Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  Few new doctors are learning to perform abortions, and those who do, concerned that publicity like the WANTED posters will ruin their practices, often return to the happier task of delivering babies. The big medical organizations, which can lobby like nobody’s business when they want to, have been uncommonly low-key. They were more fired up about our right to choose breast implants than they have ever been about our right to choose abortion.

  Ms. Windle says that a reporter scoffed when she described this as a civil war. But it is a war, and there is battle fatigue. There has sprung up a thirst for some middle ground. Sometimes the talk is of promoting contraception, sometimes of curtailing the period of pregnancy during which abortion is permissible, sometimes of merely allowing abortion while making clear that it is not desirable.

  But this battle is not being driven by those with a will to compromise. The people who are harassing doctors, patients, and clinics consider any means permissible in their quest to prove that they know what’s better for you than you do. The ordinary American standards of personal privacy and personal property don’t apply. “God’s law is higher than man’s law,” says Randall Terry, the leader of Operation Rescue, who said in Buffalo that he would be using investigators to dig up dirt on doctors who perform abortions, a part of God’s law that I missed in my study of the Bible.

  And so it is important today to remember a T-shirt slogan: Think Globally, Act Locally. Many of us who speak out in favor of legal abortion have had little to do with the day-to-day happenings at the clinics, perhaps because we were focused on sweeping safeguards, perhaps because it is easier to see abortion as a crusade than as a business. The truth is it must be both. Freedom of the press is only as meaningful as the willingness of one person to publish a newspaper. The right to choose abortion is empty if the people who provide it are harassed out of existence.

  HEARTS AND MINDS

  April 22, 1992

  Today the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a Pennsylvania law that would restrict access to abortion in that state. Today demonstrators from both sides of the question will face each other across the unbridgeable moat of their disparate beliefs outside clinics in Buffalo.

  What about tomorrow?

  With all this activity, in the courts and in the streets, it is important to remember that we have taken this debate exactly nowhere in the last twenty years. The great social issues of this country are settled not with placards or legal briefs finally but in hearts and minds. While the standard-bearers on both sides posit from the margins of perfect certainty, the great majority learn nothing that they didn’t already know about abortion.

  There has been a lot of talk that the Pennsylvania statute is a kind of abortion-rights Armageddon. It includes parental consent and spousal notification, a twenty-four-hour waiting period and medical counseling about other available options, the procedure, and the gestational age of the fetus.

  I do not like this law. It has as its subtext the assumption, prevalent among anti-abortion zealots, that women decide to have abortions in the same way they decide to have manicures. But it does not serve our credibility to inflate its provisions. When we squander our rhetoric on restrictions in Pennsylvania, what does that leave us for the law in Louisiana, a slam-dunk of legal abortion that allows it only in limited cases of rape and incest or to save the life of the mother?

  More important, when we excoriate waiting periods and parental consent we dismiss the ambivalence of many Americans and we miss an opportunity to communicate beyond the slogans. Waiting periods sound reasonable—until you evoke the impoverished mother of three who has driven six hundred miles and has only one day’s worth of baby-sitting money in her pocket.

  Parental consent is constantly justified with the aspirin analogy, the idea that a girl who cannot get Tylenol in school without a parent’s permission should not be able to have an abortion without that permission. That’s because the judicial bypass that is a required alternative to consent is little more than a phrase. You have only to describe a fifteen-year-old pleading her case before a judge to make some people understand that this alleged attempt to legislate communication is designed to intimidate instead.

  The spousal notification provision is supposed to send the message that husbands have rights, too. But common sense tells us all that a woman who can’t discuss this with her husband probably has a reason so potent that no law is going to deter her.

  In short, there are many talking points. It is simply that we have not talked. We have taken stands, and stood.

  I understand the positioning that is taking place here, to drum up support by evoking an imminent threat to legal abortion. And I understand the frustration at an issue that it seems will never be settled, and the temptation to meet zealotry with zealotry.

  But it saddens me to see some of those who support abortion rights in Buffalo using language as ugly as that of the people who send me anonymous postcards filled with vitriol and photographs of fetuses. I imagined we were better than that. I picture folks seeing this on television and thinking that both groups are lousy with lunatics.

  Most Americans, the polls tell us, feel truly represented by neither side. They are the people who say they simultaneously believe abortion is wrong and it is a private matter. While the demonstrators see black and white, they see gray.

  In 1990, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee held six “listening sessions” to hear what Catholic women were saying about abortion. I wish in every town in America someone would do what the honorable archbishop did: bring people together to talk, to disagree, and above all to acknowledge the gray areas.

  If we rely on elections and legislation, those of us who believe abortion should be legal, our fortunes will vary with the personnel. If we make people feel their ambivalence is unacceptable, then we’ve lost them. But if we have reached out to, and reached, the hearts and minds of average Americans with honest discussion, that will drive so much of the rest.

  Or we can continue moving from legal argument to legal argument, confrontation to confrontation, as we will today.

  But what about tomorrow?

  ONE VOTE

  July 1, 1992

  History was being made Monday. You could tell because Harry Blackmun and Randall Terry agreed about something. Justice Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, and Mr. Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, both said the same thing when the Supreme Court decision affirming a constitutional right to abortion but upholding state restrictions was handed down.

  One vote, they each said, one with anguish, the other with rage. One vote.

  That is what you need to remember about what happened this week. The ruling on Roe was 5 to 4. One vote. It was a most confusing day. It is not often that those who support legal abortion and those who oppose it agree on anything. But both said the decision was dreadful, and that left many Americans befuddled about what it all meant.

  It was a most personal ruling by the Court, as though the tumult in the streets was a fever that had reached inside and infected even those nine so insulated from the world.

  Justice Scalia’s dissent espousing the overthrow of Roe was angry and dismissive of the majority opinion. “Its length, and what might be called its epic tone, suggest that its authors believe they are bringing to an end a troublesome era,” he sniped.

  Justice Blackmun’s frustration at the ebb tide of judicial liberalism burst out in an attack on Chief Justice Rehnquist: “The chief justice’s criticism of Roe follows from his stunted conception of individual liberty.”

  But perhaps the most personal part of the decision was that upholding the right to an abortion. Written by Justices Souter, Kennedy, and O’Connor, characterized by Justice Blackmun as “an act of personal courage,” it stated a central truth, too seldom evoked: “the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law.”

  And it continued: “The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical co
nstraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the state to insist she make the sacrifice.

  “Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the state to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.”

  Those leaders with whom I agree about the necessity of legal abortion concentrated not upon the eloquent vision in that opinion but upon the restrictions upheld. I think waiting periods make abortion unnecessarily difficult for women who must travel great distances, and parental consent is intended to scare teenagers who must face a judge if they cannot face their mothers. I mourn a shift from a “fundamental right” to a right which must only contain no “undue burden.”

  But it does not serve accurate reporting—or even successful spin control—to say this decision guts Roe. Quite the contrary: justices once thought hostile to the unique questions of liberty and privacy raised by this issue apprehend them in ways we did not imagine. They got it, folks. And I, for one, applaud.

  I am sorry the Pennsylvania restrictions were upheld. But today it is critical to stress the reaffirmation and how tenuously it holds. If we want to raise the alarm, it will not be done by decrying counseling provisions.

  Justice Blackmun: “I fear for the darkness as four justices anxiously await the single vote necessary to extinguish the light.”

  Mr. Terry: “We need one more justice.…”

  George Bush has shown himself willing to nominate a second-rate jurist to satisfy a standard of conservative extremism. And zealots like Mr. Terry will be pressuring him for another such. “I am 83 years old,” Justice Blackmun wrote plaintively of his mortality and perhaps of Roe’s. Surely this must shape the election. Surely Republican women must consider how they will explain to their daughters their reelection of a man who will attempt to rescind the basic human right of bodily integrity.

  One vote. Pennsylvania is important. November is critical. This has always been a personal matter. It just got more personal. One vote. Yours.

  THE TRUTH TELLING

  July 5, 1992

  When she wrote about a Supreme Court decision on the liability of tobacco companies, New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse included a paragraph, part human interest, part factoid, explaining which of the justices smoked.

  She was in no position to do something along the same lines last week when the Court handed down its decision on abortion. There was no obvious way of telling if anyone on the Court had family or friends who had once ended a pregnancy.

  That is because abortion is considered a most private act. Many women have never told their parents, their children, or even their friends. They live closeted in this respect.

  It is a truism that the more we apprehend the world personally, the more empathetically we respond to it. One of the reasons homophobia has eased a bit is that more and more of us know gay people as friends, as colleagues, as sisters and brothers. That is because more of them are open about who they are. The openness and the understanding feed on each other, in a kind of circular argument of familiarity that breeds not contempt but knowledge.

  In the introduction to The Choices We Made, a book of personal accounts of abortion, Gloria Steinem wrote: “From the prisoners whose stories started the storming of the Bastille and the French revolution to the ‘speaking bitterness’ groups of China, from the church ‘testifying’ that started the civil rights movement to the consciousness-raising that began this most recent wave of feminism, populist truth telling has been the heart and soul of movements and revolutions all over the world.”

  Ms. Steinem herself was part of the truth telling when she and other prominent American women, including Lillian Hellman, Susan Sontag, Nora Ephron, Barbara Tuchman, and Billie Jean King, signed a manifesto in the first issue of Ms. magazine witnessing to their own abortions, a “campaign for honesty and freedom.”

  That was twenty years ago, twenty years during which close to 30 million abortions were performed in the United States. It is difficult to believe you do not know someone who has had one. Or perhaps you simply do not know you know. One of the ironies of parental-notification legislation is that the world demands sixteen-year-olds to tell their parents about their abortions when it is filled with forty-year-olds who have never done so.

  What Gloria Steinem and the other women who joined her did in 1972 was courageous. But, like listening to Cybill Shepherd rue a bad marriage, it may have seemed removed from everyday experience. We feel that the prominent are somehow different.

  In the minds of so many ordinary people, the women who have abortions are different, too, not quite like them. Perhaps that will continue until the day someone turns and says, “Mom, Dad, I have something important to tell you about my life.” Or until the woman at the next desk, hearing for the umpteenth time about how maybe it ought to be legal but Lord, I could never do it myself, finally blurts out, “Oh yes you could. I did.”

  It is easier to be judgmental about a construct than about a friend.

  I oppose outing. I don’t believe any gay man or lesbian, no matter how prominent, should be forced to retire privacy for the good of the cause, although I believe openness does the cause good. And I believe the only person entitled to know whether or not any woman has had an abortion is the woman herself.

  But when I hear people talk about abortions of convenience and abortion on demand, I know there is one superlative way to counter those utterly misleading modifiers. That is by testifying, bearing witness, truth telling. That’s how you learn what this really means, not by statistics or demonstrations or even court opinions. And it’s why, millions of abortions later, many Americans still don’t understand how central this liberty is to so many lives. No one has leaned across the kitchen table and told them.

  We moved forward last week, with a reaffirmation of the constitutional right to choose abortion that was as much about women as it was about issues. That is the stereotype that silence reinforces—that this is an issue. It is millions of stories, each one different. Many of them you know—sister, daughter, friend—except perhaps for the silence in the center where the abortion was. Silence is our right, too. But it sometimes leaves truth untold.

  NO MORE WAITING

  July 22, 1992

  From time to time you hear complaints from people of apparent goodwill about how much national attention is being focused on AIDS. What about cancer? say cancer survivors. What about heart disease? And in these complaints there is usually a touch of envy. Many of us whose lives were mangled by mortal illnesses suffered privately, confident that doctors and researchers and the purveyors of government grants were doing their level best to eradicate the scourge. We waited. And waited. And waited.

  Then the AIDS activists disrupted hearings and marched down city streets and agitated, agitated, agitated for better drugs, for speedier approvals, for more research money. Some people think they are too militant. If I could help give someone I loved a second chance, or even an extra year, what people think would not worry me a bit.

  It’s certain that we women can learn from this, after all these years of waiting politely for a male medical and governmental establishment to be nice to us. When the president pandered yet again to the anti-abortion lobby by vetoing a measure that would pay for research on women’s health issues because it also lifted the ban on fetal-tissue research, it was clear we’d been polite too long.

  And then there’s RU-486, a pill that causes early abortion. Comparisons are odious, but imagine if doctors discovered a method of vasectomy that required only a handful of capsules and a drink of water. It’d be approved so fast it would make your head spin.

  A pregnant
social worker named Leona Benten was stopped at Kennedy Airport when she flew in from Europe carrying a duly prescribed dose of RU-486. The drug is on a special import alert list, although even some Food and Drug Administration officials say that this has nothing to do with safety. It didn’t go on the list at the behest of serious scientists, but at the request of conservative members of Congress, thereby making the F.D.A. an arm of the right-to-life lobby.

  But RU-486 is not just a drug that induces abortion. There is evidence that it may help fight breast cancer, a disease that leads to the deaths of forty-four thousand American women a year. Some doctors think the drug could prove useful in treating adult diabetes, hypertension, and other cancers. But they—and you, if you suffer from any of those conditions—are stymied here in the United States by the unhappy alliance of politics, medicine, and corporate caution.

  The manufacturers of RU-486, Roussel Uclaf, have acted as businesses tend to do. They pulled it off the market in their native France after there were protests, putting it back on only after the French government ordered them to do so. They will not even apply for a license in this country, where posses of men illustrate their respect for life by thrusting fetal remains at candidates and clinic escorts. In several European countries, where there is less fetus throwing, RU-486 is being used with success and safety.

  There is a kind of resonance to all this for anyone who has read Ellen Chesler’s marvelous biography of Margaret Sanger. One legal challenge described in the book is entitled—truly—United States v. One Package Containing 120, more or less, Rubber Pessaries to Prevent Conception. The offending devices were sent to Mrs. Sanger by a Japanese doctor, then confiscated by customs. This was not an uncommon problem; after Mrs. Sanger married the inventor of 3-in-One oil, he smuggled diaphragms in the product’s containers. It all seems rather quaint, as Leona Benten’s difficulties will someday, which is cold comfort to her today.