"My ghost son keeps pace with me ..."

I recently came across these two posts about abortion at Ambivablog. While I disagree with this blogger's ultimate position on abortion (that early, first-trimester abortions should remain legal), I found her recounting of her personal experience with abortion both moving and morally serious:

One way to measure the magnitude of what’s banished by an abortion is to try to imagine your life without just one of the significant people in it: one friend, one lover, one sibling, one child. I don’t mean if they died, God forbid; I mean what if you had never known them? What if that face and voice and humor and trouble and insight had never crossed your path or woven into the texture of your consciousness? It wouldn’t be your life as you know it. You wouldn’t even be the same you. That’s what an individual is: the most life-changing thing you will ever encounter.

I used to believe, like the well-indoctrinated Ivy League student I was, that accomplishments, technological inventions, scientific discoveries, voyages of exploration, great works of art, great acts of state, were what most changed the world. I am now convinced that nothing comes close to changing the world as much as bringing a new individual into it. (And that holds for fathers as well as mothers.) Individuals are what the world is made of, and what makes the world. It’s not just that all the abovementioned accomplishments come from individuals. It’s the simple fact that each life stunningly and uniquely impacts the lives closest to it, and these impacts ripple outward, interacting to make the complex and particular patterns we call the world. Add or remove one individual, and you change everything – not only the sight and sound and story of the world, but its inner dimension, too. A human being displaces a lot of nothingness. Like a special-effects superhero leaping out of nowhere, each one shoulders apart the air, opening a boundless space where the whole universe is newly rooted, where its meaning will be uniquely relived and reworked. (That’s what we do: process meaning the way earthworms enrich soil.) When someone who was going to be here isn’t here, the air stays sealed at that spot, like the Pied Piper’s mountain, without even an x to mark the site of amputation. A whole world that would have opened up within the world remains forever closed. Am I making any sense?

So the Ground Zero in my life and heart is completely invisible. Yet among the casualties buried in that non-place are not only my son’s whole life, and the mother I would have been, but also the friends who never knew him, the cousins whose whole generation would have been reshaped by his presence, the lovers who would have loved him, the children he might have fathered, and also his ancestors on his father’s side, who are now entombed in the past, with not even a tendril to the future.