Abortion
Several months ago, I appeared on a morning TV show alongside Cecile Richards, then the president of Planned Parenthood. Our topic had been women’s activism, and we’d both spoken in equal amounts. But when I checked Twitter later, the violent insults were flying only at Ms. Richards, with commenters calling her a “baby butcher” and “this puke bitch” for her support of abortion rights. None took aim at me — and as I read the stream, I felt more cowardly than I can ever remember, as if I were crouched in a foxhole while Ms. Richards took fire for the rest of us.
Why was I letting her take the heat? After all, I’d had an abortion myself.
No woman has an obligation to talk about her most personal decisions. The right to privacy, in fact, is the legal underpinning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that secures a woman’s right to choose. Still, that day I felt ashamed — not of my choice, which I have never regretted, but of my silence. The decision I made 30 years ago was perfectly legal. I’m a grown woman, with a family and a career I love. Why keep quiet?
Last week, that question has taken on new urgency. As Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose vote has helped protect abortion rights over his 30 years on the Supreme Court, prepares to retire, we are faced with the very real prospect of a court that would overturn Roe, at a time when states across the country are already restricting abortion rights. Against this alarming backdrop, my silence started to feel like a holdover from a safer time. Which this most certainly is not.
The story of my abortion is nothing out of the ordinary, though it determined the course of the rest of my life. I was a college freshman, completely infatuated with a boy I had chased most of the semester. Back home in Virginia, my mother was in the slow process of dying of cancer; she’d hung on for my high-school graduation and sat with fierce pride and tears running down her cheeks as I got my diploma. I loved her profoundly, but when she dropped me off at college, I felt free from the crushing nearness of grief, and then immediately guilty at feeling free. I immersed myself in late-night discussions and new friends. I drank too much. And one night, when the object of my affection and I ended up at the same party and walked each other home giddily singing little-known Bruce Springsteen lyrics, I forgot everything I’d ever known about birth control. (As did he.)
Seven difficult weeks later, I ended my pregnancy at a nearby clinic. My main emotions were intense regret that I’d gotten myself into this mess and equally intense relief that I could get myself out. Before my mother died the next year, she told me she’d confided my experience to a friend so that I’d have someone to talk to about it if I ever felt alone. But the truth was, I found plenty of people to talk to about it those first years: friends, roommates, boyfriends, including the one I’d eventually marry. And my female friends and colleagues told me about their abortions — stories of broken condoms, carelessness, missed pills and sometimes rape. Some found their decisions agonizing, others not at all, but most had the same feeling that I did: not the situation I wanted to be in, but thank God it’s a choice I have.
Around us, it felt as if other women were talking too. Two decades earlier, in 1971, 343 well-known Frenchwomen like Catherine Deneuve and Simone de Beauvoir had signed the “Manifesto of the 343” testifying that they’d had abortions. They got called the “343 salopes,” or sluts, for it, but still, the next year 53 Americans, including Gloria Steinem, Judy Collins and Billie Jean King, followed suit, publishing an open letter in Ms. magazine titled “We Have Had Abortions.”
By the time I came of age, in the 1980s and early 1990s, such stories were not unusual: In 1985, the Hollywood sweetheart Ali MacGraw had appeared, with a soft smile, on the cover of People under the headline “Abortion: No Easy Answers”; inside, she detailed her own harrowing procedure when it was illegal — and her later discovery that her own mother had had one as well. In 1991, Whoopi Goldberg and Rita Moreno opened up about their abortions (in Ms. Goldberg’s heartbreaking case, at age 14 with a coat hanger) in the book “The Choices We Made.” If I was sharing my story, I had company.
Then, at some point, I stopped sharing. In part because of the passage of time — after a few decades, and the birth of my children, the experience became a memory I thought of mostly when filling out the “number of pregnancies” line on doctors’ charts. But it wasn’t just that: Around me, other women seemed quieter too. Many of the earlier generation of activists had been survivors of the coat-hanger era and they spoke out as a warning: never again. As the years passed, so did that urgency; my generation began to feel more secure — and perhaps less inclined to air our private business.
And as the extreme and often violent anti-abortion movement in this country began to build steam, it also began to feel riskier to speak up. By the mid 2000s, the idea of a high-profile actress appearing on the cover of People to discuss her choice as Ms. MacGraw had 20 years earlier seemed preposterous. “Celebrities today regularly reveal the details of their drug addictions, sexual obsessions, marital infidelities,” the journalist Susan Dominus observed in 2005 in Glamour, “but no celebrity in recent memory has admitted to ending a pregnancy.” To be clear, women in the United States were still getting abortions; nearly one in four of us will have had one by age 45. They just weren’t talking about it.
Over the past few years, the attacks on reproductive rights have come fast and furious — 51 clinics closed nationally just between 2011 and 2014; in about 90 percent of American counties there are no abortion clinics; and the reduced access has hit poor communities and women of color especially hard. As a result, activism around abortion rights has risen, and I’ve watched in admiration as well-known women (from the entertainers Chelsea Handler and Vanessa Williams to Representative Jackie Speier) have spoken about their own experiences, while groups like We Testify and Shout Your Abortion, co-founded by the writer Lindy West, have collected stories online. But silence is still the rule, and I observed it: When I spoke at pro-choice events, I told only the story of an older female relative of mine who’d risked her life seeking an illegal abortion decades ago. It was true — but it wasn’t the whole truth.
And that day on Twitter, I began to feel like a coward.
This silence, after all, has a price: First, it renders the women who make this choice anonymous and lets those who would deny us our freedom do so without looking us in the eye. There are so many would-be deniers today: Iowa has passed a law that outlaws most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually about six weeks into a pregnancy, making it virtually impossible for most women to have one; politicians and pundits — from President Trump on the campaign trail to the columnist Kevin Williamson — now like to bat around the idea of punishment for those of us who have made this choice. (“I’ve got a soft spot for hanging,” Mr. Williamson said, chillingly.)
But would it be quite so easy to demonize this common experience if it were clear that the women who have gone through it include kindergarten teachers, clergywomen, Republicans, C.E.O.s, the woman who served your coffee this morning, who cleans your house, who signs your paycheck, who patrols your neighborhood? As the activistRenee Bracey Sherman, who runs the We Testify site, put it: “Everyone loves someone who has had an abortion. And if you think you don’t, they just haven’t shared their story with you yet.”
Silence also allows menacing myths about abortion to thrive. Most Americans believe the procedure to be less common than it is, and more dangerous. No wonder: According to one study, on television 5 percent of all female characters who choose abortion die — a figure that is 7,000 times the actual, very low real-life mortality rate. As for the popular perception that women regret their abortions, 95 percent of women who end their pregnancies say they believe they made the right decision. Oh, and the stereotype that women who get abortions are selfish or unmaternal? Well, the majority already have one child, studies show. But for a young woman faced with an unplanned pregnancy, those are terrifying misperceptions to contend with.
It’s time for those of us who know and have lived the truth to raise our hands and say no, this is the real story: Many of us have been here before you, and we are here for you, and we will not let your rights be rolled back. With that in mind, I recently told my own 15-year-old daughter about the choice I’d made. To my surprise, I cried as I described my life that year — the confusion, my mother’s illness — and though she was just a kid, not much younger than I had been then, she wiped my tears. I told her that I felt immense gratitude for the life I have been able to build, for the two children I’ve been able to care and provide for, for the marriage I could choose freely, for the dreams I was able to pursue. And all of it, I told her, was made possible by my right to decide when I was ready to be a mother.
Today, that right is under greater threat than it has been in my adult lifetime, for her and for all women. And just as women decades ago shared their stories en masse in an effort to change inhumane laws, it’s time for those of us who feel we can share to do so once again. Already on social media, women have responded to the Supreme Court news by coming forward to say “I made this choice,” and their forthrightness encourages my own.
No woman owes anyone an answer about whether she has or hasn’t. But roughly one in four of us have, and we are your sisters and mothers and friends. We have lives. We have moral compasses. If you are going to call us immoral, ignore our basic human dignity, propose sending us (but not our partners) to jail, or enact bans that, make no mistake, will kill women — well, these are not anonymous characters you’re dealing with, represented by a few brave spokespeople on TV. You’re dealing with real women. You’re dealing with me. You’re dealing with us.
An Irish Catholic bishop has suggested that undergoing an abortion may sometimes be a more traumatic experience for women than being raped.
Dermot Farrell, who serves as Bishop of Ossory at the Saint Mary's Cathedral in the Irish town of Kilkenny, made the remarks as Ireland prepares to vote on whether or not to repeal the country's conservative laws on abortion. Reflecting the traditional position of the Catholic Church, Farrell is a staunch supporter of the country's tough policy against abortion and, citing his experience with women, said abortion must remain illegal even in cases of conception after rape.
"First of all, rape is a violent act and it's a violent crime against a woman — a terrible crime," Farrell told Irish radio station Newstalk.
"And sometimes, what I understand from women who have been raped, is that the abortion that followed sometimes after rape was far worse than the rape itself," he added.
Ireland is one of only two European Union countries that outright ban abortions except if it’s proven childbirth would take the mother's life, according to Euronews. The other country is Malta. In these countries, abortion is prohibited even in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformities, socioeconomic grounds and various other reasons provided for the procedure, which is readily accessible in almost every other EU state.
Owing to its strong Catholic tradition, Ireland has resisted attempts to soften its stance on abortion. The Catholic Church believes that life starts at conception, therefore abortion would be akin to taking the life of an unborn child. The Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, adopted in 1983, states, "The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."
A number of women's rights organizations and liberal groups have protested this viewpoint, arguing that a woman should be able to choose what to do with her body. After mounting pressure, the Irish government approved a bill in March that would trigger a referendum to be held May 25, deciding whether or not to repeal the Eighth Amendment.
Farrell was appointed to his position in January by Pope Francis, who despite his own campaign to reform the Vatican has never opted to soften the Catholic Church's stance on abortion. During Friday's interview, Farrell said that preserving legislature against abortion "was the most important social and justice issue of our time."
"It's going to shape the kind of Ireland that we have," Farrell added. "What we're voting on here is not just a law, but a value system."
The retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy and the selection of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to fill his seat makes the future of Roe v. Wade shaky at best, and doomed at worst. Even with Kennedy’s vote, Roe is a shadow of what it once was. States have spent the decades since Roe was decided chipping away at the expansive right the justices announced in that case. In so doing, access to abortion has become a patchwork based on where a woman lives and her economic standing.
Since 1976, the Hyde Amendment has kept federal funds from being used to pay for abortions for poor women (with a few narrow exceptions.) Widespread clinic closures due to onerous and unnecessary laws regulating abortion procedures have left many women living in areas without ready access to abortion care. Thus, overruling Roe, as many think will happen, would be the last in a series of steps that have made access to abortion increasingly difficult for most and nonexistent for many.
The Supreme Court vacancy reminds us that all rights within our constitutional order are precarious, especially when those rights protect the most vulnerable. When a new justice joins the court for a lifetime appointment, that person’s vote impacts law for those of us alive today and perhaps for generations to come.
If Roe falls, abortion would cease to be a right protected by the U.S. Constitution. Instead, individual states would determine abortion rights, likely under state constitutions. The last several years of abortion legislation and litigation reveal deep fissures in how states do or do not protect abortion access within their borders. There are several states that have long protected the right to abortion and will likely continue to do so even if Roe falls. There are many others, however—at least 23 according to the Center for Reproductive Rights—who are just as likely to act quickly to make abortion illegal in their states.
There are some indisputable truths about abortion in the United States. First, abortion is a common procedure for women of reproductive age. According to researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, about one in four women will have an abortion by the age of 45. Whether you know it or not, there is a strong likelihood that someone you know, love, and respect has had an abortion at some point. Second, abortion is an incredibly safe procedure. A first trimester abortion (which is when most women terminate their pregnancies) is safer for the pregnant woman than carrying a pregnancy to term. Third, making abortion illegal will not keep women from ending their pregnancies.
Women who want to terminate pregnancies will find ways to do so. Wealthy women will travel out of state or even out of the country to have abortions, while more economically fragile women will sometimes resort to illegal abortions with unscrupulous providers or to dangerous self-abortion techniques where legal and safe abortions are not made available to them.
It is ironic that in the same year that Ireland finally began to reform its archaic and dangerous abortion ban, the United States is poised to move backwards in its commitment to abortion rights. A majority of Americans believe that in all or most cases, women should have the right to have an abortion. In spite of this societal consensus, this administration speaks of protecting the unborn while acting with deep disregard for the needs of born children.
Forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term while simultaneously constricting the social safety net, decreasing access to contraception, and touting abstinence-only sex education is nonsensical. Pretending that motherhood is always the right choice for women is a farce in a nation that has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world. Claiming a commitment to families, while not requiring paid family leave for new parents shows how shallow that commitment truly is.
About half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended and there will always be women who become pregnant when they do not want to be pregnant. Some of those women will strongly desire to end those pregnancies. In a world without Roe, it is the most vulnerable women—poor, young, women of color, undocumented—who will suffer the most. These are the women for whom pregnancy and childbirth create significant risks, physical and otherwise, and for whom parenting is perilous in a nation that demands that even those without boots pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The legacy of Roe has been critical for women’s equality. Being able to control if and when one becomes a mother is a basic human right that can only be realized with access to a full range of reproductive health services, including abortion. Without Roe, many more American women will find themselves searching for ways out in a country that assumes their fitness for motherhood while denying their fitness to choose for or against pregnancy.
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Planned Parenthood is an organization used and appreciated by many, without question, yet their controversial practices are slandered heavily by those that disagree.
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With not many people willing to speak out and fight for what they believe in, we are at risk of losing these things.
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Great lengths are being spoken about involving the future of abortions
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Different countries ie. ireland have laws prohibiting abortion due to the catholic faith
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