3min chapter

Things Fell Apart cover image

S1. Ep 1: 1000 Dolls

Things Fell Apart

CHAPTER

The Last Two Episodes Are About Abortion and Ronnie Wad

In the 19 seventies, christian evangelicals weren't at all engaged with the issue of abortion. This was coming totally from left field. Most evangelical christians saw this as a quodunq catholic issue. In those days, we had nothing to do with roman catholics if we could help it. But now here was the vered francis shaffer, in the spirit of fostering his son's creativity, taking up the abortion issue. My suggestion came in the context of me being a teen age father myself. It's very personal. Its like, this was an unwonted pregnancy. Jeannie and i are teen agers. We're having this baby and we

00:00
Speaker 2
Ye, there's one thing you do in this piece, and, eh, you do it at the end, in a very arresting final paragraph, which i'll let people read. But you bring the experience of men into the picture in a way that it had never occurred to me to do. Me, we tend to talk about this as a problem of the ethical problem, or the ethically interesting facts are the woman's experience, how she got pregnant, and all the the chaos and suffering that may be attendant on that. You know, again, your rape bein the obvious case, and in all the reasons why she might have not to want to be pregnant or deliver a baby into this world, and the questions of auton over her body and, you know, the intrusions of the state, and, you know, the other people's apparent interest in, you know, what she can do with her life and all that, right? So that the nextes of all this is the woman and you on the other side, the obvious fact of taking a, depending how you think of it, at what point in term, the life of an innocent baby who could have been viable at a certain point, or is potentially viable, and has its own interests. So that's the problem. But you bring the experience of men into this, and suddenly the reader understands that when you have women dying by the thousands, which was, you know, obviously the case due to illegal abortions, many of these women have men in their lives, you know, husbands in many cases, and they, they have existing fam is, right? The i just can't face it again moment is, by definition, the story of a woman, very likely married, already having kids. And so you take the point of view of the man who has delivered his critically ill wife, almost certainly the mother of their existing children, to a hospital where she dies. And you know, after that tragedy, he simply has to go home and face raising the kids by himself, right?

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