Katha Pollitt - Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights

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In memory of Lynn Schneider

19502013

as promised

Outside, snow falls in the streets

and quiet hills, and seems, in the window,

framed by the rooms 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

INTRODUCTION

I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didnt 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 ones mother for having a life outside her childs 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 mothers abortionits illegality, the fact that she didnt tell my father, the unknowability of her reasons or her feelings or the experience itselfis 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, Its the twentieth century, so were going to let you vote and go to college, and have a family and a jobnot a great job, not the one you wanted, because unfortunately that job is for menand your own charge accounts at Bonwits and Altmans 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, youll 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.

Womens lives are different nowso much so were in danger of forgetting how they used to be. Legalizing abortion didnt just save women from death and injury and fear of arrest, it didnt 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 babyJesus or her parents or her boyfriend is telling her she has to do it. But actually, she doesnt 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 welcomeindeed, is sometimes quite painfulbut that has become part of what women are.

One thing Roe v. Wade didnt do, though, was make abortion private.

Sometimes I look up from reading about the latest onslaught against abortion rightswhile Ive 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 opponentand I think, How strange. Justice Harry Blackmuns majority opinion in Roe v. Wade was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a womans 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 coverageeven though hes wrong about how these methods work. Its religionfacts dont matter, especially when the facts involve womens liberty.

Maybe Blackmuns mistake was thinking that a woman could claim privacy as a right in the first place. A mans home is his castle, but a womans body has never been wholly her own. Historically, its belonged to her nation, her community, her father, her family, her husbandin 1973, when Roe was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldnt her body belong to a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right to live and grow in her body, why shouldnt she be held legally responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean if her doctor thinks its 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. You would almost think the people who have always opposed womens independence and full participation in society were still at it. They cant push women all the way back, but they can use womens bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.