MIAMI, September 3, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Wedding announcements often include details like the bride's dress, the wedding party, how the couple met, and the romantic proposal that took her breath away. But the New York Times' announcement of Miami Heat forward Udonis Haslem and Faith Rein's wedding contained an unusual tidbit: the happy couple's previous abortion.
A writer at the feminist website Jezebel.com calls that inclusion a sign of “real social progress.”
On Friday, the Times published “Taking Their Very Sweet Time,” which chronicled the NBA couple's 14 years from meeting to marriage.
The two became a couple at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Faith, a track star and deep thinker, grew up in a stable , suburban Virginia home, the child of “a black Baptist mother and a Jewish father.”
Haslem, the captain of the Miami Heat, calls himself “a ghetto kid” whose mother never married his father.
The odd couple began dating seriously in May 2001. By spring 2002, she became pregnant.
“I am not a huge fan of abortion, but we both had sports careers, plus we could not financially handle a baby,” Haslem told the Times.
Haslem was already paying support for a child he fathered during high school, Kedonis, now 14.
Rain remembered that “Udonis appreciated that I was willing to have an abortion.” She said her abortion made her love Haslem even more, because she “found him caring, supportive, nurturing.”
“I saw another side of him during that difficult time and fell deeply in love,” she told the Times. “He had a big heart.”
The two had a son, Josiah, in January 2007, before tying the knot in a “nondenominational seaside ceremony” at a Palm Springs resort on August 24.
Doug Barry at Jezebel wrote that the story's forthright treatment of abortion – as well as cohabitation and illegitimacy – signals that “a vast majority of Times readers (at the very least) recognize that having an abortion is a completely legitimate option.”
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The couple “almost took a detour deep into parenthood,” he wrote. But some single women “just aren’t ready to sacrifice their futures to the altar of devoted parenthood.”
That decision should be “made by people based on their own priorities and not some imaginary standard of adulthood imposed by a pious, anti-choice finger-waggers.”
Barry also said journalists' coverage of homosexuality has helped undermine the permanence of marriage, as well as its heterosexual requirement.
“When same-sex marriage doesn’t merit the 'same-sex' modifier, for instance, in most mainstream news publications, it’s a signal that most members of our society think beyond the man + woman = monogamous married couple for ever and ever paradigm,” he wrote.
Barry called this a token of “real social progress.”