Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (29 page)

I
f anyone had told me even ten years ago that I would, in my first years as an Op-Ed columnist, write more columns about abortion that any other single subject, I would have been both incredulous and disconcerted. The reasons are obvious. I am Catholic. I have three beloved children whose gestation, delivery, and rearing have been my greatest joy. And I have been, for most of my life, deeply ambivalent about abortion, about what it is, what it means, and how we think about it.

None of those things changed during the time that I wrote an opinion column. But what they came to mean to me within the context of the unquenchable fire of the
abortion debate that raged in America during the last decade of the twentieth century changed a good deal.

The truth is that no matter what I had eventually come to believe, think, and feel about the subject, I would have been remiss in my mandate as an opinion columnist, and particularly as a woman in the job, if I had not written with some regularity about the subject. Only think: during 1990, 1991, and 1992 Supreme Court justices were apparently chosen on the basis of their perceived positions on the issue, several American cities were thrown into tumult because of demonstrations about it, it became a defining issue in a presidential campaign, and the Supreme Court handed down one of its most important and eloquent opinions on the subject. No one can claim it is an exaggeration to say that abortion became the most talked about and controversial issue in this country during the 1990s. And that shows no signs of abating.

“When do you think it will be settled?” people sometimes ask. And I think the answer is clear: it will never be settled. That alone makes it an issue different from most others, and more compelling, too.

But for me it is also the issue that most embodies the name that was eventually cooked up for my column when we began it in 1990. It took us a long, long time to find a name. We would think something sounded right, send it to the legal department to be vetted, and find out that some other publication was already using it. (The best blowout was the name “Persuasion,” which I floated primarily because I am a great Jane Austen fan. It turned out that “Persuasion” was already the name of a column—an advice column in a sadomasochistic skin mag.)

The editorial-page editor, Jack Rosenthal, finally came up with the name “Public & Private” modeled, in part, after Walter Lippmann’s “Today and Tomorrow.” At first I found it serviceable but not particularly illuminating; eventually I found it perfect. For I became most interested in writing about the intersection of the private and the public, most convinced that that was where the
action was. The economy as reflected in the job search by a fifty-year-old middle-management type, the issues of welfare dependency embodied in one reluctant welfare mother—the policy without the personal seemed to me empty, the personal without the political not telling enough. The two together spoke the truth.

And nowhere is this more true than on the question of who will and should decide whether an individual pregnancy must be taken to its endpoint of birth and motherhood. It was because of my private feelings that my public profile became so determinedly that of an advocate for legal abortion.

(A word on words here: the words we use to talk about abortion are among the most unsatisfactory in any public dialogue. Both pro-life and pro-choice are oversimplifications, and nothing about this issue is simple. So at a certain point I tried to give up both and simply refer to the two groups as those opposed to legal abortion, and those in favor of it. This adds words and, when 750 is your limit, added words are unhappy events. But the alternative was distortion by oversimplification, which is, to my mind, no alternative at all.)

My Catholicism has in fact guided me to that position, because it first led me to the idea that the act of an individual examining her conscience to search for wrongdoing was honorable and proper. My three children, while the greatest joy of my life, were all wanted but exhausting, so that, having them and rearing them, I felt conscious of the potential damage to both mother and child of an unwanted pregnancy in a way I doubted many of the male leaders of the movement against abortion, so blithe in their assumption that one could make do, would ever be.

But above all it is my continuing questioning and various ambivalences about the issue that have, paradoxically, brought me down most heavily on one side of the wall that seems to exist between those who favor legal abortion and those who do not. Some will be surprised by that; others will find it false. The profile of most feminists on the issue—and I am feminist, have
been nearly all my sentient life—is that we believe flatly that women cannot be free unless they can control when they will carry a pregnancy to term. In some broad sense this is correct; in many ways it is an oversimplification, ignoring the complexity of one of our most complex questions.

I have never sat down to write about abortion without feeling, at least for a moment, the complexities sweep over me like a fit of faintness: the complete life of the woman and the burgeoning life of the child, the primitive development of the embryo and the potential traits of the baby, the joy a pregnancy often brings and the despair it sometimes carries with it.

There is no other issue that so often and so insistently forces me to wrestle with who I am, with what I believe; even when I still went into the dark cabinet of the confessional every single Saturday, I never examined my conscience as I do when I choose, often with a sigh and a sense of the futility of meaningful discourse, to write about abortion. The process of argument itself has taught me something about this most private of public issues, and that is that the most suitable battlefield upon which to play out its vast conundrums is the one inside my soul.

THE ABORTION ACCOUNT
April 8, 1990

When I was growing up, my life was governed by nuns and priests. Don’t scratch in public, Sister said. Don’t roll your skirt up, Sister said. Don’t whisper in class. Don’t gossip. Don’t cheat.

The priests were always more remote. What I remember best is the outline of their profiles against the confessional screen and the low murmur as they repeated the words of absolution while I said my act of contrition. In a church so often devoted to conformity and crowds, this seemed the great individual act, the confession of the soul, examining her conscience.

The solitary claustrophobia of the confessional came back to me last week when American Catholic bishops announced their new campaign against abortion. They are prepared to spend as much as $5 million to convince the people of this country that their most bitterly contested right is a mortal sin. A powerful public relations firm and the pollsters who brought us Ronald Reagan have been hired to succeed where sermons failed. Examinations of conscience give way to examining the efforts of slick
professional persuaders. For years we have bemoaned the hat trick with mirrors these people have made out of the ballot box. Now we admit them to the pulpit.

My heart sinks.

Five million dollars. My God, the good we could do with $5 million. The women carrying wanted babies who cannot afford the meat and milk to nourish them in utero. The babies just born who stare at the ceiling in hospital nurseries, waiting for someone to take them home, even to touch them for more than a few minutes. The babies born fifty years ago who now live in subway tunnels and cardboard boxes and the doorways outside the residence of John Cardinal O’Connor, who announced this campaign. If this is such an honorable battle, why did no polling group, no public relations outfit, offer its services free so we could spend this money on babies already born?

I don’t mean to suggest that the Church does not help the disfranchised. The sad state of affairs today is that the compassion and intelligence of many priests and nuns and laymen are lost in the din surrounding the pronouncements of a very few. All over this city Catholics educate, feed, and house the poor. But they work unsung while we listen to Cardinal O’Connor speak of the dangers of heavy-metal music. It seems such a minor issue in a city where human suffering screams louder than any boom box.

I do understand why the bishops have decided to do this. Around this issue all the frustration of conservative Catholic clergy has coalesced, the frustration they must experience every Sunday when they walk onto the altar and know they’ve lost them in the pews. For two decades they have looked out and seen Catholics who have gone their own way on premarital sex, birth control, divorce, and abortion, too. If they threw them all out, the churches would be denuded.

Some Catholics would argue that I did not learn the most important lesson from my Catholic education: the Church makes the rules. Sister taught us that the priests were always right. But the Catholics who were children then are adults now. And many
of them seem to have learned best what I did, the examination of conscience, the searching of the soul to discover whether they had done wrong.

I do not believe the bishops understand the abortion issue, and not only for the obvious reason that they will never be pregnant or have a wife or daughter who is. It reminds me of all those years when our mothers came to them in the confessional and quietly pleaded: Five children in seven years, Father. Isn’t it enough? Isn’t there something that can be done? No one does that anymore. We already know the answers. Abstinence, abstinence, abstinence. This is how they lost us in the pews. They refused to look at our lives.

The same is true today. They do not listen. The most notable exception is the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G. Weakland, who, while his colleagues were loudly warning Mario Cuomo of hell, was quietly asking Catholic women on both sides of the divisive issue to come together and talk. He wanted them to listen to one another, and he wanted to listen to them all.

His actions suggest the Church still honors its people.

A multimillion-dollar payout to public relations and polling firms suggests something quite different. It tells those women convinced they are the best guardians of their own bodies that the Church believes they are shallow enough to be swayed by practiced paid persuasion, as though they were buying soap powder. It suggests that the bishops no longer see us as souls, but as votes. And in a country where people dine from Dumpsters, it is a monumental waste of money.

MOM, DAD, AND ABORTION
July 1, 1990

Once I got a fortune cookie that said: To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers what it was like to be a reporter.

A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

And I’ve remembered it more keenly since the Supreme Court ruled that the states may require a pregnant minor to inform her parents before having an abortion.

This is one of the most difficult of many difficult issues within the abortion debate. As good parents, we remember being teenagers, thinking that parents and sex existed in parallel universes.