When we found out that my girlfriend was pregnant, it was pretty much the worst time possible for us. She was unemployed, and I had recently gotten out of the Army. But we had been talking about getting married anyway, and though we were terrified, we decided to try to do the right thing and get married and have the baby. Since neither of us had a job, we obviously didn't have employer-provided health care. But I had a little money saved up from my time in the service, and we were pretty sure I could get a low-wage but serviceable job fairly quickly.

We began looking into buying an individual health care plan that would cover maternity -- only to discover that such a thing is a practical impossibility. For the amount that we could afford to pay each month, we would have been unable to meet the deductible on any plan that would cover maternity (most don't).

On the other hand, when we looked into the state plans in California, we realized that state aid (Medi-Cal) would force us to sell one of our cars (greatly restricting the number of jobs we could reasonably apply for) as well as spend our entire meager savings on health care before the state would help. In essence, we would be required to bankrupt ourselves. We were too "wealthy" for state aid, even though neither of us had an income or health insurance.

(We did consider not getting married and pretending that she was single and unattached, in which case the state was more lenient, but this seemed fraudulent, and it would also have meant that if I WERE able to get a job with benefits, we would have had to scramble to get married.)

My wife and I are both college-educated people with skills, and we are fortunate to have a few avenues left open to us. I have gotten a $600-a-week job, which is about enough to keep us eating and indoors in Southern California, but it has no benefits. My wife is still looking for work. In the meantime, I have joined the Army Reserve in the hope that we will be able to buy into Tricare, the military health care system, before we have the baby. We both feel very fortunate that I am still able-bodied and qualified to join the military; otherwise, we probably would have felt that the responsible thing for two unemployed people with no health insurance to do would be to have an abortion.

I feel things have worked out for us so far, but we are hanging by a thread -- one bad turn would ruin us. And I don't understand why we have a health care system that incentivizes abortion, punishes people for not destroying themselves financially, and penalizes marriage.