| I’ve
wrestled with the language of the abortion debate all
my female life. I grew up as birth control became available, and as
abortion became legal. This changing landscape required that I think
about my stand on the issue starting from the time I reached puberty.
I used to imagine, in covert dialogues with myself, what I would do
if I were to get “knocked up,” and would I go on the pill
for a guy— all of that. I secretly read my older sister’s
pulp novels about “girls in trouble” to inform my views.
Thinking about these fictional dilemmas no doubt helped me avoid the
real life ones. Stealing into my sister’s room to read her voluminous Our Bodies, Our Selves did as well. I understood how it all
worked, what sex might mean, how it might feel, and how to act responsibly
many years before I needed and used that knowledge— all because
the cultural debate was hot. Ralph Reed was on TV talking about abortion
as birth control, the Catholic Church was echoing its eternal opposition
to contraception. My mother explained why some Catholic families were
large ones, how other religions viewed conception, birth, and the
life of the mother. Never, ever have a baby at a Catholic hospital,
she warned me. If they had to choose between your life and the baby’s,
they would choose the baby’s life. The new baby was more vital
to the world than the ailing mother; a motherless child was hope and
a failing woman was damned, anyway. Issues of sex and a woman’s right to control her body were
all around me growing up, sometimes in painful relief – tragedy
set against a completely serene suburban sky. My sister was raped
during her first year away at college. Big news, but it was kept
quiet. Subsequent history led me to know that my sister never forgot
her attack, and thereafter entered a world of confused promiscuity—
one fueled, in part, by sexual abuse during childhood. And although
I don’t know when or the exact circumstances, I do know that
she had at least two abortions. Though she loved children and probably
agonized over what she had to do, she knew she would be violated
by a pregnancy she didn’t want. In this context, I learned
that consenting to childbirth, to becoming a mother, was much like
consenting to sex — it had to be something a body affirmed.
My sister knew she had to care for herself, her aching self, become
well and have a life of her own before she could mother any child.
Then there was my best friend. She was younger than I was, but
she was speeding ahead of me in so many ways. She was smart, and
quick, easily mastering any subject matter in school and out in
the adult world. She met an older guy, like way older— like
today he would be considered a child molester older. I never liked
him. They dated for a long time and then one day I figured out that
they’d done it. Maybe it was that day at the park up on the
jungle gym— where we talked about the wonders of our bodies,
how guys made us feel, what guys liked, what was right for us—
and blow jobs.
I loved my friend. Our devotion to one another strained at the
introduction of boyfriends, but we tried to stay close. One day,
in the restroom she told me she’d had an abortion. She was
fourteen. I was furious with her boyfriend and said so to her face,
but I told her how happy I was that she’d had it. Her life
was worth more to me than an imaginary baby’s.
I never asked myself then if she knew what she was stopping…
was it a Life with a capital “L” or just a little bit
of life, dependant solely on the unformed life of the mother? Roe
v. Wade told us that life begins not at conception, but at the age
a fetus can live independently. Years later, I noted well when my
own perinatalogist, called my baby a child from the beginning
of my routine sonograms. That is what my children were to me then,
growing into life-beings, soon to be babies, soon to be children.
Always a child— a word that when my daughter was
growing in my womb gave her a heaviness that came to rest on the
total unimaginability of her loss. At some risk to lose the pregnancy,
I wasn’t ready to lose her, and Thank God I didn’t.
But that was when I was as far away from 14 as I had ever been.
I could not have felt that way, had not the capacity or the ability
to feel that way at 14. You could ask why the urge toward sex comes
so long before the capacity to truly nurture and provide. You could
make another bumper sticker, “Another Mother Against The Adolescent
Sex Drive,” “Another Mother Who Waited.”
Knowing about Roe, and
about options for birth control, allowed me to think critically
about myself and my life; it afforded me control. I was not a pushover
for any wink and a promise, any itch that I had to scratch. My time
was my own and I was in control. I made choices about who, where,
when and what I would use to protect myself when the time came.
I felt empowered by society to care for myself. The right to
an abortion never meant that I would rush to terminate an unwanted
pregnancy. It just meant that I could, that I could consent to what
would grow inside me based on my beliefs, values, the status of
my own capacity to mother— no one else could make that call.
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