It’s a Skaldthetical with a long storytelling OP. If you don’t like these, why are you still reading?
Today’s story is about Barry West, a professional political consultant of the liberal persuasion, and his wife, Iris Park, the conservative mayor of the largest city in the state she and Barry reside in. They’ve been married for twenty years. Barry and Iris long ago agreed to some rules designed to put their marriage ahead of their careers. Iris would never mention Barry or her marriage in a political context; Barry would never work for a candidate opposing her; Iris would never campaign against a candidate Barry was working for; neither of them would ever allow their children (both adopted, incidentally) to be used for political gain; and so forth. Neither of them has ever broken these rules.
Iris is running for state governor. Barry is keeping track of the polls and in his professional opinion, this election will be extremely close–decided more than anything else by voter turnout. For obvious reasons he is sitting out this election, which is something of a shame: Iris’s opponent is an old friend and ally of his, and pretty much Barry’s dream candidate for governor. More than that: as much as he loves Iris, she’s the last person he wants in the governor’s mansion, and though he is silent publicly and supportive at home, in the voting booth he plans to vote against her.
Iris only narrowly won the Republican primary. She has some problems with her base, you see, as she went on record several times in the campaign as opposing abstinence-only sex education and supporting initiatives designed to teach safer sex and distribute condoms in schools. But despite her position on sex-ed, Iris also opposes abortion rights in most circumstances. She’s gone on record as believing that, if abortion is allowed at all, the mother should be required to wait two days before getting one and to first view an ultrasound of the “baby” (she refuses to use the word fetus), adding that she believes the majority of women who have an abortion come to regret it mightily later. Even rape and incest cannot justify killing an unborn child, Iris says; abortion should be allowed only to save the mother’s life.
Less than a week before the election, Barry is accosted by a reporter for a major newspaper in the state. The reporter says he’s heard a rumor that Iris was cheated on Barry decades ago, while they were in college, got pregnant, and had an abortion. Can Barry confirm or deny that?
Barry’s impulse is to punch the reporter in the throat. Sitting on his hands instead, he says that Iris has never cheated on him, much less been forced to have an abortion because of it. But while that’s all true, it also skirts the issue–because Iris **did **have an abortion in her teens. It wasn’t the result of an affair; she and Barry weren’t lovers at the time. She was molested and impregnated by an uncle, and her parents got the family doctor to perform the procedure and hush up the incident. It’s something Iris never talks about, something that took her years of therapy to get over.
Barry doesn’t say anything the incest and abortion out loud, of course. But the reporter notices that Barry didn’t quite say that Iris never had an abortion. So he presses the issue: “Mr. West, are you saying that Ms. Park DID have an abortion at some time in her life?”
Barry’s a quick thinker. In the space of an eyeblink, he realizes that, if a credible story about Iris’s abortion comes out at this late date, it will cause a defection in her already-shaky ranks, and quite likely cost her the election. On the other hand, she’s his wife, the mother of his children; he hates the idea of torpedoing her.
What should Barry do, and why?