MULTIPLICITY

The Bizarre Story of How My Mom Tried to Terminate My Cat’s Pregnancy

I was ten years old

*Trigger Warning: Discusses abortion.*

I’ll never forget the episode of Animaniacs: Rita the cat finds a passel of abandoned kittens and deliberates whether to become a mom.

I can still hear the lyrics of her song, as she weighs the pros and cons of independence — and whether or not she cared to parent anybody at all.

I was in fifth grade — old enough to appreciate nuance — and firmly pro-choice. But I was surprised to notice that I’d been rooting for Rita to keep those babies.

The question is, why?

I’ll be clear: I’ve never terminated a pregnancy and do not know that anguish. Anyway, abortion and relinquishment of dependents have less in common than Yakko, Wakko, and Dot had with the real-life counterparts of whatever-the-fuck animals they were supposed to cartoon-ily represent. Still, responsibility, “choice” versus “life” (and similar euphemisms), bodily autonomy, and other themes are shared.

And everybody — even a Warner-Brothers character that probably wasn’t even singing about termination of pregnancy — is both right and at least a little bit wrong about this issue.

“We don’t…do that here,” the vet said. We were in Northern Virginia — generally a somewhat conservative place. She stopped palpating our tortoiseshell calico’s abdomen and looked pointedly up at Mom.

At the beginning of the visit, I hadn’t been savvy to what my mother was suggesting. But Mom’s unenthusiasm-turned-anger broke my warm cushion of denial. No wonder my dad had encouraged me to go to that appointment, had gone out of his way to point out that kittens, kittens! would be fun.

Was Dad’s tactic fair? Would Dad be the one to take mama cat and her babies to the vet — or find them caring homes?

I was ten, and a different vet may have had another valid answer for my mom. There are millions of pets without homes. We destroy 2.7 million animals a year at shelters. Did he care at all?

In the early aughts there was a columnist and editor for the State News, a student-led newspaper at Michigan State University. Rishi Kundi was his name. He summarized the complexity of caring for the individual woman while having regard for “life.”

I cannot find his exact words, but as Kundi signed off on his final contributions to the newspaper before heading off to medical school, he wrote something like this —

A fetus is like nothing else in the universe. [He/She/] It is not a person, yet [he/she/] it is a person. It is not “alive,” but it isn’t not alive, either.

Nobody — and I mean no. body. — has the definitive answers.

There was another strong point from Kundi’s editorial that still speaks to me. I’ll paraphrase —

…and learn to spell, you illiterate motherfuckers.

And there it was, the motherfucking wisdom he wished to see in the motherfucking world.

Yoshi, our calico, was pregnant.

That was the summer I overheard my mother — an OB/GYN nurse — sobbing as she told my dad about having assisted with a later-term abortion that day. Not on a cat. Never had I felt so helpless as I did in the moments that followed.

Mom didn’t say much to me. But as she came downstairs she felt the need to explain why she’d been so upset: the remains of the [insert appropriate terminology for fetus or baby, depending on your own politics] reminded her of me.

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