Mondays with Mike: The power of choice

The permutations of the circumstances around women’s pregnancies are infinite. I can only speak of Beth’s.

In 1985, shortly after we learned that Beth wouldn’t ever see again, she was enrolled at the Illinois Visually Handicapped Institute, later to be nicknamed “Braille Jail” by Beth. Unfortunately, that moniker is less of an exaggeration than you might think.

That’s my dad holding Gus.

It was a tough few months. Her family who lived in the burbs would spring her on some weekends. Otherwise I’d spring her and hang out for the weekend. Every Monday morning sucked, as I’d drop her back off at Braille Jail and drive home to Champaign-Urbana.

Finally, around Christmas, Beth determined she’d learned as much as she could there, and sprung herself. When she came home, it was a relief, and a comfort. And, well, one evening, we celebrated being together again in a particularly physical way. I was using very natural feeling protection, but the problem was it felt so natural that I didn’t realize when it fell off.

Given our luck over the previous year, we kinda both knew that she was pregnant, and sure enough, she was. Beth had told me about the difficulty of bearing children if you have type 1 diabetes. We’d pretty much decided if we really wanted kids, we’d likely adopt.

So, to be perfectly frank, my baseline thought was that we’d have to run the gauntlet of abortion protesters that were outside the clinic every day. I grew angry just thinking of it—them not knowing a thing about Beth’s circumstances (or mine, for that matter). And I girded myself for self-control and to not give them, if the time came, an object lesson in the difference between murder and abortion.

Beth and I never faced that situation. She saw an endocrinologist who assured us that it was possible to have a healthy pregnancy and birth under the right circumstances and with lots of finger sticks. To start, he said, Beth needed a battery of tests to check on the current state of her kidneys and other health indicators. If any of these came back bad, he said he’d recommend terminating the pregnancy for Beth’s health’s sake.

They came back clean. Which was good, but also put the onus of a decision on Beth and on us. I say us because although yes, it’s a woman’s choice, if she’s in a relationship, it’s not a decision made in a vacuum. She was cognizant of what I thought.

We’d had a hard time for a long time. At first an unplanned pregnancy seemed like bad new, but with Beth’s health new it was suddenly potentially a light at the end of a long tunnel. Beth carried to term.

As many of you know, Gus was born premature, and very nearly died shortly after his birth. The doctor gave him a 50-50 chance at surviving his first night on earth. And he ultimately was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic abnormality that HAD NOTHING to do with Beth’s diabetes. It left him with developmental disabilities.

I can’t speak for Beth, but for me, that fact that she and we had a choice in the matter made all the difference in the world in how I viewed our son. I almost felt a deeper responsibility to give him a good life..

Gus lives in a group home in Wisconsin now and will turn 38 this year.

And I’ve never supported the right of women to a safe and legal abortion more than I do today. That doesn’t reflect ambivalence about how I feel about Gus. I love him and always have. What would Beth/we have done if we knew what was in front of us? Doesn’t matter, We didn’t.

But, fortunately for us, it was up to Beth and to me.