. The friends that have been lost. The family we will never see.

Somehow people’s mistakes have been confused for the people they make.

So I cry for the little heartbeats felt but ignored.

And I thank God that my heart still beats.

Jordan Sok is a 20-something writer, Christian and newlywed. Her personal blog encourages her readers to “embrace the awkward,” because the way she sees it, a lot of “awkwardness” is simply feeling uncomfortable because something is out of the norm. And maybe that is a good thing. Her blog focuses on a mixture of topics surrounding the 20-something Christian life- the good, the bad, and the funny. Oh, and the awkward.

Image courtesy Jordan Sok.

Publication date: December 7, 2015