It's Complicated
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IT’S COMPLICATED Nearly one in three American women will have an the most “sympathetic” abortions: those abortion by age 45. Why are we so afraid to talk performed because of rape or incest, be- about it—or to acknowledge that our lives would cause the life or health of the mother is in danger, or when the fetus has some dev- have been so much less than we hoped for without astating disease like Tay-Sachs. All those it? Why are we pressured to feel that we should regret taken together account for less than a our choice, and that there’s something wrong with us tenth of the more than one million preg- if we don’t? By Laurie Abraham nancies terminated in this country each year, Pollitt tells us in Pro: “So sorry, I went to Katha Pollitt’s apartment one latory new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion fifteen-year-old girls who got drunk at sunny afternoon last summer, bearing Rights—the very subject of which is im- a party, single mothers with all the kids fancy sandwiches and a decent bottle of politic. She greeted me at the front door they can handle and no money, mothers rosé. The sandwiches were our lunch; in dark, loose pants and a cotton-knit preoccupied with taking care of disabled the wine meant more. top, the kind of comfortable clothes one children, students with just one more year The venerable columnist of the left- wears to write. Her hair was short and to a degree, battered women, women who wing magazine The Nation lives with her spiky, a little damp, as if she’d just come have lost their job or finally just landed a second husband, political and social the- out of the shower. She was barefoot. Did decent one, and forty-five-year-olds who orist Steven Lukes, on Manhattan’s Up- I say it was hot in there? have already raised their kids to adult- per West Side. The apartment was very The wine was for me, you must know hood, to say nothing of women who just warm; sweat would soon bead on my up- by now. To calm my nerves, because I don’t feel ready to be a mother, or maybe per lip. came to Pollitt not just as an admirer even don’t ever want to be a mother.” Reporters sometimes ply interview of Pro but also to discuss my intention I took Pollitt’s book very personally; I subjects with alcohol in hopes of lessen- to write about my personal experience read it as a kind of call to action, an ap- ing their inhibitions, getting them to say with its topic. I’m tired of the rhetoric, peal to stop letting abortion opponents the impolitic but “true” thing. But not even from pro-choice advocates, who in fill all the available airspace. There is in this case. I knew Pollitt would be ea- their understandable defensive posture an incipient movement in this direction, ger to expound on her important, reve- seem to restrict themselves to discussing akin perhaps to Ms. magazine’s “I have TaraTodras-Whitehill 292 READER Essay To read more from Katha Pollitt, go to ELLE.com/pollitt-Q&A. had an abortion” petition, first published are already mothers. They’re not—we’re means that more than half of Ameri- in 1972 and signed by such luminaries as not—“other.” Those numbers are from cans don’t approve of what I did, not to Billie Jean King and Nora Ephron. Lucy Pro, and when I call it “revelatory,” I mention that at 19 I barely qualified as a Flores, a politician running for lieuten- want to add, oddly so. You can’t live in teenager. (And somehow I suspect these ant governor in Nevada, whose story has the abortion-is-murder culture for all of respondents were thinking about girls been told in ELLE and other national your adult life and not have it affect you, finishing high school, not college.) publications, has been frank about the even if you’re pro-choice. So while I al- Some might put me in the category positive impact of abortion on her life. ready knew much of the basic informa- of women who’ve terminated pregnan- A young New Jersey woman named Em- tion Pollitt imparts, I’d “forgotten” some cies to further their careers; only a rock- ily Letts filmed her abortion and ear- facts, and lost track of how the facts in- bottom 25 percent of Americans approve lier this year posted it to YouTube; she formed my pro-choice convictions. of that. Seventy-nine percent would per- did it in part to counter the anti abortion I came of age in the ’70s—I was eight mit abortion when rape or incest are the movement’s successful efforts to limit when Roe v. Wade was decided—a time cause of pregnancy; if it’s about protect- abortions via state laws requiring clinics when pro-choice advocates didn’t feel ing the physical health of the mother, 83 that perform the procedure to be outfit- forced to talk exclusively about the other percent say abortion is okay. ted practically like full-service hospitals; kinds of medical care Planned Parent- But these figures alone can be mis- she wanted to show that the standard hood clinics provided: the breast cancer leading, and Pollitt does an excellent job surgery isn’t especially complicated or screens, the contraception, the treatment of unpacking them and showing the con- painful. And, most recently, in the ro- for sexually transmitted diseases. I grew tradictions in our views, as well as the mantic comedy Obvious Child, a single co- up in that short era when, Pollitt writes, limits to what surveys can tell us about medienne named Donna, after getting “you were not automatically a callous, su- the decisions Americans make for them- pregnant on a one-night stand, quickly perficial person if you felt nothing but re- selves (an old abortion joke, according to decides to have an abortion and follows lief that you were no longer pregnant, and Pollitt: “When should abortion be legal? through with it (unlike in most movies, you were not a monster if you said so.” Rape, incest, and me”), or even which in which abortion is used as what one In several meetings at work in which policies they’d support given the chance. critic called a “misdirect” that eventually this essay was discussed, I noticed that One piquant example from Pro: More gives way to an “uplifting birth”). As none of the other editors in the room, all than a third of those who call themselves Jenny Slate, the actress who plays her of them pro-choice, could bring them- “pro-life” also say women should have “KATHA POLLITT’S PRO IS DIRECTED AT THIS AMBIVALENT SET: ABORTION SHOULD BE LEGAL, SORT OF, BUT IT’S WRONG, SORT OF, AND IT SHOULDN’T BE TOO EASY, AND IT SHOULDN’T BE TOO LATE.…” in the film, told The New York Times, the selves to utter the word abortion; it was the right to choose abortion. arc of Obvious Child is Donna’s “complex “Laurie’s pro piece,” or her “memoir.” I The book is directed at this ambiva- experience” with terminating her preg- know that my colleagues, many of whom lent set, what Pollitt calls the “muddled nancy, not that abortion is a “tragedy.” are my friends, were just trying to be kind middle,” and it’s not that she doesn’t For a small segment of women—and when they referred to my “reproductive understand that people have oppos- the number is small, by any reasonably rights” story. The truth is, I felt uncom- ing impulses about important matters. scientific account—abortion is indeed a fortable saying it out loud too. Abortion The problem, she writes, is that “While tragedy, a trauma with long-lasting re- is a conversational third rail, women’s you in the muddled middle dither and verberations. But I want to tell a different dirtiest dirty laundry, to mix metaphors. worry and fret and vent—yes, abortion story, the more common yet strangely Because the other thing about living in should be legal, sort of, but it’s wrong, hidden one, which is that I don’t feel a political culture where a single-cell zy- sort of, and it shouldn’t be too easy, and guilty and tortured about my abortion. gote is constantly being called a “person” it shouldn’t be too late, and the woman Or rather, my abortions. There, I said it. is that there is a penumbra of shame sur- needs to think about it more, but also not “Abortion. We need to talk about it,” rounding abortion. For myself, however, wait too long, and most of all she should Pollitt beseeches in Pro. “We need to talk I wonder: Am I really ashamed—and, if not be such an irresponsible slut—a rad- about it differently. Not as something we so, what is it exactly that I’m ashamed of? ical movement against abortion rights all agree is a bad thing about which we has gathered enormous speed.” In 2000, shake our heads sadly and then debate its The first one was the “acceptable” one— according to the Guttmacher Institute, precise degree of badness, preening our- the one that most people would under- about one third of American women selves on our judiciousness and moral se- stand, at least those who aren’t categor- lived in states “hostile” to abortion.