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Excerpted From "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights" by Katha Pollitt. Copyright 2014 by Picador. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpted From "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights" by Katha Pollitt. Copyright 2014 by Picador. All Rights Reserved.
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 introduc-
tion, 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
several things you could mix together, items so safe and so ordi-
nary they could never be banned, that you could prepare in
your own home, that would flush your uterus and leave it pink
and shiny and empty without you ever needing to know if you
were pregnant or about to be. A brew of Earl Grey, Lapsang
Souchong, and ground cardamom, say. Or Coca- Cola with a
teaspoon of Nescafé and a dusting of cayenne pepper. Things
you might have on your shelves right now, just waiting for some
clever person to put them together, some stay-at-home mother
with a chemistry degree rattling around her kitchen late at night.
Something like the herbal concoctions Jamaica Kincaid re-
members from her childhood:
blood pressure so high that you won’t be able to have your pro-
cedure that day, no need to notify your parents or get their per-
mission. The whole elaborate panopticon that governs abortion
today—gone. RU-486, the “French abortion pill,” now better
known as mifepristone, was supposed to accomplish that: Any
doctor could prescribe it in his office and no one need be the
wiser. A 1999 New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story
called it “the little white bombshell” that “may well reconfig-
ure the politics and perception of abortion,” pushing abortion
earlier and reintegrating it with regular medical practice. It’s
the age-old hope that a single technological or scientific ad-
vance will once and for all resolve a social issue, a fantasy that
means forgetting that the new thing will be embedded in the
existing system and involve the existing human beings. For a
variety of reasons—difficulties obtaining the drug, laws that
made medication abortions as heavily regulated as surgical
ones, fear of abortion opponents—few doctors not already in-
volved in abortion care took up the challenge of prescribing it.
That women want early abortion, that many women prefer
medication to surgery, that especially in rural areas it would be
a lot simpler and cheaper and less stressful for women to get a
prescription from their local OBGYN or GP than to travel long
distances to a clinic, that it would be a good thing to free
women from having to run a gauntlet of protesters—none of
that mattered. What women want in their abortion care is sim-
ply not important.
“Trust Women” is a popular motto in the pro-choice move-
ment. It sounds a little sentimental, doesn’t it? Part of that old
sisterhood-is-powerful feminism, it is fashionable to mock to-
day. But “Trust Women” doesn’t mean that every woman is
wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no
one else can make a better decision, because no one else is liv-
ing her life, and since she will have to live with that decision,
not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court,
chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot. Dr. George
Tiller, who provided abortion care in Wichita, Kansas, and was
one of a handful of doctors to perform abortions after twenty-
four weeks, wore a “Trust Women” button. Unlike the vast ma-
jority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking
an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy
having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not as-
sume that her body ceased to be her own because she was preg-
nant. Well, you see what trusting women got him: In 2009 he
was gunned down in church by Scott Roeder, a far-right Chris-
tian anti-government anti-abortion activist, who thought he
had the right to commit murder because, as he told a reporter,
“preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.”3
When Roe v. Wade was wending its way through the courts,
and various states were reforming their abortion laws to permit
abortion for rape, incest, fetal deformity and the like, the radi-
cal feminist activist Lucinda Cisler, head of New Yorkers for
Repeal of Abortion Laws, warned against half measures that
left women regulated by the state and the medical profession.
She feared that qualifications of the essential right “would be
extremely difficult to get judges and legislators to throw out
later.” 4 At one meeting, she held up a piece of paper represent-
ing the ideal abortion law: It was blank. Cisler saw Roe v. Wade
as a defeat, and maybe she was on to something, because what
seemed at the time to be small details have proven to be criti-
cal fault lines. The extraordinary deference paid to physicians
and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman’s desire
to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be ap-
proved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost
always a man. (Roe placed the medical profession under no
from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her
door—even if, like most women who have abortions, including
my mother, she already has children. There is deep contempt
for women in that—and disregard for the seriousness of moth-
erhood as well.
For many years, pundits dismissed the notion that abortion
would ever be significantly restricted, and mocked as Chicken
Littles pro-choicers who warned that both rights and access
were at risk, and contraception, too. The conventional wisdom
held the Republican Party would not risk waking the sleeping
giant that is the middle-of-the-road more-or-less-pro-choice
voter. Now we are seeing the Chicken Littles were right. Where
is that giant? In some states, it is indeed stretching and stand-
ing up—Virginia is a blue state now because the Republicans
in charge went too far, closing clinics, trying to mandate trans-
vaginal ultrasounds, and so on. In others, the giant dozes on,
immobilized by conflicting, not-very-well-thought-out notions
about women, sex, family, race, government, and a general
sense that America is going down the drain.
Clinic doctors, nurses, directors, and employees risk their
lives to help women. Patient escorts, abortion-fund volunteers,
bloggers, organizers, lawyers, and thousands of other activists
work tirelessly to keep abortion legal, expand access, change the
discourse, and sway the vote. But it’s the millions of pro-choice
Americans who are so far uninvolved (and still complacent)
that will ultimately decide the fate of legal abortion in this
country.
It’s past time for the giant to rise.