Opera raised me. My grandfather, the man who gave me his name, lived inside those stories. He knew every line Verdi ever wrote, every tear Puccini pulled from the air, every twist Bizet threw at you. At night, he gathered us kids around the old record player and poured those tales of love and sacrifice straight into our hearts.

Out of everything, Les Contes d’Hoffmann hit him hardest: one broken poet, three women who shattered him. He laughed when he said it, but his eyes stayed serious.

He always told us that the doll Olympia, one of the characters in Les Contes, carried the cruelest test for any soprano. That mechanical aria rips the voice apart and puts the soul on display. He was right. The first time I truly heard it, years after he left this earth, the notes felt like glass breaking inside my ribs.

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He died. We left Cuba for America. Rock and R&B rushed in to fill the empty spaces, but opera never left. Stevie Nicks became one of my favorites as a teen in the seventies, that raspy wind-through-the-pines voice that made you believe heartbreak could sound holy.

Much later, hunting down every Olympia I could find just to feel my grandfather close again, I stumbled on Natalie Dessay. Her high notes cut straight through time, clean and eternal, like they started somewhere outside her body and only borrowed her throat on the way out.

Two women. Two voices I loved before I ever knew their stories offstage.

Stevie reached the peak every musician dreams of. Fleetwood Mac ruled the world. Then she found out a child was growing inside her. She ended the pregnancy. She said it plain, almost casual, the way you talk about cutting your hair or getting a new tattoo. The band, the tours, the legend, all of it would die if she kept the baby, she believed. “There would have been no Fleetwood Mac,” she told the world, and the world nodded like that settled everything.

I carry no anger when I repeat her words. I carry only sorrow. A woman looked at the life she made and decided her music mattered more.

Somewhere, a heart stopped before it ever heard applause.

Somewhere, a voice never learned its first word.

The stages got brighter, the records sold millions, but one song never made it to the setlist.

Now picture this.

La Scala, Milan. Natalie Dessay steps out as Olympia. Seven months pregnant. The gown flows around the curve of her belly like it belongs there. She sings those merciless coloratura runs, every note perfect, every breath shared with the child inside her. Two hearts beat under the lights.

When the final high note explodes and the doll “breaks,” the theater erupts. The toughest audience in the grandest house stood in cheer and applause for what seemed an eternity. People stood and roared not just for the voice, but for the miracle standing before them, art and life refusing to choose between themselves. And best of all, the YouTube video preserves the moments forever.

She walked off that stage fuller than she walked on.

I tell you these two stories side by side because they ask the same question we keep pretending has only one answer. One woman believed a child would kill the dream.

One woman carried the dream and the child at the same time.

One left the stage lighter.

One left the stage carrying the future.

Our culture now keeps telling women they can have everything until a second heartbeat shows up. Then the culture’s whispers start: pick one. The world says motherhood dims the light. Natalie Dessay proved the light can burn twice as bright when a woman refuses to dim either flame.

Some choices ring through concert halls forever. Some choices leave only the echo of what might have been. I still listen to both voices. One reminds me how high a woman can climb. The other reminds me of what some women are willing to leave behind on the way up.

My grandfather would have understood. He spent his life chasing stories about love that costs everything. Turns out some of the saddest ones happen offstage, in the quiet rooms where no one claps.

LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.

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