Abortion & Celebrity (kind of): John Cheever

In the Sunday edition of the New York Times Magazine, The First Suburbanite, covers the life, and upcoming biography, of writer, John Cheever.

His father, a shoe salesman, lost his job in the Depression; his mother mortified everyone in the family by opening a gift shop. Cheever believed himself to have been unwanted and unloved. If not for a second Manhattan enjoyed one evening, his mother told him, he would never have been conceived, and his father later encouraged her to see an abortionist. Cheever’s closest relationship — an intimacy that may have been literally incestuous — was with his older brother, Fred, who in later years also became an alcoholic, and in some ways the rest of his life was a quest to create for himself the kind of innocent, unconditional familial embrace he felt deprived of.

This is the third article in as many weeks on a famous figure of some kind in the NYTimes, that says how this famous person was almost aborted. Not quite sure what I make of it yet.

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Abortion & Celebrities: Neko Case & Rosario Dawson

Last weeks Sunday edition of the New York Times Magazine features Neko Case in the article, Wild Thing, where Neko says:

“I should have been an abortion,” Case says, with her customary frankness. “The only reason I wasn’t was that my father was a Christian.” Air quotes didn’t quite land on that proper noun, but they hovered close by. He was also a heavy drinker, she says, and used drugs, and “he hated his life. And he reminded us of that every day.” Abortion rights is an important issue for Case — she emphasizes that she has seen and lived the misery of unwanted children. (Another cause of hers is humane treatment for animals that suffer cruelty and neglect at people’s hands.)”

This weeks edition of the The New York Times Style magazine features Rosario Dawson, in article titled “The Kid Stays in the Pictures,” where Rosario says:

My mom told me so much about sex at an early age that she scared me: I didn’t have sex until was 20. I got into trouble at school because one of my friends said, ‘‘Lesbians do it with straws.’’ I said, ‘‘I can tell you how lesbians do it, and there are no straws involved!’’ But I think all that talk of sex put me off. The first time I had it, I think it was in a head-to-toe rubber. I was terrified of getting pregnant. My mom was planning to get an abortion when she was pregnant with me. She was at the clinic waiting for her appointment and she felt me move in her stomach. I always tell her it was probably gas. I thank God for gas.

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