Kate Deloz’s grandmother died long before she could know her. And then she found out how she had died.
I was twelve years old when she finally told me the truth. Some friends and I had got into a long after-school discussion about abortion, prompted by the gruesome posters that a protester had staked in front of the Planned Parenthood in our Vermont town. I had already begun reading my mother’s Ms. magazines cover to cover, but this was the first time I’d encountered a pro-life position. When I hopped into my mom’s car after school, I was buzzing with new ideas. I had almost finished repeating one friend’s pro-life argument when I saw the look on Mom’s face. That’s when she told me: the “household accident” that had killed her mother had, in fact, been a self-induced abortion.
Her hands were tight on the steering wheel as she spoke. I realized later that it wasn’t the topic of abortion itself that made her so uneasy—she was a nurse and a Roe-era feminist who usually responded straightforwardly to even the most embarrassing health questions. Rather, her anguish arose from sharing a truth that she’d been brought up believing was too terrible to speak.
Sitting beside her in the passenger seat, I struggled to absorb the meaning of what she’d told me. I had only just grasped what abortion was a few hours earlier, and was still trying on this new pro-life idea. “O.K.,” I said, “but what about the uncle or aunt I never had?” Mom whipped toward me, face taut with a rage and fear that I somehow understood had nothing to do with me. “What about the mother I never had?” she said.
Read the whole thing. We learn that her grandmother, Winifred Haynes Maye, was an intelligent, well-educated, lively person who made a conscious decision to plan her family, and died because there was an absence of appropriate medical help. How many good people will we lose now and in the future because of the politics of ignorance?
That happened to one of my great aunts.
She died young, in her 20’s.
No one ever talked about her.
She was always the mysterious, shadowy person that people
remembered but didn’t want to talk about.
I found out not too long ago from distant relatives that she
had a back alley abortion that went wrong. She ended up in a Catholic
hospital bleeding out.
The relatives said the Catholic hospital knew what had happened and just
let her bleed out and die.
I can’t confirm that the hospital did that, over a half century later, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they did.
The problem is that pro-lifers don’t care about the whole choice thing, because they view it as murdering a baby. To them, a tiny bundle of cells is an innocent baby, and it doesn’t matter what dire circumstances the mother is in, how much damage this is going to cause to future life, and how much everyone would benefit from a healthy abortion–murdering a baby is simply pure evil.
I honestly don’t see any way around this argument, except for slowly reducing the number of people that revere human zygotes as something implicitly invaluable, perfect, and innocent by increasing the general population’s education about reproductive biology, in addition to making them realize that we should have complete autonomy over our bodies. Their typical counter-argument is that you no longer have full bodily autonomy when there is an invaluable human zygote inside of you. I simply don’t know how to remove that magical layer of protection that they give a small mass of cells, and until that magical layer is removed, we’re going to have fanatical pro-lifers reaping havoc on our society.
And yet they would be perfectly happy if two of my cousins were never born, if it had happened through abstinence.
One of my cousins was given up for adoption, and the mother of the other cousin wa thrown out of the house. Fortunately less jerky relatives took her in.
“Mom whipped toward me, face taut with a rage and fear that I somehow understood had nothing to do with me. “What about the mother I never had?” she said.”
There is this “club” that my spouse and I both belong to: The Dead Parent Society. We share the same pain and loss that others simply do not understand, and one that happens much too often. When I explained to another intern while I was working to earn the funds that paid my last two years of college, and some of my other funding came from the proceeds from the wrongful death lawsuit from the plane crash that killed my mother, I got this response: “So your parents are paying for college.”
Once upon almost three decades ago during a presidential election a call came from the local Republican Party asking me to support the continuing shaming of single parenthood championed by Dan Quayle. That made me very ranty and asked her if their policy was to legislate against death! In their small little minds they had not even thought of that possibility… especially with their anti-women’s health policy causing many of those deaths.
Caution: there may be many errors due to rage typing through tears (happens every time when I mention losing my mother when I was eleven years old)
I’m sorry chris. Love to you.
Thank you.
@Raven, #1
I’m writing something for Pervert Justice right now that will probably be put up tomorrow morning. I just want you to know that while it is mostly in response to connections I had already made between Daloz’s grandmother and No Name Woman from The Woman Warrior, I’ll be thinking of your story, too, as I write.
@everyone:
I read the full piece over at The NewYorker. There’s much that’s good, but I find the ending rather incomprehensible, especially given Daloz’s statements of renewed concern in the era of Trump:
While I have no trouble believing Daloz wrote those words and intended them to be part of this piece, to use them as the conclusion seems odd and unfitting. As I read them, I cried. I cannot share the confidence she attempted to convey to her child, and the mere effort to communicate that confidence broke my heart.
My mother was a nurse on a gynaecological ward in the 1950s when abortion was still illegal in the U.K. When the NHS was founded, part of the price for getting the doctors to support it was that they were allowed to use NHS facilities (including all the nurses and ancillary staff) for their private patients free of charge. It was quite common for private patients to be admitted for a ‘D&C’ (dilatation and curettage), i.e. a safe abortion. The cost was, of course, much higher than ordinary people could afford, so they had to resort to hot baths, gin and bent coat-hangers. The victims of those ‘procedures’ ended up in the general ward next to the private rooms with ‘D&C’ patients in them … That’s why abortion is legal in the U.K. now and in nearly all European countries.
Well, I’m probably as pro-choice as anyone in the world. (Really.) But even if Roe/Wade goes (which it almost certainly will, and the loss will be very bad), it is very unlikely that we’ll see a large number of deaths from self-abortions (and no one knows how many there were before, either). It’s much easier to avoid pregnancy now, and there are much safer ways to self-abort, starting with misoprostol. (Misoprostol is the main reason the abortion-ban in Philippines is not more damaging than it is.) We will see some women being unjustly imprisoned, some black-marketers of misoprostol will be unjustly imprisoned too, and some birth-defects (which misoprostol can cause when it fails to cause a complete abortion), and of course we will see an uptick in interstate abortion-tourism, but not likely a lot of women dying from self-abortions.
“what about the uncle or aunt I never had?”
Had your grandmother lived, you might have had many.
handsomemrtoad #10
Well, I guess we can all rest easy.
Thank you for your insighful comment.
Bless your heart.
A fetus is not a person. A woman is.
A woman having an unwanted pregnancy is in need.
That’s about as pithy as I can put it. What more do the anti-choicers need?
@10:
That depends on how much “State’s Rights” is allowed. If Roe v. Wade goes,there will almost certainly be federal legislation to ban abortion. A Constitutional Amendment, which is what some anti-abortion advocates really want, is less likely because it’s unlikely that more than the 3/4 majority of states will vote for it.
And an increase in interstate abortion tourism will certainly not cover everyone in many areas where a woman might have to fly or drive hundreds of miles from southern AL, MS, or GA to Ohio or PA.
And then there might be bans on interstate commerce in misoprostol which would mean that one would have to check with the neighborhood drug dealer.
how do you know that there
And how do you know that there won’t be restrictions on the availability of birth control methods?
I’ve thought a long time that the so-called pro-lifers aren’t pro-life at all. They don’t give a shit about the real lives of real people with real feelings and real problems like unwanted pregnancies. Life as they think of it is some metaphysical abstraction, like in John 14:6: It doesn’t mean shit.
A while ago, I read a book called The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service by Laura Kaplan. The book told the story of women who had died (or nearly died) from botched abortions and detailed the ways in which this feminist collective had pulled together in the hope of preventing these tragedies from happening, regardless of the law in pre-Roe times. It was a riveting book and did a good job of detailing the horror of living in a time when abortion was illegal in all but a few states in the US.
A proud moment for me: Years and years ago the anti-choice folks had selected this one particular local clinic to picket with their nice signs and photos and whatever. I made a giant coat hanger out of .060 ga copper wire bent into the normal shape and this was my picket “sign.” I stayed near the protestors but didn’t physically intrude, and zero (0) of them had the stones to approach me about my “sign.”
Was just trying to make folks think for a change.
#10: the news out of modern-day Ireland, Northern Ireland, and various Central American states suggests that you’re wrong. Women die from abortion bans. Even today, with modern medecine and technology, women die from these policies.
This is why I feel one thing that needs to happen is for those who’ve made these choices to speak loudly up about it. Like, this procedure is one of the more common surgical procedures out there and there are so many stories out there from so many people.
The sexist forced-birthers have been erasing the women out of this whole debate rather successfully in their cynical campaign against women’s basic rights and the role of health care. So we need to recenter the women and their experiences. The deaths that happen without access, the stories of those who needed them for any reason, especially those who had to to make sure they and their children could live.
Because the forced-birthers are using this as a means to attack all reproductive health care and all surgeries they don’t approve and it needs to stop once and for all. Abortion has been deemed a medically ethical procedure by the AMA, if the forced-birthers really bought their bullshit, they’d take their campaign there. But they don’t, because they are full of shit and get off on harassing and abusing women just trying to access their health care rights.
@Marshall
The “fetuses as human” argument is defeated by the notion of self-preservation.
I’ve done this to forced-birthers before. I accepted their premise at face value (despite the stretching that necessitates). Okay, so the fetus is human. Now what? It’s still inside *my* body, and comes with its own set of consequences, many of which are negative. Well it may be tragic or unfortunate for me to “apply force” to preserve myself since the fetus has not conscientiously put me in this position, but it’s no different than swerving in traffic to cause a minor accident in order to avoid a major one. Nobody “deserved” it, nothing about the circumstances is deliberate, but it’s a perfectly sensible if unfortunate thing to do despite its randomness. Saying I’m obligated to plough into the major accident to avoid the minor one is some pretty twisted morality–I’m quite certain such a choice would be uncommon.
That’s only for the sake of argument. I do believe a fetus qualifies as a parasite unless the pregnant person decides otherwise, but the forced-birthers just start chanting “murderer.” Let’s give rights to tape worms, while we’re at it.
@#10, handsomemrtoad
In other words “this issue isn’t really an issue because it won’t effect people who are rich enough to take a bunch of time off and travel”. (Sort of the way divorce “wasn’t really an issue” back around 1900 because the rich could go and spend a few weeks partying in Paris while they got one.) People too poor to do that? Well, better take some drugs which might be prohibited in your state, and shut up. And if you can’t afford those drugs — or don’t want to break the law — well, tough patooties, you shouldn’t have been having sex, not even if you’re married.
I keep saying that economics is a social issue (in response to the continuing push by the Democrats to use “social issues” to blackmail people into supporting right-wing economics). People like you prove me right, but I almost wish you didn’t.
18 numerobis: I didn’t say NO deaths; I said NOT MANY. And, Ireland? Really? Irish women routinely travel and get abortions abroad (and it’s not nearly as expensive for an Irish woman to travel outside Ireland as for an American to travel outside USA.) England and Holland are the most popular destinations for Irish abortion-tourists.
21 The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs): RE: “In other words “this issue isn’t really an issue because it won’t effect people who are rich enough to take a bunch of time off and travel”.”
AFFECT. Not “EFFECT”.
RE: “People too poor to do that? Well, better take some drugs which might be prohibited in your state, and shut up. And if you can’t afford those drugs — or don’t want to break the law — well, tough patooties, you shouldn’t have been having sex, not even if you’re married.”
Both you and chigau (違う) have responded as if I were saying it won’t be bad when Roe/Wade goes. But I didn’t say that. It will likely be VERY bad. What I said is that there won’t likely be MANY DEATHS. Exaggerating the magnitude and character of a danger does NOT help cope with the danger, and, in the end, does NOT strengthen an argument against a policy which would cause the danger. What do you say, for instance, when a right-wing hate-monger says “if we let Syrian refugees into USA, they’ll take over and make us all convert to Islam!!!!!!!”? You say: “No they won’t. That’s stupid. Go away.”
Remember also: sure it’s an outrage if women have to travel for abortions. They shouldn’t have to. But how often does it happen? USA is not like USSR where many women had fifteen or more abortions.
Siobhan, No. 20, the anti-choice argument is actually a bit more complicated than that. The argument is that if you don’t want to get pregnant, birth control is cheap and easy and almost always effective, and if a woman chooses to have unprotected sex, she has to live with the consequences, just like if you get HIV from unprotected sex you have to live with the consequences. In both cases, the situation in which you now find yourself was completely avoidable by practicing safe sex, and if you’re too lazy to do that, the child that resulted should not be killed for your laziness.
The legal term for this is “special duty”. Even if you normally would not have a duty to someone else, if that someone else is in a predicament because of your own negligent conduct (in this case not practicing safe sex), you acquire a duty because of your own negligence that put them in the bad situation in the first place. That precious fetus only exists in the first place because you were negligent in allowing the conception to occur.
Now, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but not much.
@#22, handsomemrtoad
PEDANT. Not “IMPORTANT”.
The outrage isn’t that they would have to travel, the outrage is that having abortion be legal (and available, of course — in a sense there are already places where it is not available, which causes the same problem) in some places, and not in others, which means that the rich can afford to get one without breaking the law, while the poor cannot.
@#23, thirdmill
Or getting raped.
Or practicing safe sex, but the method you used failed. (All forms of birth control have a nonzero failure rate.)
Or having a previously-undiagnosed medical condition which means you and the fetus will die if you don’t abort.
Or having a fetus with a medical condition which will kill it eventually, but in a much more painful and agonizing way than an abortion.
Those are just off the top of my head — there are undoubtedly others.
The argument that there is “special duty” involved because abortion sometimes involves a fetus created out of carelessness is specious, because it ignores the other cases.
I think the best pro-choice argument is:
Some pro-choicers say we don’t know whether or not fetuses are live human persons. But SMARTER pro-choicers say we don’t CARE whether or not fetuses are live human persons.
If something is located inside your body and unwelcome there, then you should be entitled to have it killed, no matter what it is. If ALL the human beings in the whole world were gathered together inside your body, then you should be entitled to holocaust them. That’s part of the meaning of the word “your” in the phrase “your body”. If God were located inside your body, then you should be entitled to kill God (and may God have mercy upon His own soul).
@25 handsomemrtoad
Why should you be entitled to have it killed? Or more particularly, since most US anti-abortion laws don’t set punishments for women having abortions but for doctors performing them, why should you be entitled to have other people kill it for you? If I decide my healthy spleen is an unwelcome occupant of my body, can I demand a doctor remove it?
Vicar, No. 24, you’re right that there are “other cases” though I suspect those other cases are probably a small percentage of the abortions performed.
I support abortion rights in part because I don’t think the fetus, at least in the early stages, is a person. I will admit, though, that if I did think it was a person, it would be a lot harder to take the position that it’s OK to kill it when its conception could have easily been prevented in the first place. At that point, you really are killing someone because of someone else’s irresponsibility. And if you’re trying to sway public opinion, that’s not an easy sell.
@thirdmill #27
Please show me the statistics on how many of those “other cases” end in abortions? I’m willing to bet that it’s a much larger number than you would expect. People have sex. A lot. A .01% failure rate means there will be many failures of the birth control method used. In some cases, the child will be welcomed anyway. In other cases, the time is not right for some reason, in many cases because the family cannot support the coming child either financially, emotionally, or both. And that’s not even considering any of the other issues The Vicar brought up. I don’t always agree with them, but they brought up good points.
As for thinking of it as a person making it harder to kill the child, you’re welcome to never get an abortion yourself. Being a man, I am lucky enough to never have to make that decision myself. It’s dictating that nobody else is allowed that decision that makes you anti-choice.
Think of it this way: if you have someone squatting in your house while you’re living there, you’re free to evict them. You have no moral obligation to make sure they can find living arrangements outside your home.
Granted, a fetus cannot live outside the uterus, but it is, as Siobhan said, a parasite unless and until the host decides otherwise. If you don’t believe me, look up the definition of parasite. I’ve heard many mothers refer to a child in the womb as a parasite when they were not feeling well due to the pregnancy. They still loved that little parasite once it detached from the host and became an independent human.
Oh, I forgot to mention:
All killing is due to someone else’s irresponsibility, be it soldiers killing in war, terrorists killing because they weren’t caught early enough, terrorists feeling justified due to someone else’s perceived slights, someone killing their spouse’s lover, etc. Just because I don’t think any killing is justified doesn’t mean I don’t believe in killing, though. It all depends on circumstance.
methuseus, if someone is squatting in my house because I myself created the circumstances that are causing them to squat in my house, I may or may not be able to evict them, and I will certainly not be allowed to do so unless I’ve made arrangements for them elsewhere. That goes back to the special duty issue — if your own conduct created the situation in the first place, then you have a duty that you wouldn’t otherwise have. In any other context than abortion, that’s not even controversial.
And I think at the purely visceral level, this is why the pro-choice position is deeply troubling to a lot of people. They understand that bad things happen. They don’t understand shifting the cost of irresponsible behavior to an innocent child by taking that life. Consequence-free behavior is enough of a hard sell all by itself; shifting the cost of irresponsible behavior onto an innocent child is a complete non-starter. And again, in any context other than abortion, this wouldn’t even be controversial.
My body is not my house. My body is me. I can evict someone–violently, if necessary–if they are inside me and I don’t want them there. Even if I invited them in, I can revoke consent at any time. I am not required to allow a stranger, a baby, or even my own lawfully recognized spouse to continue occupation of me.
Unless the laws are very different where you live, you can evict them with, usually, 5 days notice, sometimes less. No, you don’t have to make sure they have arrangements for them elsewhere. Maybe that’s just the USA though.
But The Mellow Monkey is right. A body is different from a house anyway. How about this analogy. If someone is raping another person, do you feel they would be justified in killing that person if it were the only way to stop the rape? If not, you have some pretty messed up priorities.
See the part I highlighted. Can you guarantee me that the vast majority (above 75%) of abortions are because of negligence? Not knowing how to use contraception isn’t negligence because it’s likely because of lack of instruction in school and by parents. Failure of contraception doesn’t count because there is no negligence.
You also act like there is no cost to the mother (for lack of a gender neutral word?). Many abortions are not entered into lightly. Also, if the abortion is for economic or other “bad situation” reasons, will that child really have much chance in the world if they weren’t aborted? I’ve seen children born to mothers that never wanted a child. I would never wish that on anyone.
Say that it’s about preserving life all you want, but until every single anti-choice individual adopts a minimum of one child and treats them like their own child, they can’t honestly be considered as pro-life. And you can’t cheat by shopping around and only adopting infants, either. Sometimes the infant isn’t adopted right away and turns into a toddler or a child, and then there is very little chance of adoption.
#26 chris61:
RE: “Why should you be entitled to have it killed?”
Because it’s located inside your body.
RE: “If I decide my healthy spleen is an unwelcome occupant of my body, can I demand a doctor remove it?”
If you can find a doctor willing to do that (goooooood luck!), you should be entitled to HIRE him.
Mellow Monkey, and metheseus, you’re still not understanding the concept of special duty, which basically means that you got them into this mess, so you have a duty to get them out of it. The fetus was not merely invited in and had any choice about whether to accept the invitation. And the huge public relations problem comes from the woman saying, as Mellow Monkey does, that despite irresponsible conduct being the cause of the fetus’s problems, it’s all about me and I have the right to kill something that only exists because I couldn’t be bothered to practice birth control. That kind of raw selfishness just isn’t going to fly with a lot of people; it’s Ayn Rand on steroids.
Now, let me say again that I myself do not believe the fetus is a person, at least not in the early stages, so for me that resolves the issue. I’m firmly pro choice. But for those people who believe the fetus is a person, you are not going to persuade them that people should be killed because of parental irresponsibility, which is probably most of the abortions that are performed. At least not with any argument I’ve heard yet.
@33
So the question is, since you think I should be entitled to do it, will you support politicians who will fight to make doctors offer the service and force private insurance and medicare/medicaid to pay for it?
Chris61, I’m not remotely convinced you’re arguing honestly, but a major difference between abortion and removing a healthy spleen is that the abortion is medically indicated. Having an abortion *always* entails a lower risk than continuing with the pregnancy; doing so does not therefore involve a doctor violating their medical ethics.
@36 jefrir
Having an abortion will in some cases entail a lower risk to the pregnant person but it always entails a 100% risk to a healthy fetus. Whether it requires a doctor to violate their medical ethics depends on whether the doctor considers the fetus a person.
37chris61:
RE: “Having an abortion will in some cases entail a lower risk to the pregnant person but it always entails a 100% risk to a healthy fetus.”
Yes, but the healthy fetus is located inside another person’s body, and unwelcome there. Therefore, we don’t care about it.
There are also doctors who possibly believe that you won’t go to heaven if your body is not fully intact. Imagine a society where that was the majority belief. Tons of people dying due to sepsis, toxic shock, etc, because getting an amputation or organ removed was so rare and regulated against to the point of non-existence. But hey, at least their ethics weren’t violated! Total win for society!
thirdmill
I love how you claim to be pro-choice while regurgitating this misogyny. There is no other instance wherein a person is required to maintain the presence of another life form inside of them. Even if you consider a fetus a person with all the legal rights of one, by forcing people who can get pregnant to carry them you’re declaring pregnant people sub-human, enslaved to the production of other people. When you use an analogy where a person who can get pregnant is an inanimate object like a house, you’ve already shown your hand. When you frame pregnant people as “irresponsible” and guilty of “raw selfishness”, you’re telling us exactly how you see them.
It’s nice that you’ve come to a place where you’re pro-choice and have determined fetuses aren’t people and aren’t due the full rights of such. But you’ve got a little further to go, since you clearly don’t see people who can get pregnant as people either.
@38
And that, I suspect, is at least part of the problem. There are some subset of pro-lifers who are offended by your indifference.
@39
Are you proposing to dictate ethics to doctors? I can see that going over real well.
chris61 #41
Do you have some objection to addressing commenters by name?
Does addressing them by a comment number make it easier to dehumanise them?
@42 chigau
I often address commenters by name. But sometimes I forget. My bad.
chris61@41
Doctors have their ethics dictated to them all the time via medical boards.
We’re talking about preventing a massive public health crisis in both cases where predominate cultural factors exclude life-saving benefits for the favor of some hokey belief in some quality of existence beyond what is factual.
Defining a fetus as a person with full rights a priori because you want to avoid murder is on the same level of metaphysical bullshit as believing organ donors are going to hell.
Mellow Monkey, first, I did not initiate the house analogy; if you go back and read the thread you’ll see that I was responding to someone else’s use of the house analogy.
Second, it is not misogynistic to say that women, like men, are responsible for the choices they make and the consequences that flow from them, in this case the decision not to use birth control. Unless your claim is that it’s misogyny any time a woman is told she can’t do something, and if that’s your claim it’s pretty silly. Men get told all the time they can’t do things.
Third, you are correct that pregnancy is the only situation in which one life is maintained inside another, but you’re ignoring how that life got there in the first place, which was by the failure to use birth control. And that is irresponsible, whether you want to hear that or not.
thirdmill, @45
And you are deliberately ignoring all the ways in which an unwanted pregnancy can occur for other reasons and not due to irresponsability, which were already pointed to you above, but you are willing to gloss that over to be able to assign blame to the pregnant women willing to abort, which you are disgustingly eager to vilify.
Are you really that dense, or you are deliberately trolling so clumsily?
“Who”, not “which”. Sorry about that. English is not my first language, and all that jazz.