Dad hadn’t gotten a chance to get to know me yet. He just wasn’t ready or willing to have a child. It was nothing personal. Actually I would consider it a big positive that he stuck around once he actually met me. I don’t see why anyone would be upset, unless they were strongly anti-abortion and would be upset about *anyone *who wanted to abort any baby.
If you had a really cool and loving dad growing up, and found out as an adult he wanted you aborted.
Despite being relatively “cool and loving,” my dad was a bigot whose respect I stopped bothering to seek somewhere around middle school. I wouldn’t be the least bit bothered.
Wouldn’t it be a rejection of some anonymous fetus’s existence? There really wasn’t a “you” yet, just the concept of a baby.
I don’t know how I’d feel about my father wanting my mother to have an abortion - but I’d sure wonder why someone thought it was a good jdea to tell me.
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I am, I guess, kind of in this situation. In that I have been told that my dad’s preferred number of children was zero (by him) and that I was a result of a contraceptive failure (by my grandmother, who admittedly may have been just guessing)
Neither of these pieces of information bother me in the slightest. I have every reason to believe that my dad values both me and my brother as people, he just wanted to do other things with the childrearing years of his life than childrear (and probably has some zero-pop-growth beliefs as well, though he’s never given me grief about having three kids myself). I can understand that - kids are a lot of work, specially for an introvert. He was, in sober fact, extremely good at it though (I may have told before on these boards the story of how someone once wondered if he were a child abductor because “it’s strange to see a father paying that much attention to his kid in public”)
Although the grandmother involved in the second nugget was my Sane Gran who I loved dearly, I don’t actually *advocate *telling your adult grandchildren that they were a Big Mistake … she was getting a little dotty at the time, and would lose track of exactly who she was talking to. But it really wasn’t a ‘thing’ for me. Dad, on the other hand, was perfectly capable of correctly reasoning based on his knowledge of me that I would consider the entire issue about zero percent of a big deal.
My very cool and very loving Dad didn’t consider fetuses to be people, and neither do I.
One of the few polls I answered without seeing previous results. Turns out I voted with the majority. How my dad feels about his wife’s medical condition does not reflect on how he feels about me.
It wouldn’t change my opinion of my dad, but I’d really think twice about the motivation of the person who told me. There was a thread a while back about spontaneous witticisms. The problem is they are often unintentionally offensive. Telling someone their dad wanted to have them aborted is either a really poorly thought out joke, or a remark intended to hurt, or the person is a self-important jerk.
Meh. For starters, I don’t come from a background where ones opinion on abortion is the ne plus ultra of religious/political virtue. And as others have pointed out, the “you” in the thread title is misleading. When I was a clump of cells I wasn’t a “you”. As for him being really cool and loving, why is that even a consideration?
Wouldn’t bother me at all.
There might even be a lesson in there.
~Max
Very understandable in my case. My mother was quite ill during the last several months of my time in utero. The doctor flatly told my parents that my mother had little to no chance of surviving my birth. Luckily, her condition improved and we both managed to pull through.
I’d be a fine one to cast blame. I was one of those twins who bullied the sibling, who never developed into anything more than a flushable tadpole.
Put me down for “meh”.
Hell, now that I’m a dad, I’m just amazed how cool and loving he was!
Hell, I know some mothers who seriously considered abortion when they found out they were pregnant, which I think would generally be considered even less socially acceptable than fathers feeling that way.
All the mothers in question ended up deciding to carry the pregnancy to term and ended up loving and nurturing their children with all their heart. It just took them a while to get there, and I don’t blame them for that in the slightest, nor would I blame a father for having the same initial reluctance.
Same goes if it turned out that my own mother or father had felt that way, as both of them were very loving and committed parents from the time I was born, which is all I had any right to expect (and a hell of a lot more than some unfortunate kids get).
Having kids is goddamn hard and scary, and no shame to anyone for being scared of it. And adults should be mature enough to realize that a potential parent initially not wanting a hypothetical future offspring is not the same thing as a parent feeling that you personally, the actual present offspring, would be better off dead.
(And yeah, I never did nor would breathe a word to the children of said mothers about what I was told re their feelings at the start of the pregnancy. Even totally natural and temporary feelings of rejection and aversion towards one’s family members shouldn’t be maliciously gossiped about by third parties, no matter how normal such feelings may be.)
My parents could have just decided to not have sex that night and it would have just as much meaning.
Context matters. If there seemed a good reason for wanting it at the time, I’d be sympathetic.
People consider lots of things when under duress, so it wouldn’t be surprising. The initial revelation might set you back on your ears because we like to think our parents always wanted us, but mostly it’s a “meh”.
However, I do wonder about the motives of the person who’s sharing that information. If it’s a third party and the motive they have is to alienate you from your father, then that person’s a card-carrying jerk.
If it’s your father himself who’s telling you about life, the unexpected, and how things can turn out well even in life-altering moments, that’s a different thing altogether.