Intimate Wars (15 page)

I went to see Swaggart in person once when he appeared at Madison Square Garden. A religious Jew who sat near me told me he had begun to see the light after listening to him preach. Swaggart didn't manage to “save” me, but I learned something about myself that day. I had a message as well, and it was time to begin my odyssey to spread it.

Early in 1981 I began to travel the country on a debate circuit to share my perceptions of Reagan with others who were also out in the cold. With the help of my public relations agent I arranged my own tour, traveling from the small towns in the Midwest, to the wine counties of Southern California, to industrial, forbidding Detroit, and home to Philadelphia to bring my messages regarding women, abortion, pluralism, and civil rights to any place willing to put me on the air or give me a debate. At that time I was one of the very few pro-choice activists debating the leaders of the anti-choice movement: Joe Riley, Jeanne Head, Reverend Dan Fore, Beverly LaRossa, and Kathy Quinn, among others.

I had recently conducted a two-year study at Choices in conjunction with HIP and Adelphi University, in which my patients were asked to give their reasons for having abortions. Fifty-three percent said financial reasons were the
most important factor, up thirteen percentage points from a similar study done the previous year.

I called the study “Abortionomics” and publicized it widely. I wanted these findings to hit home with worshipers of Reagan, that champion of the unborn who was clearly swelling the ranks of the aborted with his economic policies. The study showed that under the influence of the Reaganomics cult, which preached and reinforced individualism, careerism, and material benefit, women were choosing mortgage payments and second cars over second babies. Women may not have seen any connection between their choice of abortion and the economic policies that led them to it, but the specter of the “Welfare Queen” planted dread in the hearts of many who might otherwise have chosen to have more children. Reagan had successfully managed to address issues of personal pain with a fluency of script that enabled people to believe that their problems were a result of misplaced “liberal values” instead of a symptom of general social and political decline.

The
New York Times
published a letter I wrote in 1984 when a seventeen-year-old student in Pennsylvania chose to have her baby and was dismissed from the National Honor Society as a consequence. Had she had an abortion, she would have been able to remain in the society. “What a set of circumstances in a country which gives lip service to the concept that it is a good thing for women to have children, yet punishes some of them so severely when they choose to do so,” I wrote. “The time is long past for women to stop being victimized by a society whose double messages place them in the position of always being wrong. One wonders, too, about the male involved in this pregnancy. Will he be allowed his ‘honors'?”

My study also revealed a powerful contradiction: the majority of women who came to the clinic for the purpose of having an abortion did not consider themselves to be pro-choice. They had never imagined themselves in a position where they would decide to have an abortion, an act they considered morally reprehensible even as they waited their turns to be called into the operating rooms. Many shunned the pro-choice movement and distanced themselves from other women who had gone through the same thing. Colleagues told me of women who picketed their clinics, came inside for abortions, then went right back to the picket lines.

As long as women judged themselves by Reagan's vision of a “good mother,” they would also judge one another. It was a defense mechanism, a way to protect themselves against the shame and guilt they had internalized. In a heightened state of self-preservation they created a wall between individual experience and collective understanding. Many politely shook their heads when I asked them to sign petitions, come to rallies, or participate in meetings. Some women, faced with the challenge of being harassed on their way into the clinic, became briefly politicized as a way to express their anger, but few actively joined the pro-choice movement. After their abortions, most women just wanted to leave it all behind.

Yet despite this desire for distance, women demonstrated a quiet solidarity with the cause through the simple act of having them. They referred their friends and family to Choices for abortions and came back to the clinic every time they needed counseling or care. Women were silently, undeniably connected to each other by the necessity of making reproductive choices. Every woman who chose abortion took part in an ongoing struggle toward a “reluctant epiphany,” a realization that not politics, but necessity drives women's
choices—and thus, there is an inherent morality in having the power to choose.

There were some women who did have the courage to vocalize their experiences and take action, however small. I remember one woman in particular who I met on my debate tour that year. She had been a prostitute on welfare, using sex to get by after her second marriage. She said she was forty, but she looked much older. As we walked through the quiet campus where I was scheduled to speak that day, she told me that her abortions had been an expected occupational hazard. Now she sat on several boards of directors, a pillar of her community. Listening to her, I felt a sense of awe and wonder. So many activists are made, not born, radicalized by life, not theory.

On a trip to Todos Santos, California, I was to be the keynote speaker at a professional women's conference. These women were hungry for inspiration. They came to their activism the hard way, not on college campuses or in consciousness-raising groups, but through marriages. Most of them were divorced. When I finished my talk, a woman got up and began, “I've never told anyone about it, but five years ago I got pregnant and I had an abortion . . .” With that, she had joined the movement. She'd found her voice and reached out to her sisters.

That was what I lived for, the small awakenings and profound beginnings. And I finally had enough psychological distance to recognize the phenomenon and call myself a feminist.

 

I RETURNED TO NEW YORK that summer for a nationally televised debate with a prominent anti-choice leader. I was anxious and tremendously concerned that I should win.
I understood that one could never really convert the other side. Debates merely served to rearticulate the issues on an ever higher and more conscious level so that those already converted became disciples.

My debate was taped on a Friday. I had taken a pregnancy test that morning, leaving my urine at Choices. My period was a couple of weeks late, and I was worried. I was always so careful, almost obsessive, but no method of birth control is perfect.

As the debate progressed, I experienced an odd sort of splitting off. I responded to the gibes and questions of my opponent, all the while thinking that I could be pregnant. I felt removed enough to appreciate the irony of the situation, a battle being waged on multiple tracks. I was performing politically for the cameras and debating emotionally with myself. My opponent asked me how I could call myself a feminist and support abortion rights when half the fetuses being aborted were female. It was not a new argument. None of it was, but this time it made me think of my mother. My mother, with dreams deferred and denied.

In the closing argument I made a passionate plea for the importance of women's lives, for remembering that the abortion “issue” was ultimately about that. Thousands of individual stories, thousands of different reasons, all culminating in one shared ambiguous reality—a reality I was beginning to enter.

I finished the taping and asked to use the studio phone to call my office
.
The assistant stood next to me, engaging me in conversation; I was talking, laughing. Then I got on the phone, spoke to my secretary, and found out that the pregnancy test was positive. It took my breath away.

Sweating profusely, I wondered whether I had stained the outfit I was wearing for the debate. I called a cab, flattened
my back against the seat, and took slow, deep breaths, trying to keep from feeling suffocated. The idea of abortion was a valve, an opening, a way to breathe. There was no question of whether I would have one. As we crossed the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, I held my stomach and said aloud, “Sorry little one, it's just not time.”

My diary entry from that night reads, “For one night I am a mother.” I don't remember whether or not I slept. I only remember my exhaustion and an overriding sense of inevitability. The next morning I dressed carefully in a red-and-white suit. What does one wear to an abortion? There are no traditional costumes like those for funerals or weddings. There is no ritual from one generation of women to another to look to as a guide. There are only functional considerations; you wear something that comes on and off quickly and easily.

At Choices, the steps of the familiar process played out in surreal reversal. The blood tests, the images of the sonogram, the table, the stirrups—they were all for me. Marty stood at the head of the table and held my hand while Dr. Mohammed performed the abortion. Now I was joined to the common experience of my sex. But as I lay on the table I had stood beside to support so many others, I felt irrevocably alone. The hands that touched and caressed my hair felt as if they moved through a dark porous divide that separated me from everything that I knew or had been before. As I spread my legs like all my sisters, I thought of the child whose time was not now. Strange how I thought of the fetus as female, as if that shared gender gave me a more special connection.

Yet despite that connection—the recognition of the fetus's potential to become my child—I knew that I could not allow this pregnancy to come to term. My sense of self, my sense of time, the flow of my movement toward goals that I had
created had been interrupted the moment my test came back positive. The fetus was an invader, a separate force growing inside me, demanding and creating potentially unalterable realities. I couldn't let my life become someone else's.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that each individual operates by the “law of self-preservation,” the instinctive tendency we have to survive at all costs. The Catholic Church's just war doctrine accepts the taking of human life if one's life or that of another is directly threatened, in keeping with Aquinas's “natural law.”
¹³
Does the fetus not impede a woman's tendency to maintain her own existence? Is it not an unjust aggressor, threatening the survival of the mother? Is not a woman's choice of abortion an act of self-defense? With my choice I was fighting for the right of all women to define abortion as an act of love: love for the family one already has, and just as important, love for oneself. I was fighting to reclaim abortion as a mother's act. It was an act of solidarity as significant as any other I had committed.

After my abortion, as I slowly awoke from the anesthesia, I became conscious of immense and overwhelming feelings: non-specific, non-directed. Love, relief—then sadness.

A few days later, walking down the hallway in Choices, I heard loud, wrenching sobs coming from the recovery room. A woman was waking from anesthesia and crying for her mother. I went to her bed, lowered the side rails, and gently tried to soothe her. As I bent down to her face she whispered in a halting Russian accent, “You're the only one I have now, I'm all alone. You've saved my life by being here.” I held the woman close, enormously moved, savoring our connection. There was no good or bad, no issue of choice. There was nothing more than the pure energy of survival, and women doing what they had been doing for centuries throughout history, what they will do forever.

MARTY AND I didn't talk much about my abortion. He was never one to feel comfortable articulating his feelings, but I know he must have had a deep reaction. Oh, how silence can palpate, how distance between self and other can be stretched, distorted, choked with expectations not met. I had learned very early on how to deal with invisibility in my relationship with my father. Marty's silence left me in the same place.

Years later he told me that if I had become pregnant during our affair, he would have immediately left his wife to marry me. I was shocked when I heard that. Although I knew that pregnancy was often used as a tool in relationships, it never occurred to me to use it in ours.

The distance between Marty and me after the abortion had become characteristic of our relationship. In our early days together there had been no question of who was the teacher and who was the pupil. But now I'd passed him by on multiple levels, and my progress became one more obstacle to intimacy between us. Our competition with each other was like a blood sport, and our relationship thinned a little each time a cut was made. He was still proud of me, but the pride was mixed with envy of my youth, my public prominence, and my future. Once, when we were lying in bed together, he turned to me with that loving look, now shaded with sadness, and asked whether we could declare a cease-fire. I gently touched his cheek, whispering my assent.

After the crescendo of our wedding, we had fallen into a comfortably numbing routine. Garrison had become a kind of beautiful green prison. We would eat dinner together and then go to our corners, his in the den, where he smoked his pipe, and mine in the bedroom where I retreated to read. Or I'd take solitary walks on the Appalachian Trail while Marty puttered about or watched a game. I hated the sounds of
those games. I remembered them coming from my father's den, the constant screams of the crowd over some ball.

And then there were the politics of sleep. Marty always said that bed was only for sleeping or fucking, but for me it was a womb, a final port of safety, a place where I could be most free, both in body and mind. I loved to take to my bed to read, write, talk on the phone for hours with friends, letting sleep come naturally when it may. But no matter the stress of the day or the passion of the night, Marty went to bed at exactly eleven thirty, right after the news. I couldn't talk with him, read, or even move for fear of disturbing him. Eventually, I had to move out of our bedroom.