While he can feel sympathy for the frightened young girl, Vanauken says, now “I know Marion and her children, too.” Had Davy undergone an abortion, Marion and her “three bright and beloved children, would never have existed at all.”

This is especially poignant in light of the fact that Davy and Vanauken had no children of their own. If Davy had aborted Marion, there would now be no loving woman who calls Vanauken “father,” nor her three children.

“I glimpse,” Vanauken writes, “what [John] Donne meant in saying that any man’s death diminished him. I should be diminished if half a century ago Davy had clutched at the straw of abortion. And all the folk who have touched or shall touch the lives of Marion and her children and their children-to-be would be diminished.”

Read the rest: The Little Lost Marion.