Night Terrors by Tim Waggoner

Author:Tim Waggoner [Waggoner, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

SO YOU’VE CAUSED AN ABORTION

The manner in which I first encountered abortion was, strangely, the same way most adolescent boys discover porn: late at night on the Internet. I was about twelve and had been introduced to a website over Thanksgiving dinner, by one of the older female cousins not scandalized by the sex tape I found. My family, as you’ve probably deduced, is fond of black humor and my cousin had a particularly morbid proclivity. She told me about all the grotesque images you’d find on this website, then produced a laptop and showed me a few. The one that stuck out was a man who’d died in his bathtub while the water was running really hot and it roiled around his corpse for a few days, resulting in what can only accurately be described as man soup. Unless stew is technically more accurate? Whichever one is meat-based.

Enthused by this trove of objectionable things suddenly available to me, I went home that night and started down the rabbit hole of primitive Internet perversity. Websites full of bodies, generally dead by some gruesome misfortune, led to websites of violent urban legends and ghost stories and animal abuse hoaxes (like putting kittens in different shaped glasses to grow funnily shaped kittens) and dead baby jokes and so on. That first night, I was hunched over my computer very late, unable to resist all the appalling descriptions, clicking them and trying to assess the gore of a half-loaded image through cracked fingers.

One such option claimed to show “the victims of abortion,” and, not knowing what that was, I clicked through. The initial text I don’t recall very well; it might have been a parody of religious right rhetoric or it might have been blatantly irreverent, I can’t remember. What I do remember, however, was (1) discovering what an abortion was and (2) the visual component.

I had stumbled on an endless column of abortion aftermath. Gleaming trays of red medical waste speckled with identifiably human parts: half-formed eyeballs, hands, feet, lobes of head and sprouting ears. Some abortions are performed on clusters of cells; others on little beings. These were the kind you recognized.

Here’s the thing, though: you can’t really gauge the size of an aborted fetus just by eyeballing it; you need something set beside it. Thanks to the site’s morally bankrupt hosts, the increment of measurement was . . . a SpaghettiO. Someone had digitally added stacked circles of the popular canned ring pasta on top of images of expelled fetuses for scale. What made this even more impressively ghastly was that—when digitally added on top of an image of an aborted fetus—SpaghettiOs kind of blend.

Soon after, I became a teenager and my ignorant teenage brain eagerly sought any argument that made the noises of intellectual activity. I, embarrassingly, spent a lot of conversations about reproductive rights saying that I supported abortion on a case by case basis and that “women who use abortions as birth control” are monstrous, immoral sluts. I was sixteen.

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