“Last Factory Farm to be Closed Today” screamed the homepage of her favorite news website in bold letters.
She stopped for a moment and thought about the last 17 years. No one had foreseen that it would happen so fast. Everyone was a vegan now. And she had started it, with a fucking web series that grew out of her film project at the uni. ‘The Meat Connection’ was a comedy in which all main characters were in the meat and dairy industry. They didn’t need to change reality much. They only needed to show it. It was gross enough to wake people up. Like all good art, it made people see something they had never seen before.
And yet, in all the years leading the meatless movement, she never had to make a decision as hard as the one on her mind right now. She would give birth to a disabled child in about seven months — if she chose to. And she was going to choose life. Better for the child to have a difficult life than none at all.
Then it dawned on her. She had made *that* decision before. She had chosen that no life was better for millions of cows, pigs, chickens — and members of all the other races — who would have been born to serve humanity. She always pictured herself as freeing animals from oppression, allowing the animals to roam free and live happy. Now she realized that wasn’t the alternative. They would just never be born, they’d never exist at all. An alternative she would never have chosen for herself or for her baby.