Starr went to the clinic on Friday to have an abortion.  She's 16 and the situation is pretty bad.  She went by herself and despite putting on a brave face, she was terrified.  She can't have an abortion in Pennsylvania (where she lives) without her parents knowing so she rode a bike to the bus station and took the bus to a clinic in New Jersey.  Her parents don't even know she's had sex and they certainly don't know she's pregnant.  They've already forbidden her from seeing her boyfriend and her father even threatened to kill him.  As it turns out, she didn't go through with the abortion after all.  Moments before the procedure was to begin, her boyfriend showed up at the clinic...

Well it should be - it's a soap opera.  But "One Life to Live" is dealing with some very real-life issues in the story of 16-year-old Starr Manning's pregnancy.  And one thing that's been made quite clear to Starr, and by extension to her fans, is that once there's an unplanned pregnancy, none of the options are easy.

Richard Russo, the world's greatest living novelist (sorry, it's a measurable fact, not an opinion), recently penned an op-ed piece for The Washington Post.  In the piece Russo imagined what might be in a novel he would write about the Eliot Spitzer train wreck.  In the piece Russo says:

Fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught.  And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent.  For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly.  He will swerve at the last moment (emphasis mine).  The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him."