“Sorry, not sorry,” says mom in letter to baby she plans to abort

A woman who says she is planning to abort her child next week wrote her baby what seems to be a tender letter to an unborn child in the womb–except for the punchline of how she’s going to kill the child next week.

With poignant tenderness, the mother writes a letter to “Little Thing” and says she loves her child. Then, in a tragic ironic twist, she says since she’s not ready to be a mom, she has to take his or her life next week.

The user scaredthrowingaway, wrote her letter on Reddit, and entitled it, “An open letter to the little life I won’t get to meet”:

“Little Thing:

“I can feel you in there. I’ve got twice the appetite and half the energy. It breaks my heart that I don’t feel the enchantment that I’m supposed to feel. I am both sorry and not sorry.

“I am sorry that this is goodbye. I’m sad that I’ll never get to meet you. You could have your father’s eyes and my nose and we could make our own traditions, be a family. But, Little Thing, we will meet again. I promise that the next time I see that little blue plus, the next time you are in the same reality as me, I will be ready for you.

“Little Thing, I want you to be happy. More than I want good things for myself, I want the best things for the future. That’s why I can’t be your mother right now. I am still growing myself. It wouldn’t be fair to bring a new life into a world where I am still haunted by ghosts of the life I’ve lived. I want you to have all the things I didn’t have when I was a child. I want you to be better than I ever was and more magnificent than I ever could be. I can’t do to you what was done to me: Plant a seed made of love and spontaneity into a garden, and hope that it will grow on only dreams. Love and spontaneity are beautiful, but they have little merit. And while I have plenty of dreams to go around, dreams are not an effective enough tool for you to build a better tomorrow. I can’t bring you here. Not like this.

“I love you, Little Thing, and I wish the circumstances were different. I promise I will see you again, and next time, you can call me Mom.”

Many of the Reddit replies were resoundingly supportive, commiserating with the mother as if she had just learned her baby died at the hand of uncontrollable circumstances rather than was planning to take her baby’s life. Many called her letter “beautiful.”

When a reader wrote a response as if from the baby in the womb, asking to live, the backlash was immediate and angry.

Though the mother says, “I want you to be happy. More than I want good things for myself, I want the best things for the future. That’s why I can’t be your mother right now,” she doesn’t show that selfless attitude. Few readers do either. What is surprisingly sparse in responses is the word adoption. A few people mentioned it, such as user “Kztexas” who wrote:

“My husband and I will adopt your baby, cover it with love and care for it like it was our own. Just say the word, and we will help you.”

But for the most part the community, filled with sympathy toward the mother, avoided the obvious solution for a woman not prepared to raise a child: give the child to a family who would give the life to the child the mother can’t.

Though many say, as a reader did to this mom, that a fetus isn’t human, can’t feel, this letter reminds us that even a woman choosing death for her baby knows she is carrying a baby. Whether the woman is really pregnant and planning to abort her child next week, we may never know, but the responses of readers, and the sentiment of the piece itself, tell a tragic story of the ease of death in a society that has now embraced killing as acceptable.