By Frederica Mathewes-Green
Sunday, January 22, 2016
At the time of the Roe
v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth,
feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a
semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist
“underground newspaper” Off Our Backs.
As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper
sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.”
The first issue of Off
Our Backs after the Roe decision
included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the
collective criticizing the decision. It didn’t go far enough, she said, because
it allowed states to restrict abortion in the third trimester. The Supreme
Court should not meddle in what should be decided between the woman and her
doctor. She should be able to choose abortion through all nine months of
pregnancy.
But, at the time, we didn’t have much understanding of
what abortion was. We knew nothing of
fetal development. We consistently termed the fetus “a blob of tissue,” and
that’s just how we pictured it — an undifferentiated mucous-like blob, not
recognizable as human or even as alive. It would be another 15 years of so
before pregnant couples could show off sonograms of their unborn babies, shocking
us with the obvious humanity of the unborn.
We also thought, back then, that few abortions would ever
be done. It’s a grim experience, going through an abortion, and we assumed a
woman would choose one only as a last resort. We were fighting for that “last
resort.” We had no idea how common the procedure would become; today, one in
every five pregnancies ends in abortion.
Nor could we have imagined how high abortion numbers
would climb. In the 43 years since Roe v.
Wade, there have been 59 million abortions. It’s hard even to grasp a
number that big. Twenty years ago, someone told me that, if the names of all
those lost babies were inscribed on a wall, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
the wall would have to stretch for 50 miles. It’s 20 years later now, and that
wall would have to stretch twice as far. But no names could be written on it;
those babies had no names.
We expected that abortion would be rare. What we didn’t
realize was that, once abortion becomes available, it becomes the most
attractive option for everyone around
the pregnant woman. If she has an abortion, it’s like the pregnancy never
existed. No one is inconvenienced. It doesn’t cause trouble for the father of
the baby, or her boss, or the person in charge of her college scholarship. It
won’t embarrass her mom and dad.
Abortion is like a funnel; it promises to solve all the
problems at once. So there is significant pressure on a woman to choose
abortion, rather than adoption or parenting.
A woman who had had an abortion told me, “Everyone around
me was saying they would ‘be there for me’ if I had the abortion, but no one
said they’d ‘be there for me’ if I had the baby.” For everyone around the
pregnant woman, abortion looks like the sensible choice. A woman who determines
instead to continue an unplanned pregnancy looks like she’s being foolishly
stubborn. It’s like she’s taken up some unreasonable hobby. People think, If
she would only go off and do this one thing, everything would be fine.
But that’s an illusion. Abortion can’t really “turn back
the clock.” It can’t push the rewind button on life and make it so she was
never pregnant. It can make it easy for everyone around the woman to forget the pregnancy, but the woman herself may
struggle. When she first sees the positive pregnancy test she may feel, in a
panicky way, that she has to get rid of it as fast as possible. But life
stretches on after abortion, for months and years — for many long nights — and
all her life long she may ponder the irreversible choice she made.
This issue gets presented as if it’s a tug of war between
the woman and the baby. We see them as mortal enemies, locked in a fight to the
death. But that’s a strange idea, isn’t it? It must be the first time in
history when mothers and their own children have been assumed to be at war.
We’re supposed to picture the child attacking her, trying to destroy her hopes
and plans, and picture the woman grateful for the abortion, since it rescued
her from the clutches of her child.
If you were in charge of a nature preserve and you
noticed that the pregnant female mammals were trying to miscarry their
pregnancies, eating poisonous plants or injuring themselves, what would you do?
Would you think of it as a battle between the pregnant female and her unborn
and find ways to help those pregnant animals miscarry? No, of course not. You
would immediately think, “Something must be really wrong in this environment.”
Something is creating intolerable stress, so much so that animals would rather
destroy their own offspring than bring them into the world. You would strive to
identify and correct whatever factors were causing this stress in the animals.
The same thing goes for the human animal. Abortion gets
presented to us as if it’s something women want; both pro-choice and pro-life
rhetoric can reinforce that idea. But women do this only if all their other
options look worse. It’s supposed to be “her choice,” yet so many women say, “I
really didn’t have a choice.”
I changed my opinion on abortion after I read an article
in Esquire magazine, way back in
1976. I was home from grad school, flipping through my dad’s copy, and came
across an article titled “What I Saw at the Abortion.” The author, Richard
Selzer, was a surgeon, and he was in favor of abortion, but he’d never seen
one. So he asked a colleague whether, next time, he could go along.
Selzer described seeing the patient, 19 weeks pregnant,
lying on her back on the table. (That is unusually late; most abortions are
done by the tenth or twelfth week.) The doctor performing the procedure
inserted a syringe into the woman’s abdomen and injected her womb with a
prostaglandin solution, which would bring on contractions and cause a
miscarriage. (This method isn’t used anymore, because too often the baby
survived the procedure — chemically burned and disfigured, but clinging to
life. Newer methods, including those called “partial birth abortion” and
“dismemberment abortion,” more reliably ensure death.)
After injecting the hormone into the patient’s womb, the
doctor left the syringe standing upright on her belly. Then, Selzer wrote, “I
see something other than what I expected here. . . . It is the hub of the
needle that is in the woman’s belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to
the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing line nibbled by
a sunfish.”
He realized he was seeing the fetus’s desperate fight for
life. And as he watched, he saw the movement of the syringe slow down and then
stop. The child was dead. Whatever else an unborn child does not have, he has
one thing: a will to live. He will fight to defend his life.
The last words in Selzer’s essay are, “Whatever else is
said in abortion’s defense, the vision of that other defense [i.e., of the
child defending its life] will not vanish from my eyes. And it has happened
that you cannot reason with me now. For what can language do against the truth
of what I saw?”
The truth of what he saw disturbed me deeply. There I
was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer
that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence. Well, this sure
looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece
of my feminism? How could I think it was wrong to execute homicidal criminals,
wrong to shoot enemies in wartime, but all right to kill our own sons and
daughters?
For that was another disturbing thought: Abortion means
killing not strangers but our own children, our own flesh and blood. No matter
who the father, every child aborted is that woman’s own son or daughter, just
as much as any child she will ever bear.
We had somehow bought the idea that abortion was
necessary if women were going to rise in their professions and compete in the
marketplace with men. But how had we come to agree that we will sacrifice our
children, as the price of getting ahead? When does a man ever have to choose
between his career and the life of his child?
Once I recognized the inherent violence of abortion, none
of the feminist arguments made sense. Like the claim that a fetus is not really
a person because it is so small.
Well, I’m only 5 foot 1. Women, in general, are smaller than men. Do we really
want to advance a principle that big people have more value than small people?
That if you catch them before they’ve reached a certain size, it’s all right to
kill them?
What about the child who is “unwanted”? It was a basic
premise of early feminism that women should not base their sense of worth on
whether or not a man “wants” them. We are valuable simply because we are
members of the human race, regardless of any other person’s approval. Do we
really want to say that “unwanted” people might as well be dead? What about a
woman who is “wanted” when she’s young and sexy but less so as she gets older?
At what point is it all right to terminate her?
The usual justification for abortion is that the unborn
is not a “person.” It’s said that “Nobody knows when life begins.” But that’s
not true; everybody knows when life — a new individual human life — gets
started. It’s when the sperm dissolves in the egg. That new single cell has a
brand-new DNA, never before seen in the world. If you examined through a
microscope three cells lined up — the newly fertilized ovum, a cell from the father,
and a cell from the mother — you would say that, judging from the DNA, the
cells came from three different people.
When people say the unborn is “not a person” or “not a
life” they mean that it has not yet grown or gained abilities that arrive later
in life. But there’s no agreement about which abilities should be
determinative. Pro-choice people don’t even agree with each other. Obviously,
law cannot be based on such subjective criteria. If it’s a case where the
question is “Can I kill this?” the answer must be based on objective medical
and scientific data. And the fact is, an unborn child, from the very first
moment, is a new human individual. It has the three essential characteristics
that make it “a human life”: It’s alive and growing, it is composed entirely of
human cells, and it has unique DNA. It’s a person, just like the rest of us.
Abortion indisputably ends a human life. But this loss is
usually set against the woman’s need to have an abortion in order to freely
direct her own life. It is a particular cruelty to present abortion as
something women want, something they demand, they find liberating. Because nobody wants this. The procedure itself
is painful, humiliating, expensive — no woman “wants” to go through it. But
once it’s available, it appears to be the logical, reasonable choice. All the
complexities can be shoved down that funnel. Yes, abortion solves all the
problems; but it solves them inside the woman’s body. And she is expected to
keep that pain inside for a lifetime, and be grateful for the gift of abortion.
Many years ago I wrote something in an essay about
abortion, and I was surprised that the line got picked up and frequently
quoted. I’ve seen it in both pro-life and pro-choice contexts, so it appears to
be something both sides agree on.
I wrote, “No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice
cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap,
wants to gnaw off its own leg.”
Strange, isn’t it, that both pro-choice and pro-life
people agree that is true? Abortion is a horrible and harrowing experience.
That women choose it so frequently shows how much worse continuing a pregnancy
can be. Essentially, we’ve agreed to surgically alter women so that they can
get along in a man’s world. And then expect them to be grateful for it.
Nobody wants to have an abortion. And if nobody wants to
have an abortion, why are women doing it, 2800 times a day? If women doing
something 2,800 times daily that they don’t want to do, this is not liberation
we’ve won. We are colluding in a strange new form of oppression.
***
And so we come around to one more March for Life, like
the one last year, like the one next year. Protesters understandably focus on
the unborn child, because the danger it faces is the most galvanizing aspect of
this struggle. If there are different degrees of injustice, surely violence is
the worst manifestation, and killing worst of all. If there are different
categories of innocent victim, surely the small and helpless have a higher
claim to protection, and tiny babies the highest of all. The minimum purpose of
government is to shield the weak from abuse by the strong, and there is no one
weaker or more voiceless than unborn children. And so we keep saying that they
should be protected, for all the same reasons that newborn babies are
protected. Pro-lifers have been doing this for 43 years now, and will continue
holding a candle in the darkness for as many more years as it takes.
I understand all the reasons why the movement’s prime
attention is focused on the unborn. But we can also say that abortion is no
bargain for women, either. It’s destructive and tragic. We shouldn’t listen
unthinkingly to the other side of the time-worn script, the one that tells us
that women want abortions, that abortion liberates them. Many a post-abortion
woman could tell you a different story.
The pro-life cause is perennially unpopular, and
pro-lifers get used to being misrepresented and wrongly accused. There are only
a limited number of people who are going to be brave enough to stand up on the
side of an unpopular cause. But sometimes a cause is so urgent, is so
dramatically clear, that it’s worth it. What cause could be more outrageous
than violence — fatal violence — against the most helpless members of our human
community? If that doesn’t move us, how hard are our hearts? If that doesn’t move us, what will ever move us?
In time, it’s going to be impossible to deny that
abortion is violence against children. Future generations, as they look back,
are not necessarily going to go easy on ours. Our bland acceptance of abortion
is not going to look like an understandable goof. In fact, the kind of hatred
that people now level at Nazis and slave-owners may well fall upon our era.
Future generations can accurately say, “It’s not like they didn’t know.” They
can say, “After all, they had sonograms.” They may consider this bloodshed to
be a form of genocide. They might judge our generation to be monsters.
One day, the tide is going to turn. With that Supreme
Court decision 43 years ago, one of the sides in the abortion debate won the
day. But sooner or later, that day will end. No generation can rule from the
grave. The time is coming when a younger generation will sit in judgment of
ours. And they are not obligated to be kind.
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