It's a jungle out there

Ugh. What a disgrace for a man. H/t pro-woman, pro-wife

Greg Bruell and his girlfriend of a year and a half, Sandra Hedrick, had a pact. “We agreed that if we got pregnant, we’d terminate because we were not in a stable family unit,” Hedrick says. Or as Bruell more starkly puts it, “I resumed sexual relations with her on the condition that were birth control to fail, she’d abort without waffling.”

“Resumed,” because nine months ear­lier Hedrick had conceived a child with Bruell and the couple decided to end that pregnancy. Or rather, he decided, and she went along. Their relationship was too rocky—a series of breakups followed by passionate reunions—for them to become parents together, Bruell argued. Plus, both were still in the process of finalizing di­vorces, and he was a newly single father struggling to balance his needs against those of his eight-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. Bruell wanted to steady their destabilized worlds before jumping into fatherhood anew.

A dead ringer for Woody Harrelson, with penetrating blue eyes, an athletic body splashed with freckles, and a diminishing crop of strawberry blond hair, Bruell wasn’t one to take becoming a dad lightly. Perversely, considering his new situation, he’d waged a two-year campaign—complete with “charts and graphs”—to persuade his former wife, Pam, to have their daughter and son. “Pam wasn’t sure she could balance her career with parenting,” Bruell says of his biology-professor ex (who seconded his version of events), “so the agreement was that I’d be the stay-at-home dad.” When their first child was born in 2001, Bruell quit his job as a software executive and, buttressed by a trust fund from his grandfather’s fragrance company, dedicated himself to parenting full-time.

Hedrick, a petite 39-year-old whose lively blue eyes, long blond hair, and curvy figure recall something of the high school cheerleader she once was, also already had a child, a five-year-old girl, and was still untying the emotional knots of her seven-year marriage. Her reaction to the pregnancy, however, had been one of “love, hope, happiness, and an overwhelming feeling that the baby was meant to exist.” But Greg’s logic and unwavering certainty that the baby was not meant to be ultimately carried the day for her. Still, Hedrick admits, “If Greg wasn’t beside me on the table, I don’t think I would have gone through with it.”

It gets worse.

Shudder.