The Tragedy Of Abortion Rhetoric
by Fran Varian - hipmama.com
I came to abortion work in a rather circuitous way. It was not expected after seven years of strict Catholic schooling and twenty-one Thanksgivings full of staunchly conservative, pro-life family debates. By the time I arrived in Seattle in 1998, a newly graduated college-educated feminist, I had left all of the conservative Catholicism behind me, but I still did not anticipate that abortion work would become my passion.
I was living in a house with three other newly graduated feminists and we were all looking for work at the same time. My housemate learned of an open position in a local abortion clinic and after much thought decided it wasn’t the work for her. The interview fell to me by default.
One moment I was a “I’m pro-choice but I don’t think I would ever have an abortion,” feminist, and the next I was counseling women who were terminating their pregnancies. My clinic was special. It was one of the three free-standing facilities in the country at the time that routinely performed abortions well into the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. Yes, we performed the much talked about, often loathed (even in liberal circles) late-term abortion.
Talking about abortion makes people uncomfortable. Even if you theoretically believe in a woman’s right to chose whether or not she will continue a pregnancy, you probably don’t want to know the details of how that pregnancy will be ended. And, chances are if you’re one of the millions upon millions of women who have had an abortion (or two or three) you still don’t want to know all of the details.
I know all of the details. I’ve seen thousands of abortions. And, watching the last Presidential debate on Wednesday night I was reminded yet again that we will have no real freedom over the domain of our own bodies until we untangle the rhetorical nonsense both sides of the debate throw up rather than discuss the real issues.
Partial-birth abortion is an ugly misnomer which obscures the difficulties surrounding the decision to terminate a pregnancy past 12-14 weeks. It implies a horrific and gruesome scenario in which a woman labors to deliver a viable baby who is somehow then executed. This is not only untrue, it’s illegal and unethical and you would be hard pressed to find an ob-gyn or abortionist in this country who would do it.
Do late term abortions often end perfectly viable pregnancies? Of course they do. Early abortions end viable pregnancies too, as do miscarriages. But when I hear Senator Obama talk about the “tragedy” of abortion, much to the agreement of Senator McCain, my skin crawls. We all agree, say the politicians, that the best solution to this problem is to have fewer abortions, period.
I don’t agree with them. I think the only solution is for all of us to become very serious about creating a world where the children who already exist have a decent chance at growing up healthy and in control of their own destiny.
A year ago I wrote a piece for Hip Mama about a twelve year-old boy from Maryland named Deamonte Driver who died because his family couldn’t find a dentist willing to accept Medicaid to extract his abscessed tooth.
As you read this there are approximately 83,000 children in the foster care system in the state of California alone.
In my very short life I have worked with children whose parents locked them in closets for days. I have pulled a young girl out of a crack house where she sat patiently waiting for her mother to get high in the back room. I have counseled hundreds upon hundreds of children and young women who were pregnant because their fathers, brothers, ministers, uncles, boyfriends, some stranger, or a group of strangers raped them.
It is said of Hemmingway that he preferred simple, unadorned language because after witnessing the horrors of war words like “horror” had no meaning anymore.
I am very certain that neither candidate for President is qualified to speak about the tragedy of abortion. Neither one of them.
Many of the women I had the honor of talking to before they had their abortion told me they would prefer not to terminate their pregnancies but they simply could not afford to bring a child into this world. They wanted their pregnancy, they loved their pregnancy, but they could not in good conscience ask their child to suffer the same poverty they were suffering.
Women who terminate in their second trimester often do so because they are uninsured or their employer-sponsored insurance plans exclude contraceptive and abortion benefits. They can’t raise the money for a first trimester abortion, which often means they have to desperately scurry to borrow money for more expensive second-trimester procedures.
Some women simply have no idea they are pregnant until they are well into their second trimester. We receive ridiculously mixed messages about our sexuality. We are taught that it is our responsibility to be attractive and sexy, then we fight legislation to teach sex education in the public schools. How many adult women do you know at this very moment who can’t give you an accurate, concise explanation of how her own reproductive system works?
Many women don’t receive crucial genetic testing results until their second trimester. I vividly remember holding the hand of a lovely biologist who learned at 18 weeks that her fetus would not survive the rest of her pregnancy. She was given the “choice” of terminating at that point or waiting to deliver her dead baby several weeks later.
Determining the morality of a stranger’s actions is pretty easy when you don’t know the facts. And when it comes to abortion we never want to know the facts. The facts make us squeamish. The facts point us to the truth that while we profess to hold “life” in the highest esteem we do precious little as a culture to ensure the most basic quality of life for our most vulnerable.
I don’t dislike people who are opposed to abortion. Abortion is a very personal decision which, in my vast experience, is best left to the woman who has to harbor that pregnancy and spend the rest of her life dealing with it’s consequences. While many abortion opponents speak of the physical dangers women face when aborting, the truth is that having a first trimester abortion in this country is significantly safer for a woman than carrying that pregnancy to term. And of course, once you decide to carry that pregnancy you have to find a way to pay for it. My very good friend just gave birth to perfect, gorgeous, and much wanted twin baby girls. The hospital bill for her delivery alone was $80,000.
People who want to get pregnant and people who want to be parents face these obstacles, often joyfully. And I support them wholeheartedly. Forcing a woman who does not want to be pregnant or parent to continue her pregnancy amounts to nothing more than another, government sanctioned, act of violence against her and against her fetus.
I dislike rhetoric and sound bites about abortion offered up by people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and that includes every single politician I’ve ever heard speak on the subject.
Deamonte Driver’s death is an American tragedy.
The crashing, tumbling, increasingly corrupt health care system which benefits the CEO’s of insurance companies and their lobbyists at the expense of the rest of us is an American tragedy.
The fact that a blonde, blue-eyed baby is exponentially more likely to be adopted than a six year-old child of color is an American tragedy. The fact that children with disabilities of any age or ethnicity are lost in the system is an American tragedy.
We need to change the public agenda. We need to talk about quality of life for all of our children.
Abortion is a decision that women from every socio-economic group and every kind of religious and moral background has to face at some point in her life. It is a reality that we do not like to think about. It is a birth control method we don’t speak of in polite conversation. There is evidence of women aborting from the dawn of time and it isn’t likely to go away any time soon, because as long as women fear for their ability to feed their children and keep them safe they will question bringing them into the world.
If our politicians are serious about lowering the number of abortions in this country it would be in their best interest to stop wasting money bombing other women’s children around the world. If we truly wish to cultivate a culture of life in this country we need to put our money where our rhetoric is. We need a viable universal health care plan from Senators McCain and Obama. We need financial assistance for single mothers and struggling families instead of Wall Street millionaires. We need to recognize the beauty of all kinds of family structures and stop preventing perfectly loving people from adopting and fostering children because they are single, gay, or otherwise non-nuclear.
I have watched the abortions you don’t want to think about. I have also watched beautiful, brilliant living children subjected to unspeakable horrors that I wish I didn’t have to think about. I’ve seen politicians and ministers and good respectable people question the morality of women who have chosen abortion over failing a child they would have loved dearly.
I haven’t seen any politician reaching out to Deamonte Driver’s mother and apologizing to her for her son’s death. I don’t see them dedicating substantial amounts of money toward the future well-being of the children already in existence. I don’t see us take accountability for the fact that as a nation we fail our children and their families, not to mention the children of the world and their families every single day.
That makes me squeamish. That is immoral. That is a tragedy.
Frances Varian is a writer and a performance artist who lives in Durham, North Carolina with her partner and an assortment of poorly behaved animals. Her work has been published in: Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class, It's So You:35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style, Lodestar Quarterly, and HipMama.com.
She has featured at the Seattle Poetry Festival, The Bumbershoot Arts Festival, The San Francisco Queer Arts Festivals and many dive bars and cafes up and down the West Coast.
She is currently working on healing from late stage Lyme Disease and raising awareness about the disease and the need for health care reform in the United States. For more information about Lyme Disease and Fran please visit: www.helphealfran.org
