Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (32 page)

But there is indeed a kind of endless alley in the lives of Linn Harwell and Gwen Elliot, the dead end in your heart when you grow up without a mother. They tell us something about banning abortion that is both touching and chilling, these two little girls who grew up to become activists because of what happened to them. Which likely means many little girls, and boys, too, who do not know, who still believe pneumonia did it, or who are ashamed, who keep the secret.

This is the shadow of things to come. Someone’s mother will die. That’s not how we commonly think of this. We usually think of children having children, even though statistics show more than half of the abortions performed in the United States last year were performed on women over the age of twenty-five.

We think of cases like the horrific one unfolding in Ireland right now, in which a fourteen-year-old girl who says she was raped has been forbidden by the courts to travel to England to have an abortion. Her parents made a critical mistake: they were good citizens. They asked police about having fetal-tissue tests
done as evidence. The attorney general stepped right in to enjoin the girl’s planned abortion.

It is a great mistake to believe that if abortion is illegal, it will be nonexistent. Ireland has the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, and still several thousand of its citizens travel elsewhere to end their pregnancies each year.

Some kind of douche, some kind of drug, some kind of tubing: women will do it themselves. They always have. They become pregnant for reasons we know nothing of, reasons not as easily quantifiable as being raped by a friend’s father at age fourteen. Linn Harwell’s mother had had five children, eight pregnancies. Gwen Elliott’s mother had two small children and had just separated from her husband. Their reasons died with them. What lived on were their motherless children.

“My father said that when they took me to the cemetery somebody told me she was sleeping,” says Commander Elliott, “and I thought that anytime he wanted he could go get her. My father says I used to ask ‘Why don’t we go get Mommy?’ but I don’t remember it.”

That is the shadow of things to come.

AT THE CLINICS
April 5, 1992

Last fall a thirty-year-old woman named Eileen Moran pulled into the parking lot of the Aware Woman clinic in the space coast town of Melbourne, Florida. Ms. Moran was not surprised to see demonstrators; that is commonplace. The surprise came the next day, in a manila envelope full of color photographs of bloody fetuses, anti-abortion tracts, and a letter warning her about procedures performed at the clinic.

“I felt very violated,” says Ms. Moran, who is now five months pregnant and had gone to the clinic only for a checkup. “The idea that they could trace my name and address through my license plate and have something in the mail that day was pretty terrifying.”

At Aware Woman, it is pretty ordinary. Ms. Moran got off easier than the teenager whose envelope was sent to her parents. And her experience pales in comparison to that of doctors who receive middle-of-the-night hang-up calls on their unlisted lines and whose homes are picketed constantly. Opponents of the Melbourne
clinic have issued
WANTED
posters, offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to “the arrest or conviction” of one doctor who works there.

The poster, which describes him as “a hired assassin in that he kills unborn babies for a fee,” includes his photograph, his home phone number and that of his mother, and the license-plate number of his car. The poster was taped to the office doors of other gynecologists in central Florida; written at the bottom was “You Are Next.”

Today in Washington, D.C., there will be a rally for abortion rights, for constitutional protections and federal legislation. But while we have been looking at the big picture we have forgotten something important. What if they gave us abortion and nobody came—no doctors, no clinic administrators, no nurses?

The people who run abortion clinics are a tightly knit group, as folks who are under fire tend to be. Their carpenters have been persuaded not to make repairs, their medical labs to turn away their business. Their children have been accosted and told that they are the spawn of murderers. I couldn’t blame any of them if they decided that they’d had enough of being the real people behind the legal arguments.

You can find the place where the founder of the Melbourne clinic lives because there is a groove in the grass out front, where every morning a woman walks back and forth with a sign that says
PAT WINDLE, STOP KILLING GOD’S BABIES
.

Few new doctors are learning to perform abortions, and those who do, concerned that publicity like the
WANTED
posters will ruin their practices, often return to the happier task of delivering babies. The big medical organizations, which can lobby like nobody’s business when they want to, have been uncommonly low-key. They were more fired up about our right to choose breast implants than they have ever been about our right to choose abortion.

Ms. Windle says that a reporter scoffed when she described this as a civil war. But it is a war, and there is battle fatigue. There has
sprung up a thirst for some middle ground. Sometimes the talk is of promoting contraception, sometimes of curtailing the period of pregnancy during which abortion is permissible, sometimes of merely allowing abortion while making clear that it is not desirable.

But this battle is not being driven by those with a will to compromise. The people who are harassing doctors, patients, and clinics consider any means permissible in their quest to prove that they know what’s better for you than you do. The ordinary American standards of personal privacy and personal property don’t apply. “God’s law is higher than man’s law,” says Randall Terry, the leader of Operation Rescue, who said in Buffalo that he would be using investigators to dig up dirt on doctors who perform abortions, a part of God’s law that I missed in my study of the Bible.

And so it is important today to remember a T-shirt slogan: Think Globally, Act Locally. Many of us who speak out in favor of legal abortion have had little to do with the day-to-day happenings at the clinics, perhaps because we were focused on sweeping safeguards, perhaps because it is easier to see abortion as a crusade than as a business. The truth is it must be both. Freedom of the press is only as meaningful as the willingness of one person to publish a newspaper. The right to choose abortion is empty if the people who provide it are harassed out of existence.

HEARTS AND MINDS
April 22, 1992

Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a Pennsylvania law that would restrict access to abortion in that state. Today demonstrators from both sides of the question will face each other across the unbridgeable moat of their disparate beliefs outside clinics in Buffalo.

What about tomorrow?

With all this activity, in the courts and in the streets, it is important to remember that we have taken this debate exactly nowhere in the last twenty years. The great social issues of this country are settled not with placards or legal briefs finally but in hearts and minds. While the standard-bearers on both sides posit from the margins of perfect certainty, the great majority learn nothing that they didn’t already know about abortion.

There has been a lot of talk that the Pennsylvania statute is a kind of abortion-rights Armageddon. It includes parental consent and spousal notification, a twenty-four-hour waiting period
and medical counseling about other available options, the procedure, and the gestational age of the fetus.

I do not like this law. It has as its subtext the assumption, prevalent among anti-abortion zealots, that women decide to have abortions in the same way they decide to have manicures. But it does not serve our credibility to inflate its provisions. When we squander our rhetoric on restrictions in Pennsylvania, what does that leave us for the law in Louisiana, a slam-dunk of legal abortion that allows it only in limited cases of rape and incest or to save the life of the mother?

More important, when we excoriate waiting periods and parental consent we dismiss the ambivalence of many Americans and we miss an opportunity to communicate beyond the slogans. Waiting periods sound reasonable—until you evoke the impoverished mother of three who has driven six hundred miles and has only one day’s worth of baby-sitting money in her pocket.

Parental consent is constantly justified with the aspirin analogy, the idea that a girl who cannot get Tylenol in school without a parent’s permission should not be able to have an abortion without that permission. That’s because the judicial bypass that is a required alternative to consent is little more than a phrase. You have only to describe a fifteen-year-old pleading her case before a judge to make some people understand that this alleged attempt to legislate communication is designed to intimidate instead.

The spousal notification provision is supposed to send the message that husbands have rights, too. But common sense tells us all that a woman who can’t discuss this with her husband probably has a reason so potent that no law is going to deter her.

In short, there are many talking points. It is simply that we have not talked. We have taken stands, and stood.

I understand the positioning that is taking place here, to drum up support by evoking an imminent threat to legal abortion. And I understand the frustration at an issue that it seems will never be settled, and the temptation to meet zealotry with zealotry.

But it saddens me to see some of those who support abortion
rights in Buffalo using language as ugly as that of the people who send me anonymous postcards filled with vitriol and photographs of fetuses. I imagined we were better than that. I picture folks seeing this on television and thinking that both groups are lousy with lunatics.

Most Americans, the polls tell us, feel truly represented by neither side. They are the people who say they simultaneously believe abortion is wrong and it is a private matter. While the demonstrators see black and white, they see gray.

In 1990, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee held six “listening sessions” to hear what Catholic women were saying about abortion. I wish in every town in America someone would do what the honorable archbishop did: bring people together to talk, to disagree, and above all to acknowledge the gray areas.

If we rely on elections and legislation, those of us who believe abortion should be legal, our fortunes will vary with the personnel. If we make people feel their ambivalence is unacceptable, then we’ve lost them. But if we have reached out to, and reached, the hearts and minds of average Americans with honest discussion, that will drive so much of the rest.

Or we can continue moving from legal argument to legal argument, confrontation to confrontation, as we will today.

But what about tomorrow?

ONE VOTE
July 1, 1992

History was being made Monday. You could tell because Harry Blackmun and Randall Terry agreed about something. Justice Blackmun, the author of
Roe
v.
Wade
, and Mr. Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, both said the same thing when the Supreme Court decision affirming a constitutional right to abortion but upholding state restrictions was handed down.