Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights: Reclaiming Abortion as Good for Society

203 Pages·2014·1.06 MB·English

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In memory of Lynn Schneider
1950–2013
as promised
Outside, snow falls in the streets and quiet hills, and seems, in the
window, framed by the room’s continuous greenery, to obliterate
the wide and varied world.
We half-smile, half-nod to one another.
One returns to her magazine.
One shifts gently to the right arm her sleeping newborn, unfurls the
bud of its hand.
One of us takes her turn in the inner office where she submits to the
steel table and removes from her body its stubborn wish.
We want what you want, only we have to want it more.
—Ellen Bryant Voigt
“The Wide and Varied World”
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

1 RECLAIMING ABORTION
2 WHAT DO AMERICANS THINK ABOUT ABORTION?
3 WHAT IS A PERSON?
4 ARE WOMEN PEOPLE?
5 SIX MYTHS ABOUT ABORTION
6 WHAT DO ABORTION OPPONENTS REALLY OPPOSE? (HINT: IT’S NOT JUST ABORTION)
7 CAN THERE BE A COMPROMISE ON ABORTION?
8 REFRAMING MOTHERHOOD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FURTHER READING
ALSO BY KATHA POLLITT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn’t tell me about it, but from
what I pieced together after her death from a line in her FBI file, which my
father, the old radical, had requested along with his own, it was in 1960, so like
almost all abortions back then, it was illegal. The agent who kept her file wrote
that she was in the care of a physician for gynecological problems that spring,
which I like to think was his chivalrous way of protecting her from further
investigation, but perhaps he too was in the dark and only put down what he
knew. For a while I was angry at her, the way one is angry at the dead for
keeping their secrets till it is too late to ask questions, and the way one can be
angry at one’s mother for having a life outside her child’s ken. I thought she
owed me this bit of woman-to-woman realism and honesty, instead of, or at least
in addition to, tales of the nine marriage proposals she had received by the time
she met my father, and falling in love with him at first sight, and eloping with
him three months later when she had just turned twenty-one. Knowing about her
abortion might have helped me. It might have given me a truer sense of life as a
young, very romantic woman who had no idea what was what.
When I ask myself why I have been so preoccupied with abortion rights for
so long, I wonder if learning about my mother’s abortion—its illegality, the fact
that she didn’t tell my father, the unknowability of her reasons or her feelings or
the experience itself—is part of the answer. I find myself wondering: Was
whoever performed the procedure a real doctor? Was he kind to her? Respectful?
Did he do his best not to cause pain? Did she take someone with her? I
remember her talking with her friend Judy about how another woman they knew
had “had a D&C,” which was often a euphemism for abortion back then, so
maybe her circle of women steered her to a good practitioner. Maybe her friend
Judy sat in the waiting room, if there was a waiting room, and took her home in
a taxi afterward and made her a cup of tea. I hope so. It would have been so
wrong if my tender, fragile mother had had to go through that all by herself.
What did it mean that my mother had to break the law to end a pregnancy? It
meant that America basically said to her, It’s the twentieth century, so we’re
going to let you vote and go to college, and have a family and a job—not a great
job, not the one you wanted, because unfortunately that job is for men—and your
own charge accounts at Bonwit’s and Altman’s and your own subscription to the
Heritage Book Club, but underneath all that normal, forward-looking, mid-
twentieth-century middle-class New York life is the secret underground life of
women, and that you must manage outside the law. If you are injured or die or
are trapped by the police, you’ll only have yourself to blame, because the real
reason you are here on Earth is to produce children, and you shirk that duty at
your peril. I wonder if my mother knew that her own grandmother died of an
abortion after bearing nine children, back in Russia, during the First World War,
or if her mother kept that family secret from her as she kept her secret from me.
Women’s lives are different now—so much so we’re in danger of forgetting
how they used to be. Legalizing abortion didn’t just save women from death and
injury and fear of arrest, it didn’t just make it possible for women to commit to
education and work and free them from shotgun marriages and too many kids. It
changed how women saw themselves: as mothers by choice, not fate. As long as
abortion is available to her, even a woman who thinks it is tantamount to murder
is making a choice when she keeps a pregnancy. She may feel like she has to
have that baby—Jesus or her parents or her boyfriend is telling her she has to do
it. But actually, she doesn’t have to do it. She is choosing to have that baby. Roe
v. Wade gave women a kind of existential freedom that is not always welcome—
indeed, is sometimes quite painful—but that has become part of what women
are.
One thing Roe v. Wade didn’t do, though, was make abortion private.
Sometimes I look up from reading about the latest onslaught against abortion
rights—while I’ve been writing this introduction, Louisiana passed laws like
those that are forcing dozens of Texas clinics to close, Missouri legislators
passed a seventy-two-hour waiting period requirement for its sole remaining
clinic, and a Montana health center that performed abortions as part of a family
practice was trashed beyond repair, allegedly by the son of a prominent local
abortion opponent—and I think, How strange. Justice Harry Blackmun’s
majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts
of a woman’s body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never
been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to the five
conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her employer. If the CEO of
the Hobby Lobby crafts store chain, a secular business, decides that emergency
contraception and IUDs are “abortifacients” and banned by God, he is entitled to
keep them out of her health coverage—even though he’s wrong about how these
methods work. It’s religion—facts don’t matter, especially when the facts
involve women’s liberty.
Maybe Blackmun’s mistake was thinking that a woman could claim privacy
as a right in the first place. A man’s home is his castle, but a woman’s body has
never been wholly her own. Historically, it’s belonged to her nation, her
community, her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was
decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn’t her body belong to
a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body,
why shouldn’t she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a
cesarean if her doctor thinks it’s best or be charged with a crime if she uses
illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like this have been
happening all over the country for some time now. Denying women the right to
end a pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for conduct during
pregnancy, and even if not punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014 a law
was proposed in the Kansas state legislature that would require doctors to report
every miscarriage, no matter how early in pregnancy.1 You would almost think
the people who have always opposed women’s independence and full
participation in society were still at it. They can’t push women all the way back,
but they can use women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.
That thought gives rise to a wish. Surely, I find myself daydreaming, there is
something, some substance already in common use, that women could drink
after sex or at the end of the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no
one the wiser. Something you could buy at the supermarket, or maybe several
things you could mix together, items so safe and so ordinary they could never be