I sat on the swing outside on the patio, relaxing in the pale 
light of the rising moon, trying to forget for a while the horrible events of the day. It was supposed to be a happy day, the happiest day of my life. Seeing your baby for the first time is supposed to be a magical moment where awe and wonder at the fact that you made that should overwhelm you. Instead all I could think about was that my baby girl might be deformed, physically and possibly mentally. The doctors weren’t certain about the exact nature of her deformity, but she was there was a strong probability that she was going to be different. I was having a child without no conception of how she was going to turn out. She might be the kid no one ever played with, she might be rejected everywhere she went simply for her differences. She would not thank me for her creation. How could she ever have a normal life? She might be full of anger and hate, unable to cope with her situation, and lash out at the world.
Years ago I had made this same mistake and my son had never forgiven the fact that I could never love him the way he wanted me to or give him the life he desired. He wanted me to have the baby. My son wanted someone he could call family. He had sworn to help provide for and take care of her, but the child may not be satisfied with this and might still loathe me. He might also be disgusted with her deformity and reject her. Anything could happen! How could I know, how could I go through with this when there was so much risk?
If she ever wanted children, her condition would be passed on, and they too might lead terrible lives. Did I have a right, simply to satisfy my desire for a baby, to curse my daughter and all the generations that come after her to lives of loneliness, rejection and suffering? I trembled to think of how much they would hate me, the source of all their pain, who would selfishly choose my own wants without a care for the effect on my descendants.
I looked inside the house through the window and saw him sitting in front of the fireplace, the light dancing on his face in hellish flames. He wanted someone to love and love him. I had felt so sorry for him that I had agreed to have the baby. He had persuaded and threatened me, to extract that promise, but now its selfishness and immorality burst over me. As I looked at him, I realized that though his impassioned words had swayed me before, this was my decision and I couldn’t let fear or a desire to satisfy someone else’s wants make that decision for me. A shudder wracked my body and I felt a shift somewhere within. A strange sensation came over me and in a wild rush I threw open the door and said, “I can’t do it. I can’t bring that in to the world. I’m not going through with this baby.”
An Interview with the Author of the Wildly Popular ‘Frankenstein’s Abortion’
Interviewer: It’s so nice to meet you! Congratulations on making the New York Time Top 100 Bestsellers’ list! How has the ride been?
MK: Oh its been mind-boggling. When I wrote that story I was just re-reading the scene in Frankenstein where he destroys the female creature, and thinking about how the novel portrays men through what takes place when a man tries to usurp the natural order. I tried to turn that on its head and write what Victor was feeling, but seemingly from the point of view of a pregnant woman. I never expected people to like it so much.
Interviewer: Why do you think its become so popular?
MK: I wrote it to show the gender essentialism and gender roles we propagate, and I think it resonated with people because of the large amount of attention that feminism has been receiving recently. When Victor destroys the female creature in the book one feels horror, fear for the monster’s retribution and pity for the Creature. The selfishness of Victor seems to come to the fore and the reader thinks “After coming all the way here, upsetting everybody, postponing his wedding and working for hours” he just decides to destroy her and doom himself. But when I portrayed the same things Victor says, in an almost stylistically identical manner, but giving the impression that the individual is a pregnant woman who has been persuaded to have a baby, this scene elicits pity for the speaker’s situation and anger that someone is coercing her into having the baby, very different from what it inspired in readers when the person in question was a man. I think people are responding to this subtle demonstration of the essentialist views everyone holds and it shows what we need to take steps toward changing.
Interviewer: I notice that you never explicitly say the word ‘pregnant’ or make clear that the speaker is a woman. Is there some reason for that?
MK: I only wanted to give the impression of a female speaker, to show even simply that is enough to make the reader feel sympathetic towards her, as a helpless victim.
Interviewer: Why did you choose to write about abortion specifically? I mean as I understand it, there are numerous examples of feminine essentialism and objectification of the female body in Frankenstein, embodied in Justine and Elizabeth. Why did you choose this scene and this issue?
MK: Abortion has been a major topic of contention recently with numerous new legislature being passed in different states. I wanted to throw some light on that topic too. The tense that this story is written in is the same as the novel’s and it imparts the idea that could be happening at any time, any place and to anyone.
Interviewer: Is there anything else you would like to say?
MK: Well, I just want to mention how ridiculously easy it was to mould this scene in Frankenstein into one of a pregnant woman deciding to abort, and it is almost as if Mary Shelley was talking about abortion too. Victor says “My labour was already considerably advanced… [but I had] forebodings of evil, that made my heart sicken in my bosom”, which is very similar to a woman who is pretty far along in her pregnancy but dreads the prospect of the baby and does not want it anymore.
Interviewer: Thank you so much for coming, I look forward to reading more of your brilliant work.
