Please don’t despise me because I am so young and small and am making a pitiable impression overall. You may interpret my arched head and neck as a bow, but because I am barely 35 millimeters (1.37 in.) tall, it probably won’t be noticed. You are more likely to conclude that I’m just crotchety. Indeed, I don’t look toward the future forthrightly because I am hemmed in by casings, skins, and cords; because I roll into myself; and because I have an annoying habit of tickling my nose with my little pecker. By the way, you are not the only one who despises me. My mother decided to abort me. You think this is absurd, a murder, a sin? I’m not willing to go that far. I can’t reconcile it with my small (in absolute terms) but, relatively speaking, large brain to toss abortion, coitus with a condom, the drowning of newborns, execution of hardened criminals, the gassing of millions of innocents, and the crucifixion of Jesus into the same bag labeled “Murder.” I will therefore try to consider the pros and cons of my dear mother’s decision.

She considers me an accident of the kind that can happen during sexual intercourse. The spermatozoon that entered one of my dear mother’s eggs may have originated from illegitimate testicles. Since abortion is legal, my dear mother may wish to legalize me by that means. However, I am uncomfortable considering myself an accident (coincidence). The gentleman’s sperm’s paths are dark and twisted. And yet it is necessary for a spermatozoon to encounter an egg by accident? Don’t laugh; this is, after all, what the materialist Democritus had in mind with the coincidental and necessary swerving of atoms, for which he used the term “clinamen”—which Lucretius rendered into Latin as “accidens.” My mother does believe in a legitimate order that may be disturbed by accidents, but in which it is possible to remove disruptions from the world. I, however, believe that all order is based on accidents like myself. And I am convinced that I see more deeply than my dear mother because I am closer to the origin than she and—more significantly—because my dear unknown father over-sired and over-conceived me. Nonetheless, I don’t want to insist on this statement. After all, my dear mother’s heart is beating within me.

Do you think my precocity is a bit absurd because it shows that I have no idea of how probability is calculated? Four billion years ago, a molecular structure evolved on some Precambrian beach that held within it, preprogrammed, the accidental encounter of my paternal sperm with my maternal egg. Not only that, if I were not to be aborted, the probability that I would grow up to be a mathematical genius, a mass murderer, or mongoloid idiot would be calculable as well. Right? Accept my fetal arch as a bow to the correctness of your arguments. You are water on my mill. Statistically it is immaterial whether I am aborted or not: the flow of genetic material would not be substantially altered. My dear mother is better at math than yours.

Does this offend you? In great pain, would your own mother have given you extra-uterine life, the beauty of which I cannot fathom? Allow me to disagree with you. The uterus in which I float is warm and cozy; I receive oxygen and nutrition for free. Where I am looks like paradise to those on the outside. I refer you to countless utopias and myths. What have you gained from the traumatic experience of having been born? You were thrown from a physiological into a sociocultural uterus, and not into any kind of freedom. Your birth diploma was nothing more than a preparatory exam for the larger diploma, that is, the doctorate of death. My dear mother collapses the two in me and bestows upon me the doctorate prematurely—honoris causa, of course. The more I argue with you, the more I am convinced that my dear mother will abort me out of love to spare me from suffering.

You claim that life is about gathering experience and then making decisions accordingly. That, supposedly, is freedom. Are you familiar with the theory that at birth 90 percent of one’s experiences are already in the past? How often have you decided anything for yourself? Isn’t it more accurate to say that you thought a couple of times that you had to make a decision (a curious contradiction, right?), but determined in retrospect that your decision, at that decisive moment, was contingent on circumstance? My dear mother is aborting me so as not to rush me out of paradise into this uncomfortable freedom. The uterus is not as soundproof as generally assumed. I heard some of your songs of praise about freedom. Now that I am about to get my diploma, I recognize in these songs all kinds of dissonances. I prefer a well-tempered clavier.

Please excuse the interruption of our stimulating conversation; I was otherwise occupied. My dear mother suddenly decided to carry me to term; however, she has not changed her opinion of my unimportance, my legitimacy, my future suffering, and the problem of freedom in general. My mother is a good citizen; she never changes her opinion. But the doctor explained to her that an abortion would be detrimental to her own health. And that forces me to reconsider my situation.

I now understand how we—you and I—were mistaken. When we are born the issue is less about accident, coincidence, and necessity, about suffering and paradise, that is, not first and foremost about freedom. The real issue is love. While my mother is ready to carry me to term now out of self-love, is this self-love not also basically a love for me who is a part of her—despite her cynical laughter? Isn’t it true that I love her for that, even though I preferred to be aborted? Love is a tricky thing. One should not necessarily trust those who praise maternal love and preach love for their neighbor. But now that I must (and may) be born, I realize that the question of freedom makes sense only when it is positioned within the context of love.

I don’t know how we endure the confusion of love with freedom, that is, extra-uterine life. I am still unborn. Maybe being born has only this single purpose: to learn to love and to be tested on it. I see you’re laughing again. You are quite right, I’ve not been spared from abortion; I will be aborted at a later date, just like you. So, being born is useless. At the same time, I now have a bit more time to prepare for my diploma. Please allow me to end our friendly conversation at this point so I may dedicate myself to my dissertation on love and freedom—in order to live.