Love Child

Love Child Sue Allison Once you get past the first definition of"abort," the one about removing a fetus from a uterus before the fetus is viable, you leave the world ofmedicine and, with it, the world of the controversial and the inconceivable—and a world made over-determined these days by the juncture ofchurch and state— and enter the ordinary world oferror, misjudgment, offailing, ceasing, ofstopping something in progress before it is finished. One can abort a cold, an uprising, a flight. The word means, simply: terminate before completion. Miscarry is a synonym. A miscarriage is essentially an abortion, though couples weep over their lost opportunity to parent; they mourn their unborn child. No dictionary could convince them they've had an abortion. One ofthe definitions for the word "abortion" is: a thing ofmonstrous, frightful appearance.Years ago, I coolly described a haircut I received as making me look like a Walking abortion . I was in my cynical, solipsistic, twenties then. It chills me to remember. I am looking in my dictionary to try to understand the word "abort" because I am trying to understand what happened when my husband and I were poised to adopt a child whose mother changed her mind and decided not to let us. I am looking because maybe for the first time I feel what it means to be unwanted, to be put a stop to, to be had done widi, to have been given over, to have had my plans ended, ceased, stopped, halted prematurely. Why I look in my dictionary is because I believe in words, their ability, their power to incite, to heal, to explain, to express, to communicate. I look up synonyms for abort and find: close the books on, phase out, conclude , resolve, put an end to, get over with, dispose of, polish off, put the skids on, scrap, stop, extinguish, zap, cancel, delete, expunge, censor, blank out, erase. There is a kind ofpoetry to a list ofsynonyms, a compelling unity: these are words in the same family. I follow words from one definition to another as if meaning is a string, language itself a long line of clues which will end— which will terminate—in the word which will comfort me by naming what I 14 Sue Allison1 5 am feeling. And I believe that, whether words have power in themselves or only the power we give them, whether, as linguists still debate, we create them or they create us, they are, in any case, all we have. Twenty-six letters. It doesn't seem like much. But these fragments made War and Peace, made Moby Dick, made The Fall of the Roman Empire. The "Star-Spangled Banner." Howl. The Constitution. The Declaration of Independence. New York Times. News at Nine. Nick at Night. These were made from fragments, too. Homer used only 1,300 different words to write the epics that laid the foundation for Western literature and that still encompass the entire range of human emotion, experience, and relations. Man. God. Heart. Soul. Life. But. Other.We now have thousands upon thousands ofwords.We have more books than anyone could ever read. More poems, more songs, more scientific tracts. And each is built on words that themselves are created out ofa mere twentysix letters. Fragments. Tiny pieces. Iotas. The alphabet is the genetic code of language, and the first thing children learn. But I am looking up abortion too, because in seeking to adopt a baby—reasoning that if we're going to raise a child, we might as well start at the beginning —my husband, Paul, and I are seeking out that woman for whom having an abortion is not an option, but to whom being a mother is also not an option. We sympathize with her and know she is able to make the decision because there are couples like us. Because private adoption is now possible, where the adoption can be effective immediately, with no intervening weeks or months or years while the baby waits for a family. And because the reluctant modier will be able to choose and to know the family her child will go to so that she will...