Sixty years ago this summer I had recently been married and I had bought a house in Southeast Portland. I was working in downtown Portland, and a student at Reed College who lived in the neighborhood asked if he could ride with me to work, as his father had got him a job at the same company where I worked.
Over the summer we rode together to and from work in my car. Toward the end of summer, he mentioned that his girlfriend and roommate were pregnant and the pregnancy was going to interfere with a trip that had been planned to Japan. I unsuccessfully tried to talk them out of having an abortion. They felt that the trip to Japan was more important than the pregnancy. They rationalized that she could get pregnant again at a later date.
My argument was that Japan would still be there for them. For 60 years I have wondered what this person who was not born would have been like. His or her parents were intelligent students, to get into Reed you must be intelligent and have enough money to afford the tuition of this expensive private college. The rationalization of poverty or minority was not an issue, nor should it be.
For 60 years those conversations have still bothered me; I was unsuccessful and I will never know what could have happened, and I believe should have happened.
