Babies, babies, love you, maybe?

I was reading my summer reading stuff. This one was "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan. It’s somewhat sad, but not enough for me to care and it’s just a bunch of fiction so, again, there’s not much there to matter to me beyond the words.

Or so I thought.

This quote here from page 248, a story from Ying-Ying St. Clair changed my mind:
"So I will tell Lena of my shame. That I was rich and pretty. I was too good for any one man. That I became abandoned goods. I will tell her that at eighteen the prettiness drained from my cheeks. That I thought of throwing myself in the lake like the other ladies of shame. And I will tell her of the baby I killed because I came to hate this man so much.

I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man’s firstborn son poured from me.
When the nurses asked what they should do with the lifeless baby, I hurled a newspaper at them and said to wrap it like a fish and throw it in the lake. My daughter thinks I do not know what it means to not want a baby."
 
I cried for nearly twenty minutes over this quote. I’ve always said that I can’t judge anyone else when it comes to the life of their unborn child, but my unexpected reaction to this has led me to believe otherwise. It hurt to have the thought in my mind that people could do that sort of thing to a child. I just… I don’t have a clue. I guess that my strong feelings about children and adoption and everything made these thoughts so difficult to handle. It hurt so much.