How an unplanned pregnancy during college changed the life and worldview of Maggie Gallagher, now one of the leading voices against gay marriage:
“On a mild November day, Gallagher and I are upstairs at City Bakery, near Union Square in Manhattan, where after months of requests she has agreed to meet me. As Gallagher tells it, she and the baby’s father were close; they had been together ‘on the order of one year,’ she says, so he might have been expected to stand by her. ‘My son’s father was my boyfriend at Yale,’ is how she describes their relationship. But when she told him she was pregnant, right before spring break in 1982, he vanished on her. ‘I was in his room and he had to go do something, and I was going to fly out in a couple of hours, had to get to the airport. And the last thing he said to me was, “I’ll be back in 30 minutes.” And then he wasn’t.’
“He just left her sitting in his room. And that was the end of them. When summer came, Gallagher moved home to Oregon and took some classes to finish her degree. In the fall, she gave birth to a baby boy, Patrick.”
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