Yang's Abortion

*Warning, HIMYM and Grey’s Anatomy Spoilers!*

So, Christina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy is in constant conflict with her husband about having a baby. Christina has made it abundantly clear that she never wants to have children, this seems to be coming up a bit lately (Robin from How I met your Mother just broke up with her boyfriend this season because she physically can’t and does not desire children). Dr. Hunt can’t let this go; he has his heart set on kids and won’t give it up. He can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to have kids and as a medical professional I find that hard to believe. Not having kids is a tough decision to make as a couple but it’s one to be respected. I know of people who have kids unexpectedly but found they wanted kids anyways, and others who have chosen not to, but never known anyone personally who’s been pregnant and chosen to abort. There’s much debate about the idea of a child having a life/soul even minutes into conception but it all comes down to what you believe and what you believe will ultimately determine your decision and how you cope with that. 

As I said, I don’t know anyone who’s had to abort a pregnancy, or maybe I do but they haven’t told me about it. Regardless, if you believe your child has a soul from the moment of conception, you’re going to have (or believe you should have and this will have) adverse effects from this. I heard one story about a woman who aborted when she was 16 but found that she couldn’t 5 years later with the daughter she kept. She was content with terminating the first time because she wasn’t ready and didn’t consider what was inside her to be alive. Her second child was different, she felt different, she couldn’t go through with it. Maybe there was something different other than just the parent’s feelings of being ready but regardless, it’s the woman’s body, the couple’s baby, what they choose to do is up to them. In Grey’s Anatomy’s take on this, they do it maturely for the subject material. Yang doesn’t want it, Hunt does but eventually consents to Yang having her way as she would’ve been miserable with it. There are two things I want to draw from this. One, Hunt’s reaction is easy to understand but difficult to tolerate, and two, that not having children is ok.

"I'm kind of like a walking anti-war campaign"

Hunt wants kids, and he’s not going to get them with Yang. He consents to making his wife happy by aborting their baby but he doesn’t just get over it, he harbors resentment for his wife for making the choice she made and can’t seem to let it go. I don’t know where his reaction is coming from, probably the realization that his wife will never want kids (something very important to him) but probably not from a spiritual side. He accuses her of killing their baby, but I never got the impression that he thought it was murder before, unless he developed these feelings afterwards. In the end, Hunt is probably just upset about not just losing a potential child but losing all possibility of children when he married his wife. This is the message of these recent episodes and it comes up in many other aspects of a relationship, “if your partner is directly opposed to something you’ve wanted all your life, you need to choose either your wife or that dream and leave the other forever.” It’s tough but we make these choices every day, an oversimplified example is when we choose to be healthy/happy vs. eating fast food all the time, you can’t have both.


  vs  

The choice is yours!

And finally, it’s ok to not have kids. I think this was the weirder messages I was getting from irrational, emotionally torn Dr. Hunt. He claims he doesn’t understand how anyone could not want to have kids; I think his view on the subject is sorely coming from a lack of reasonable thinking. I’ve been there and back again, thought kids would suck, thought kids might be nice someday, back to the kids sucking thing again (baby-sitting my brother or sister’s kids for a weekend will do that). Not having children is a sort of anti-evolutionary way of thinking and is the entire backstory of the movie Idiocracy, it’s also kinda selfish when you think about it but it’s detrimental to your kids to have kids when you don’t really want to. I remember going to a church where the pastor was saying he wanted to see more babies in his church, that we weren’t procreating enough as a congregation. I’m summarizing and he never said “procreating” but the idea was there. Throwing a God given duty into the mix is just another bit of the old, “do it for Jesus” way of thinking that’s lead to, well, obligation over "the joy of having kids."  If only the people who wanted to have kids were having kids, then we might see a different sort of generation of children (probably spoiled ones) in the future . 

Tomorrow… is Sunday! Following the idea of Lent, it’s not required that I blog tomorrow but I might just for fun… we’ll see.