The Abortion Petition

Read it. You can sign because you have had one, or because you support someone who has. And you don't have to be a woman to put your name up there. …

I have wondered and debated and tried to forget about this petition. I wasn’t sure I wanted my name on it. I wasn’t sure what that would mean for my career. Can you believe it? Worried over claiming a perfectly legal action in a way that I don’t worry about driving a bit over the speed limit every single day. The purpose of the petition is precisely to counter this internal struggle, the stigma.

Here’s the thing. It’s easy to categorize women who have had abortions as simply irresponsible in some way: sexually, morally, socially, etc. It’s easy to want to believe that if we all just abstain, or use birth control, everything will be just fine, and unintended pregnancies won’t happen. The trouble is that abstention is extremely difficult. Ask a man or woman of the cloth. The sexual pulsion is part of humanity. Denying it takes rather a lot of work. The trouble is that birth control can fail, in about nine thousand seven hundred and twenty-three different ways, even though it is pretty reliable.

That many states are moving to make birth control less available to whole classes of people is another issue – but not entirely. That sexual education is an impoverished and woeful thing in this country is another issue – but not entirely.

Here’s my story. I was recently divorced from a man who made of marriage a kind of fun house mirror. I was in grad school. I met man I liked. He was also in grad school. He liked me. And he made of relationships a very real and joyful mirror. The attraction between us was astonishing. The ease of discussion about our lives, our history, our present relationship, was astonishing. I learned from him just how really easy it is to be good to, for, and with a man – when that’s what both partners are doing. In short, we were good at loving, and gave that to each other. I was on the pill, as I had been for many years at that point. I was used to the habit of taking it. He and I used condoms… most of the time. And even with that (mostly) good sense and open communication about matters emotional and sexual on our side, I became pregnant.

As my doctor put it when I went to her: Nothing beats birth control like a hole in a condom and woman in a happy body. Happy women get pregnant more easily.

He had been accepted to a doctoral program in another state. I had a comps to read for and dissertation to write. Both of our families love and honor us. Our families and communities had supported our learning and becoming and talents, had each made sacrifices for our well-being and success in life. We had then and have now rich futures in front of us. The pregnancy put much of that, in both our lives, in some jeopardy. We were not planning on a life together. We were not prepared to change everything, to risk that much. We discussed the situation together, and each with our parents. Everyone was enormously sad, and sorry, and supportive of the moral choice he and I made to terminate the pregnancy.

It was, make no mistake, extremely hard to do, and a choice about which we had to seriously think. No one took this lightly. It was also painful. There is no pain like the one that emanates from the core of your body and which you cannot escape, which does not fade in few minutes.

I miss her. I always thought the fetus would be a girl. I miss her possibilities, how adorable and beautiful she would have been, how smart and precocious and curious – what with these two parents. I make a kind of prayer for her each month when my menses arrives.

It’s about nine years later, now. He’s married to a woman who is completely right for him, and for whom he is completely right. They’re thriving, and contented, and beautiful together. They’re both professors who teach the next generations. I’m not married, and I’m still carving out that life and work for which my family and friends have always hoped I would be brave enough to jump into. I was a professor for a time, and now will be a writer for a while. I did and will continue to teach the next generations in my work.

His happiness and my courage would not be possible without that choice and sacrifice. How many of the lives we have opened a bit or widely would not have been enriched in this way without it?

Moral choices are like that. They’re complicated, difficult, full of ambiguities, of joys and sadnesses, ambivalence. And they are necessary to our autonomous and collective being. That women and girls live in a world in which we are told we are wicked for taking on such difficult choices, in which it is assumed that the only way we got “in trouble” was due to some lasciviousness and irresponsibility on our part, in a world that Still Refuses to teach men and boys to be responsible for their sexuality and their sexual-moral choices --- that is the culture of death. That is the culture I hope we and wizen our way out of and into a culture where women are not the bearers of sexuality, and in which the ambiguity of living an engaged and accountable life is honored in the culture, the society, and the law.