Sam, this is really powerful. You ask some very heavy questions, ones that I feel like most theists just brush off because it's easier to just say, "it was God's plan" than it is to consider what it means if that's true.

While I was struggling to get pregnant (I never did), a family friend revealed she was pregnant at 14. Her family was awful. Her mother, a former addict, had two very young children with as yet undiagnosed conditions that caused dangerous behavior (it would turn out to be something very rare called tubular sclerosis). Her daughter ultimately chose to get an abortion, which given the situation was absolutely the best of few good options.

A couple of months later, her mother got pregnant again by the same man (who was married at the time, btw). She thought about going through with the pregnancy, but was talked out of it after someone asked her if that would be fair to her daughter, or wise, given her other children and the situation with the father.

Eventually, he divorced his wife and married her. Had she not had the abortion, she'd have been at risk of having another child with tubular sclerosis. The older one had to be institutionalized at 8 because of violent behavior.

Eventually, the father also began to be violent with his wife and their younger child. He had a gun, and people want her to leave him. I'm not sure if she ever did, as I no longer speak to my family.

I was already an atheist when I began trying to get pregnant. Some might say, well that's why you didn't. God didn't want an atheist to get pregnant. But that didn't fly when I had plenty of devoutly religious friends who couldn't get pregnant, either.

I have said, if I hadn't been an atheist, this experience would've made me one. A god who would allow a 14 year-old child in a highly dysfunctional and dangerous family get pregnant, one who allowed plenty of other unsuitable parents to become parents (my own included), but not people who are, at their core, decent, loving people who want to give their children the best possible odds for success, whatever that might mean, isn't one I want to believe in anyway.

Thomas and I still lived in NYC on 9/11. I went to college a few blocks from Ground Zero, but didn't have an early class that day, so I as still home, way uptown, getting ready when it happened. Our upstairs neighbor didn't come home that day. He was a firefighter. I became friendly with his widow through a series of odd events afterwards. She had a kind of strength I have rarely witnessed. But it was heartbreaking that she had to.