Three Abortions

Speech delivered at Lexington Reproductive Freedom Rally, October 1, 2021

This speech was given pre-Dobbs.

1.

1964: Chicago, Illinois, in a women’s dorm at the University of Chicago. Those were the days before co-ed dorms—we couldn’t even have a man visiting our rooms without the door ajar—and it was also a time when many of us were on scholarship, beneficiaries of the university’s attempt to reach buried “talent” throughout rural and inner-city America. I sat huddled in extreme anxiety with a small group of 18-year-old women as we waited for our friend to return from her abortion, performed somewhere in the dark, back streets of downtown Chicago. We’d all heard the stories of women bleeding to death, or their insides damaged for life. My friend, thankfully, wasn’t one of those. But she did return pale, shaken, and in pain, and there was no doctor or nurse to follow up during the days that followed. Student health? No way. Abortion was illegal. We were all sworn to secrecy.

2

It was 1977 and I was a graduate student, having finally gotten my BA after two periods of dropping out, a disastrous first marriage, a nervous breakdown, and serious doubts that I was cut out for graduate school.

I got pregnant. I loved being pregnant. I slept and ate without my habitual anxiety, and I felt protected from my lifelong superstition—taught to me by my father--that if I was too happy something bad would surely befall me. As in the Carol King song, I felt like a “natural woman” for the first time. So much in me wanted to stay pregnant, to experience all of it, and to be a mother that the decision to have an abortion, made with the help of my friends, sisters, and therapist from student health, was a painful struggle for me. 

I went back and forth. But when, in the end, I realized I was in no position to raise a child, the experience was unlike what my friend had suffered in 1964. Roe had gone into effect in 1973, and the forces of opposition were not yet as brazen as they’ve become. In the sidewalk outside the clinic, there were no signs and shouts accusing me of being a baby-killer. I wasn’t required to look at an ultra-sound or hear the fetus’s heartbeat. I didn’t have to provide permission from anyone or wait a prescribed period of time. The doctors and nurses were professional and caring—and they followed up throughout the weeks that followed, making sure there were no complications. 

Afterwards I cried. I was also relieved. And here’s the thing: Because it was I who made the decision, it was I who faced the seriousness of it. This was no “choice” of what pair of jeans to put on. It was hard. But it was precisely the fact that it was my responsibility—not the government’s prohibition—that enabled it to be an informed choice. 

3.

October 2021. The young women lives in Ohio, she is over two months pregnant. Although a 2019 “heartbeat bill” has been enjoined (that is, “stayed”) this young woman is still open to prosecution under the law of several districts, and if the injunction is vacated on appeal or the Supreme Court overrules Roe, any provider who performs her abortion will be subject to punishment or prosecution. 

She doesn’t know yet what she will do. If she decides to have an abortion she may have difficulty finding a place to have one, as the number of abortion clinics in Ohio has declined over the years—as it has in many states—from 55 in 1982, to less than a dozen in 2021. And although there are 28 planned parenthood clinics, only 3 offer abortions.

If she finds a clinic, she is likely, on the car or bus ride to the clinic, to encounter a church graveyard crowded with crosses marking the bodies of aborted fetuses. And when she arrives at the clinic, she may well have to make her way through a gauntlet of protestors like Rachel Ann Jackson, 71, who also vandalized a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbus, Ohio, with the message "SATAN DEN OF BABY KILLERS..." Jackson was sentenced to probation, with the judge citing her struggle with serious mental illness as a mitigating factor. 

I don’t know what this young woman will decide, but whatever her decision is, it will be made in the cold, punishing shadow of a legislature that, since the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh, has—like Kentucky—grown bolder and more strategic in its efforts to take that choice away from her. They have done this both openly, but also with stealth and wicked cleverness, and a great deal of hypocrisy. 

*************************************

Make no mistake:

For the politicians leading this effort, it has little to do with respect for life (not women’s lives or their children’s lives, not even fetal life), but is part of a broad agenda intent on dismantling all the gains in equality and social justice made since the sixties and seventies. Those were the decades when Civil Rights, Women’s Liberation, and Gay Rights began to insist that the country, its laws, and its culture were not owned by those who felt it was rightfully theirs by God’s decree. Since then, these movements have expanded, redefined themselves, become more inclusive—and more vocal. But so too, have those who felt betrayed and angry. They’ve watched, and strategized, and made affiliation with religion, with talk radio and Fox News, and with a political party that saw demographics might soon make them obsolete. And when the most promising opportunity emerged—in the figure of a demonic idiot/genius who knew the magic words— “You don’t have to take this anymore”—you made him president. And he appointed judges to do your bidding.

Make no mistake:

This is not a struggle between those who value “life” and those who want to give women “choice.” Yes, the language of “choice” has been with us for a long time. But the fact is that we occupy higher ground. We occupy the ground of the ongoing struggle for equality and social justice. “Choice” became our brand defensively, as we insisted, against those who would portray us as casually scraping embryos out of our bodies, that we were not “pro-abortion.” But make no mistake: those who want to deny us reproductive freedom are in favor of choice, too. The difference is that they insist on the government making the choice, rather than the girls and women most affected. And with that insistence they deprive us, not only of “choice” over our reproductive lives and all that entails for our ability to care for ourselves, our families, and future generations, but of our full equality under the law. 

Make no mistake:

What is at stake is the very personhood of pregnant women. Our legal system values bodily autonomy so highly that no one has ever been forced to take a simple blood test—even when the life of another hangs in the balance. It’s also a culture in which many see the mere wearing of an external facial barrier to the spread of disease as a threat to their freedom. Yet centuries of ideology and legal decisions have nullified bodily autonomy—and in the most invasive ways—when it comes to pregnant women, centuries that have seen our proper role as that of fetal incubator rather than human subject. And every woman — regardless of political affiliation, whatever her personal ethics or religious scruples regarding abortion — should feel outraged about that. 

You care so much about beating hearts? Well, our hearts are beating too, and the rhythm is loud and clear, both in those who have fought this fight before and those who are newly impassioned and angry. We “elders” will help feed that passion and anger, we will cheer you and hug you, and support you as you declare along with us: 

ENOUGH. ENOUGH. ENOUGH.