That’s when it happened, on one of my nights out. I went to my usual place at Keresztes Square, a club frequented by local office drones and yuppie types. I ran into Erika from accounting. We’d had a series of one night stands, but those nights spent together never evolved into anything permanent. Still, we started chatting again because I hadn’t seen her for a while, and I wasn’t against one more night of entanglement. I got her a glass of rosé. When I set the glass on the table she looked into my eyes and said that she’d had an abortion a couple of weeks ago.

Last time we’d fucked without a condom. We had a mutual trust in each other, plus we were high, neither of us cared. Of course when I say there was a mutual trust I mean that I trusted her to have an abortion if she got pregnant. My trust was well founded, apparently.

I asked her if it was mine. Erika shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s been taken care of.’

I have no right to judge women, what they do with their bodies or their lives, but at that moment I felt like something had been taken away from me, the possibility of a stable future. Had Erika filed a paternity suit I’m sure I would have thought differently, but still, a gaping hole had opened up in my heart, or maybe it had always been there, but now I could see it, now I could feel it.

I asked her why she would do such a thing to herself. She smiled bitterly.

‘Why, would you have raised it?’ she asked. ‘Would you have become an ideal father? Would you have left your job for a kid?’

I wouldn’t, of course. But a woman has to. After all, their bodies were designed for this purpose. They were sacrificed by life from the very moment of their birth. They were assigned an express purpose: to give birth to new beings just like themselves or me. This is of course just my personal opinion.

Erika shook her head in annoyance.

‘You men,’ she said, ‘you just couldn’t give a fuck, could you? A child doesn’t spoil anything for you, but it nullifies our lives. A child is the multiplier,’ she explained, like the economist she was, ‘and the value of the multiplier here is zero. Whatever a woman is worth in this equation, the child multiplies her by zero. We become zeroes, while you, you just fuck around more.’

I frowned.

‘Why would it be different for men?’ I asked.

‘Because men aren’t worth a damn to begin with,’ she answered.