Disclaimer: Nothing's mine. It's all Dick Wolf's.
This is my post-Choice oneshot. I was slightly dissatisfied that the episode didn't show many of Olivia's thoughts about Jennifer and the potential child and this is what I imagine her to have thought. Enjoy.
I feel for Jennifer, I honestly do, which is why I'm going to bat for her on this. Maybe the courts don't have the right to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies and maybe I'm just being ridiculous. But much as she tries to deny it, Jennifer is an alcoholic, and she needs help.
My mother was an alcoholic and my childhood was a nightmare. What if someone had helped my mother and helped her break her addiction before she'd had me? I might have had a decent upbringing then, with my mother loving me and taking care of me rather than the other way around.
I know that if Jennifer doesn't get help, her child will meet the same fate. She will walk home from school every day with a growing sense of trepidation as she nears her house, wondering not if her mother will be drinking – that's a given – but just how much. She will wonder if she's going to come home to find her mother passed out on the couch or in her bedroom with a man, or worse, if she'll come home to find her mother in a drunken rage. If that's the case, her mother will beat her to the point of bruises that she'll have to carefully cover up the next day because of her shame.
My mother never remembered, but I always did.
It wouldn't be fair to deny the baby a childhood, even if it is just a fetus. There are already too many abused and neglected kids, and is it really reasonable to bring a child into this world, just to deny them a childhood? As a child, my existence was so miserable that even as a little girl, I seriously considered ending it. No one loved me. Not my mother, not my father, not my teachers, not my friends. I had no friends.
Sometimes, I used to pretend that my life with my mother was just a bad dream or only temporary. I pretended that one day, my father would come and whisk me away, bring me back to his fully formed family with a brother and a real mother and show me off, boasting, "Look, this is my daughter and I love her so much. Now she's going to live with me forever and I'm never going to let her go."
That was how I got through the horrible nights where I would lie on my side so as not to disturb the series of welts that had accumulated on my back. That was how I got through every day at school when the kids teased me mercilessly. That was how I got through the days where I had to stay home from school so I could sit with my mother and hold the bucket while she vomited.
So, I wonder, is it really so wrong to ask Jennifer to stop? After all, it's to protect her child.
Hope you liked it. Please review; they make my day!