Abortion is okay

To remind us all of the anniversary of the passage of Roe v. Wade on this January 22, I'm going to post a rerun from my blog a year ago.  I was going to write something new, but I reread last year's post and realized it says everything I want to say about abortion.

I once carried a twelve-year old through a crowd of screaming Christians, because she was too terrified to walk and her mother was too frightened to help her. There were four us doing volunteer security at Dr. Tiller's abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas, and for most weekends that was enough. But on this particular weekend, the protestors were out in force, because of all the press the little girl’s case had received. So, there we were, frozen up on the sidewalk, just twenty feet from the clinic door, but courtesy of the mayor’s refusal to enforce trespassing laws, facing a sea of shouting, sign-waving hysterics. That was when I picked her up. She couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds, but my back was sore for a week. I just took her under the arms and held her to my chest and pushed through to the door. Behind me, two more volunteers got on either side of her mother and hauled her along.

It felt like one of the kindest things I’d ever done for another human being. We held onto each other until it was time for her to put on a gown and have her blood work done. Nearly everyone woman I talk to about that moment agrees: sometimes abortion is just the right choice. It’s the best thing to do, a good act to undo a terrible act. But here’s where I run into trouble: why does it matter that the girl in question was only twelve? That her nineteen-year old brother got her pregnant? Why is it only okay in the most heinous cases? (And of course, why would anyone imagine that abortion wasn’t the best thing for this little girl? Yet, many of the protestors held signs that said, “I’ll adopt your baby.” Why? Why her baby and not all the other unwanted babies marking time in foster homes?)

Dr. Tiller is one my heroes, because he goes on doing what needs to be done, regardless of the hatred that swirls around him. He was shot and still came to work the next day, because he believes that access to abortion is important for women.  Plus, he's a nice man, a warm, kind, gentle man.

At the same time I volunteered at Dr. Tiller's clinic, I worked at a family planning clinic that did not provide abortions, but that performed pregnancy tests and referred a lot of women to Dr. Tiller. I confess, I was a bitch of a pregnancy counselor. Oh, sure, sometimes I counseled women who went away smiling, excited about the babies they were expecting, and I smiled and hugged them as they went. Also, I counseled a lot of practical women who knew what they were going to do before they even got the official word on their pregnancies. They were only there for me to sign the referral letter to the one clinic that performed abortions, but they were glad for my kind face and my non-judgmental support.

By and large, however, most of the women I counseled probably still hate me, because I made them admit the thing that no one—not even your average liberal Democrat—wants to admit these days: abortion is okay. Every day I counseled namby-pamby weasel women who said this exact phrase: “I think abortion is wrong, but I can’t have this baby.” I don’t even know how many women I’ve heard say this, hundreds certainly.

Of course, I’ve also heard a lot of women saying, “I think abortion should be legal, but I would never have one.” To my friends and loved-ones, I say only, “Well, I guess you won’t know until you need one.”

To all of those women waiting in the clinic’s nurse station for their pregnancy results, I said something a lot less nice. I said, “If you think abortion is wrong, I’m not going to sign this referral letter.” Usually, they tried to reassure me that they were still sure about their decision, but as long as they went on saying that abortion was wrong, my answer was always, “If you think abortion is wrong, I think it would be a terrible idea for you to have one. If you think it’s wrong, I don’t want to be the person who enabled you to make this mistake.” This is how I know I’m a bit of a sadist.

Every time I said this, the same thing happened. The woman blinked, slowly, and then her face fell apart. Sometimes that was when she cried.  Sometimes, that was when she stopped crying.  That made me so happy, because I knew I had broken through some hideous, hypocritical little barrier that she had placed in her mind. Like most women, she thought that it was the right thing to say: I think abortion is wrong. But she wanted the abortion, needed the abortion, couldn’t face the prospect of her life without the abortion. Society tells us all the time that this is what we should think. Abortion is wrong, until I need one, and then it'll just be my little secret.

Here’s how vicious a bitch I am. I never signed a referral letter for anyone who wouldn’t say, “I think abortion is okay. There’s nothing wrong with it.” Now some women came to this moment on their own. After we talked for a while, they acknowledged that they didn’t really think abortion was wrong, but some women had to be coached. I had to help them understand their own hypocrisy. Here’s the funny thing: in all those years of being a bitch, I only had two women ever back out. I only had two women who said, “You’re right. Feeling the way I do, it would be a mistake for me to have an abortion.” Funnier thing: One of them just came back on my day off and saw a counselor who wasn’t a bitch.

Even though I’m a bitch, lots of women think it’s wonderful what I did that day, carrying that little girl those twenty terrible feet to the abortion clinic. I felt good about it, too, but it’s not my best story. It’s not the one that makes me feel completely tenderhearted for the human race. The other story doesn’t seem to warm anyone else’s cockles, though, probably because the girl in question was 23, too old for our natural sympathy. She was an adult, who had gotten pregnant through consensual sex with a boyfriend who didn’t want anything to do with her after she got pregnant. She had a job, a place to live. What she didn’t have was anyone who loved her unconditionally. She didn’t have anyone in the whole world who loved her enough to come with her to the abortion clinic. You can’t come by yourself, because you can’t drive yourself home afterwards. I’d never met her before, but I went to her house, picked her up, drove her to the clinic, and held her hand until the sedation kicked in. After the abortion, I drove her home, tucked her into bed with a hot water bottle, a glass of juice, some tissues, and her phone. I never saw her again, but she called me at work the day after she had her follow-up appointment. The message just said, “Everything is okay. Thanks.”

When I tell that story, a lot of people frown, because they think she didn’t have a “good excuse” for an abortion. I think she did what she thought was right, and that makes her abortion okay.

When I wrote this last year, Katha Pollitt had just published a really excellent article on this topic in The Nation, one that made me think about what the new Supreme Court make-up means for the availability of abortions in America.  It would behoove all of us to consider that, and to consider whether our opinions are hiding a hypocrisy that will eventually bite us on the ass. If abortion is wrong, how can we argue that it ought to be legal?