Today at work I was listening to KIRO while Dori Monson bandied on about a 17-year-old girl from Mexico who put her newborn baby in a bag and dropped it outside somewhere in Everett. "Who does this kind of thing?" asked Dori.
A nurse from an obstetric ward of a local hospital called in and said that many times girls have come in to the hospital panicked because they don't know what is going on with them. "I've always had irregular periods, and I just thought I was gaining a lot of weight," they would say as they express shock that they are about to give birth. Others would deny ever having had sex at all because their mothers were in the room with them.
I remember also a story a few years ago about a girl who had a baby in the bathroom at a school dance and then put it in the garbage and walked out. It seems completely crazy but it is true.
This is particularly ridiculous when you consider that every woman who has sex is worried on some level about unplanned pregnancy. Even if you had no morning sickness you would have to feel a kick now and then, right? Suddenly you are moody and gaining weight and your back hurts; there would definitely be signs. But what if you had no idea where babies come from? What if you didn't know how babies are born, or didn't even understand what babies are in the first place?
In the movie Blue Lagoon Brooke Shields and some Aryan Idol dude are abandoned on an island as children. They grow up without any other humans around and eventually their relationship takes a coital turn. Brooke gets pregnant but has no idea she is knocked up and the Aryan starts taunting her for being fat. Suddenly there is a third, little blond person on the island. Everything is beautiful again and they frolic in the surf and sand.
All of this is meant to entice you to consider the horror a dog in a single-pet family must feel when suddenly she is plopping puppies out of her womb. Dogs are usually adopted about two months after they're born, and it's doubtful they retain memories of their infancy. In many cases they're spayed or neutered and so the following scenario has no risk for them. Imagine my horror, though, when my darling Labrador Mickey was brutally raped at five months in the backyard by our neighbors' hideous beast of a mutt, Wrangler. Seriously, this dog looked like a something grown in a swamp and dipped regularly in a tank of nuclear waste. His beady eyes were the color of an oil puddle in the parking lot. His fur was matted and colored like mashed potatoes and greasy gravy. Wrangler ravished little Mickey before she had fully developed her bark.
Luckily no hideous mutts were conceived that day, but imagine for a moment there had been. What if you were a dog growing up with a family who had no other pets. You've never seen a pregnant dog, and you haven't seen a litter of puppies since you were in one. Wrangler rapes you and a few months later your belly is dragging on the floor when you go outside to pee. At the risk of giving dogs too much credit, I'd imagine a dog is thinking "What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On?"
Dogs can't read the Bible, so they don't know that Eve ate the apple and as such they are going to grow little dogs inside of them and then expel them in almost the worst way imaginable. Maybe it would be better not to know, to not anticipate for months and months the horrible pain that awaits you. There are no doggie epidurals, and dogs usually bear many puppies at a time. Suddenly Fido is just overwhelmed with pain for a few hours, like an all-consuming flu, and a few hours later these little slimy creatures are sucking on her teats. "Where. The. Hell. Did. You. Pip. Squeaks. Come. From."
I remember our first dog Molly. We got her from the aforementioned neighbors when they were struggling to whittle their litter down to a manageable size*. We went to pick her out and the neighbors told us how Molly's mom didn't really like the puppies. I remember thinking at the time that it was so unnatural. How could you not love something you've nurtured from conception.
Oh wait. Maybe you had no idea you were pregnant and suddenly there was a great tearing of the flesh and these little sickballs are attacking you. I wouldn't like the bastards either.
Then again, imagine being born. You attain consciousness at some point in the third trimester and all you know is a gooey, warm sac that pulses. Suddenly you are in a vice-grip and then a man with forceps is tugging at your cranium and someone cuts your cord-o-life. Simply terrifying.
My sympathy's still with the mom, because she knows what is normal and giving birth for the first time surely can't feel normal. A baby's brain is still developing and all he's known is the inside of the uterus. He gets squeezed for a few minutes and then he's the most important person in the room simply by virtue of birth, unless he's born in the school bathroom I guess. A mother, though, who is not expecting the pain of childbirth might feel like a sudden blight has descended on her, and who could not sympathize with the freak-out that would surely accompany such an event.
But really, let's not go throwing our babies around in sacks. A person can drop a baby off at a fire or police station without fear of legal penalty. Think what the world would be like if Moses hadn't been saved from his riverboat basket of doom. Maybe a Spartan hero was thrown out in the fields to die because he seemed like a runt at birth. I am in no way tying this into a discussion of abortion, but once a kid is out and breathing he deserves better than the dumpster.
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*Never adopt a dog as a favor.
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