Jan. 16, 2010
National Catholic Reporter
Stammering about abortion
By Claire Schaeffer-Duffy
http://ncronline.org/news/justice/stammering-about-abortion
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy lives with her husband Scott and children at
the Saints Francis and Therese Catholic Worker House in
In mid-November, the New York-based Human Rights Watch weighed in on
the Stupak amendment to the
into law, the amendment would prohibit using a federal subsidy to
purchase an insurance plan that includes coverage of abortion except
in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest. The bill’s restriction,
Human Rights Watch argued, “would effectively eliminate abortion
access for millions of women and threatens women’s human rights.”
I love Human Rights Watch, the international organization that
monitors the violations of human beings all around the world. I
consult them whenever I can. With their careful cataloging of
persecutions, their reports remind me of the ineffable truth that
human beings are made in the image of God and as such don’t deserve to
be bombed, raped, demeaned or disregarded. But the organization’s
classification of unrestricted and subsidized access to abortion as a
“human right” has left me stammering, for when considered in detail,
abortion does not evoke a sense of possibility, my typical response to
a right realized. Instead, I feel despair.
In “We Do Abortions Here: A Nurse’s Story” (Harper’s Magazine, October
1987), Sallie Tisdale writes with heartbreaking and brutal precision
about her work at a clinic that averaged 100 abortions a week. A
believer in the telescopic view, she is unflinching in her description
of the “disarmingly simple” abortion procedure, describing how her
patient lies bare, feet in stirrups, while a doctor inserts a tube and
sunctions the uterus. The machine thumps softly, and then in the basin
Tisdale holds, curd-like clots of blood reveal “an elfin thorax,”
beside which swim a translucent arm and hand. She also tells of the
doctor who reached into the uterus of a five-month pregnant woman to
manually crush her child and of the induced delivery that yielded a
20-week-old fetus, whole and intact. “It was just like a kitten,” said
the nurse who caught the child. “Everything was still attached.”
Tisdale admits to having “fetus dreams.” She dreams of “buckets of
blood splashed on walls” and “fetuses crawling in the trees,” and then
wakes and thinks of kitchen tables, coat hangers, and women “clutching
a pillow in their teeth to keep the scream from piercing apartment walls.”
Here are the worrisome details for those of us opposed to abortion.
Maternal mortality rates tend to be higher in countries where abortion
is illegal. According to “My Rights, My Rights to Know,” a 2008 Human
Rights Watch report on abortion access in
abortion except when the mother’s life is at risk or she faces serious
and permanent damage to her health. The report notes that even in
those instances where abortion is permitted, women are rarely
informed. Despite the restrictions, the practice is widespread. One
study estimates the number of abortions performed annually to be at
325,000, or one per live birth.
maternal mortality in
says the report. And they do. As do the preborn.
Established in 1972, Feminists for Life opposes abortion and its
criminalization. “We can do better” is their motto. The organization
rightly recognizes that in making abortion access the defining right
for women (the National Organization for Women calls it the “most
fundamental right for women, without which all rights are
meaningless”), we spare ourselves from asking the crucial questions:
Why do so many abortions occur and what are the alternatives? I
recently read a biography of an illiterate Lebanese woman who fled an
arranged marriage to marry the man she desired. Their union was
passionate and the woman found herself carrying more children than she
wanted. Scattered between her seven live births were self-induced
miscarriages brought on by throwing herself out of bed and drinking
potent teas. Access to abortion might have facilitated the termination
of her pregnancies, made the process safer, but would it have
rectified her fundamental problem -- a disconnect from her body? Would
it have empowered her to make a choice in the bedroom?
“Women have abortions,” writes Tisdale, “because they are too old and
too young, too poor and too rich, too stupid and too smart. I see
women who berate themselves with violent emotions for their first and
only abortion and others who return three, five times, hauling two or
three children, who cannot remember to take a pill or where they put
the diaphragm. We talk of choice. But the choice for what? ... And
there is freedom. Freedom from failure, faithlessness. Freedom from biology.”
Maybe autonomy is a delusion. The “our bodies, ourselves” movement
rightfully fought to elevate women above the classification of breeder
or sexual commodity, but, perhaps in the process, bought into a
stunted understanding of what it means to be a human being. In their
defense of abortion, the early feminists often asked, “Is biology
destiny?” Yes, it ultimately is. For women. And for men. Creatures of
the natural world, we harbor wombs and eggs, and fertile sperms that
enable us to procreate. We age and degenerate. We die and decompose.
The founding mothers of the women’s movement did not regard their
bodies so hostilely. They unanimously opposed abortion, referring to
it as “infanticide.” Far from regarding abortion as a woman’s “human
right,”
convention in
consider that women have been treated as property, it is degrading to
women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of
as we see fit.” Years ago, I heard ecofeminists critique abortion as
yet another example of the male notion of employing technology to
rearrange and control the natural order.
The Human Rights Watch report urging better abortion access in
recounts two stories of women who conceived children that were
discovered to be malformed while still in uteri. The children were not
expected to live and the mothers wanted to avoid laboring into a loss.
Reading these, I thought of Frida, the firstborn of my friend, a young
mother in
only after an arduous, unproductive labor and C-section. This had been
a midwife-monitored pregnancy with few ultrasounds. The infant lived
nine hard days before dying peacefully in her mother’s arms. My friend
admits the meaning of her daughter’s brief life remains a mystery to
her. Asked if she would have aborted had she known what lay ahead, she
thought a moment and then said, “No. Probably not.”
Abortion advocates and opponents speak fervently, as they should,
about the right to life. But life, when fully lived, is capricious and
far larger than we imagine. Albert Einstein once described human
beings as “part of the whole, called by us a universe. Although we
regard ourselves as “something separate from the rest,” this is “an
optical delusion of consciousness,” a “prison” restricting affection
and desire. Our task, he believed “was to widen the circle of
compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in
its beauty.”
all. It is this larger life each of us has a right to and this right
will never fully be realized through law, only through love.
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