The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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My vasectomy has spontaneously reversed itself nearly a decade after its confirmed success. I only learned this after my wife became pregnant, which, due to a lifelong pre-existing condition, is a severe hazard to her health.
I know what you're thinking -- what are the odds of a vasectomy spontaneously reversing itself after that long? Isn't there some alternative hypothesis for that positive pregnancy test that you're not considering? No, not the possibility of an hCG-secreting tumor, another alternative hypothesis?
Have no fear, I have confirmed the reversal with my own eyes on my own microscope, on a sample I collected and prepared. There are a multitude of obviously motile sperm where they have no business being. I've been betrayed by my own ballsack, making me some kind of regenerative mutant worthy of my own case study. Lucky me!
We're terminating this miraculous pregnancy with all haste. Even if it had been a full legal person that were putting my wife through the same hell this anonymous homunculus has been putting her through for the past few weeks, I'd be trying my best to kill them too. She's been no stranger to suffering in her life, and this, in light of her condition, has managed to top the list -- she'd likely be in better shape if it were a tumor. The possibility that she could carry this to a successful completion if she wanted to is remote.
Without getting too culture-war, I consider us fortunate to live in a polity where nobody will try to gainsay her decision, and it's been enlightening to see firsthand how narrow a window there is to make it. "Medical" rather than "surgical" abortion is only reliable up to about 10 weeks, and in her case, with a long history of chronically irregular menstruation, the first 6 weeks elapsed before she was unprecedentedly "late". With our low prior on pregnancy in light of my long-confirmed successful vasectomy, it took us another two weeks to nail down that this was actually the most likely cause of the shitshow of bizarre and disabling symptoms she was experiencing. Add one more week from there to procure the actual abortifacients, and the window had almost closed.
I'll be getting a second vasectomy, but I don't know I'll ever trust it again. Life finds a fucking way.
Even I, an inveterate pro-lifer for religious reasons first, logical reasons second, applaud your decision (though despising the tragic necessity). It’s a killing in self defense, akin to shooting an armed burglar who broke into your home.
But since this is WW, not CWR, I instead wish you and your wife the best, and the best possible outcome, and a long and happy life for both of you. if you need to see someone about lingering emotions related to this, do so without shame or reproach.
Thank you. Without being religious or a pro-lifer myself, I still hoped it would never come to this, and I did take reasonable measures to try to ensure it would not.
Not being attached to a personhood-from-conception perspective, or ever that invested in the whole controversy in general, I take the normie view of regarding abortion as unfortunate, and getting more uncomfortable with it the later it occurs. Reflecting on that in light of recent events has made me more in favor of removing as many obstacles to early abortion as possible, so it's less likely to come down to a more distasteful later procedure. It seems the more people's inputs are required to authorize it, the later the ones that do happen will happen, even if fewer happen overall. I can see though how for many people with a more "principled" stance, this would be a distinction without difference, and fewer happening overall would be the overriding consideration.
I'm still glad for her sake that there wasn't some long sequence of gatekeepers to argue with about this, having just seen the person I care most for in the world consider taking her own life to get the awfulness here to stop. Thankfully it's lessened since, with some medications that would not be safe for a fetus that we were trying to preserve.
I still find it creepy that there seem to be people who are straightforwardly pro-abortion as though it's a positive good (and those are many of the voices one encounters when actually considering having one). I kind of assume those people are just overcompensating somehow, in a "signalling support for this direction". If it's not that, I don't know where they're coming from, and probably don't want to.
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