There is a real-world political issue related to the sustainability of Roe and Bolton: public opinion. In what may someday be cited as a classic example of hubris and ego producing unintended consequences, the loudest defenders of Roe may eventually set back abortion rights in a way the Religious Right never could have achieved. Bluntly: Roe and Bolton allow abortion for any reason up to twentyfour weeks. Welcome to the world of perpetually defending abortion in the shadow cast by news stories about doctors severing spinal cords of living viable (or almost viable) babies. With “friends” like Roe and Bolton, abortion rights do not need any enemies. A midcourse correction to American law along the lines of how the French legalized abortion might help preserve abortion rights.
Whatever you think about the issue of abortion, here’s a fact: We Evangelicals in the early 1970s weren’t politicized (at least in the current meaning of the word) until after Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Here’s another fact: Almost forty years after helping to launch the Evangelical wing of the antiabortion movement, I am filled with deep regret for the antigovernment and ultimately anti-American, not to say murderous, consequences Dad and I helped unleash.
In marked contrast to the steady liberalizing of opinion on other culture war issues, such as premarital sex and gay rights, the younger generation in America is increasingly antiabortion. I’m not just talking about Evangelical or Roman Catholic young people. If the early-twenty-first-century tracking polls of young people’s views on abortion are any indication, the 1960s generation that pushed for Roe and Bolton is losing the national debate.
According to a Gallup Poll (April 2010), the percentage of college-educated people who favor legal abortion under any circumstances has been dropping since the early 1990s. As an article in the New York Times (that cited this poll) noted, “There is a long-range trend of public opposition coming from unexpected quarters.”90 And even though the largest overall drop in support for abortion rights was among men over sixty-five, it was closely followed by a drop among women under thirty.
And it’s not just young people who (according to the polls) are ambivalent about abortion. There is a another question looming: Which lives in our brave new world—at any “stage” of life or development—will be given the full protection of the law and rated as “fully human”?
Consider movies and television. Films like Blade Runner, Brazil, or District 9 or the Battlestar Galactica TV series, not to mention comedies like Waitress, Juno, and Knocked Up (even some hilarious Monty Python skits about unwilling transplant “donors”) are hardly the work of “pro-lifers.” And yet these films and series have raised philosophical, moral, aesthetic, and political questions related to issues of personhood that, taken together, seem to fly in the face of the facile “it’s just tissue” ethic of Roe, let alone equating outfits like Dignitas with a good future or an enlightened outlook.
The advances of the mid-1970s made it possible to visualize the fetus throughout gestation and to monitor its development. Tests of fetal well-being were invented post-Roe and led to fetal therapy. By the mid-1970s, an unborn child had become a patient, and obstetrics had become a complicated specialty—so much so that in 1974 the first board-certification examination was given in the subspecialty of maternal-fetal medicine. As the New England Journal of Medicine noted in 2001, “Obstetricians now care for two patients, the pregnant woman and her fetus, and are expected to diagnose abnormalities accurately and to provide therapy appropriate to both.”91 By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the science that was available in the early 1970s related to fetology seemed to be from the Stone Age. That fact may doom Roe—and whatever political party or special interest group hitches its wagon to that particular means of guaranteeing abortion rights.
The tyranny of reproductive reality and the fabulous beauty of children collide with my sense of aesthetic empathy for women and for babies—born, to be born, and unborn. This paradox can’t be resolved but only recognized and mediated as best we can in ways that will always be heartwrenching. The context of any given pregnancy is everything.
The tension between the beauty of life-giving and the slavery of some unwanted pregnancies can’t be resolved by a one-sizefits-all law or moral teaching. But science, aesthetics, emotions, evidence, and the collective wisdom and compassion that exist in religious teachings about loving thy neighbor must be given their due when we’re trying to figure out how to reconcile the irreconcilable as best we can.
“As best we can” is not perfect. And that is where both sides in the abortion debate fail when they seem willing to tear our culture apart (not to mention constantly derail the whole progressive agenda and set it back decades) in order to stick to their fundamentalist purity on “the issue.” One side sweeps the fetus under a “rug” of moral platitudes about female empowerment, and the other does the same to women with platitudes about the sacredness of life.
CHAPTER 9
“Strange Women”
PHOTO: Mom sailing with one of her friends in the early 1990s
Esther arrived each day a little breathless, hair tied back with a black velvet ribbon to stop it from going “frizzy,” as she called it. From the way she gulped the mug of coffee that I brought her, I knew that it was her first of the day, that Esther had probably been asleep twenty minutes before. A moment after arriving, she kicked off her shoes, slipped on the sandals that she kept under the console, and got to work. As soon as Esther was settled, I rolled my chair close to hers under the pretense of needing a better look at the monitor. I sat breathing in Esther’s fresh morning scent of warm bathed skin, blissful as a child face down in new-mown hay.
I was the director of an “industrial”—a corporate series of videos. Esther (not her real name) was my video editor, assigned to me by a nearby video postproduction facility. She was also one of several women I’ve had a powerful crush on since marrying Genie.
Esther and I worked together for over a year. Esther was bright, kind, articulate and good company. She was also twenty-eight years old and looked younger. When we went out for a drink after work, Esther got carded. This was in the early 1990s, soon after I’d fled the Evangelical scene for parts unknown. By the time I met Esther, I’d directed four Hollywood features that I wouldn’t have paid to see.92 I supplemented my income for two or three years (before I began to earn my living as a writer) producing and/or directing industrials, commercials, and this particular Esther-saturated corporate video series.
Mom had warned me about “Strange Women” like Esther. My mother often said that Strange Women lead Believers to destruction. This topic was usually broached when Mom and my sisters would be gossiping in lurid detail about this or that former L’Abri student who had “married a non-Christian” and how this now “unequally yoked” backslider’s heart had “grown cold toward the Things Of The Lord.” Which brings me back to the Strange Women, like Esther, who I can imagine a happy life with and from time to time fall in love with: in other words, the talented and warm females who remind me most of Genie. They’re not necessarily physically similar to Genie, but they, like her, are relaxed, kind, intelligent, and graceful. They are dangerous to my marriage.
Mom taught me that The Battle Of The Heavenlies touches down to earth more often than not through “the sort of Male Temptation that Fran suffers from.” And Dad provided lots of examples of that “sort” of temptation. Mom made sure that I noticed Dad’s failings, all the better to “grow up spiritually stronger than your poor father.”
Men were a source of danger to women. But women, too, according to Mom, could be dangerous, less to my body than to my soul.
Or as Dad put it in a sermon: “Turn with me to Proverbs Chapter Five,” Dad said. “King David’s talking to his son Solomon. He’s teaching Solomon about the Good Women and the Strange Women in the world. We read, ‘My son, attend unto my wisdom and bow thine ear.’” Dad looked up from his Bible and peered over his reading glasses at about thirty of us in tight-packed rows of dining
room chairs (especially brought downstairs for the Sunday service) in our chalet living room/church. Dad fixed his stern gaze on us and then added, “or literally ‘submit’ is what this word ‘attend’ means here.”
Dad started reading again, “‘Bow thine ear to my understanding; that thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge.’” Dad glared at us. “Notice it’s the Word that gives children discretion. When a person has the Bible he’ll be able to discriminate between right and wrong. Verse Three continues, ‘For the lips of a strange woman drip as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil.’ David’s warning Solomon. David tells us, ‘For the lips of the Strange Woman drip as an honeycomb.’ Verse Five says, ‘Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.’ You might think you’re having ‘fun,’ but the Strange Woman’s ultimate destination for you will be an ‘affair’ with death.” Dad paused, took a deep breath, and then yelled at the top of his lungs, “The seeds of this degeneration were sown by Solomon himself because he didn’t heed his own warning!”
Two recently “saved” former Roman Catholics jumped when Dad screamed. Mom winced. Dad lowered his voice back to a normal speaking volume. “Now turn with me to First Kings Chapter Eleven, Verses One and Two: ‘But King Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughters of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites; of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go into them, neither shall they come in unto you.’”
Dad got ready to yell again. I could always tell when one of his high-pitched godly howls was on the way by the extra deep breath he took. He’d also move his Bible to one side of the back of the big red leather barrel pulpit chair, a sure sign he was about to “spontaneously” pound his chair-pulpit. “This is a”—Dad’s voice shot up an octave to his most screechy prophetic shriek—“Direct Command !” FIST POUND!
I feared Dad’s preaching yells more than I feared any Strange Women I’d ever met, at least when I was eight. Dad’s yelling in church scared me when I was young and later embarrassed me when I learned to read the expression on the faces of newly arrived visitors. Students from “non-Christian backgrounds,” say Jews who weren’t Complete yet and therefore unused to the instant pretendanger of Evangelicals “fired up for the Lord,” always looked stunned the first time Dad got really wound up in his manufactured outbursts of Godly “rage.” Dad’s yelling also reminded me of his voice when he screamed at Mom, and the veins stood out on his neck as he’d screech through a wide open mouth until his face turned red.
When Dad preach-yelled, Mom squeezed her hands together and nervously crossed and recrossed her legs. She sat up even straighter, but she also lowered her head and stared at the floor, as if she just couldn’t abide looking at him. When I asked Mom why Dad yelled when he preached, she answered, “My father was a wonderful preacher, and he never once raised his voice when preaching or to my mother.” Once Mom said, right out of the blue and without specifically mentioning Dad, “Of course, my dear father was a real scholar. I don’t care for overly theatrical screaming preachers yelling and giving the appearance that they’re angry. Preachers who think that they can’t be a preacher without their feigned indignation are mistaken. Perhaps they yell to cover their ignorance.” Another time Mom said, “Fran yells most when he’s addressing his own temptations. No one needs his sermons more than he does.”
Anyway, Mom would have been thrilled with Esther and would have worked to turn Esther into a Completed Jew. Esther seemed ripe to hear the Gospel because she was rediscovering her Judaism or Yiddish or something, and Mom loved to try to save Jews (she even wrote a book called Christianity Is Jewish). I always thought of Mom’s preoccupation with Jews as “Mom’s Jew Stuff,” when she carried on and on and on about a Jew she’d just met and the “great conversation we had about Passover’s true meaning” or whatever. Mom would have urged me to find ways to talk to Esther about Old Testament prophecies being fulfilled as a way to “open a door.”
Esther’s first Jew Stuff “proverb”—as I thought of her little sayings she shared after booting up the computer each morning—was “Di yugnt iz a feler, di menlekhe yorn a kamf, un der elter a kharote,” which means “Youth is a mistake, middle age a battle, and old age a regret” (or at least that’s what Esther said it meant as per her grandmother’s instructions). This particular proverb was sighed more than spoken, usually with a shrug. (The Yiddish was all about Esther’s recent “I’m-spiritual-but-not-religious” interest in what she called “rediscovering my Jewish roots.”)
While Esther used her mouse and keyboard to log the timeline of our digitized show, I logged the daylight filtering through the window blinds as it caressed her pale cheek. As Esther cut together close-ups, establishing shots, pans, created dissolves, cued music, and this and that graphic, I memorized the curve of her slender back. Esther studied the music lists. I studied the winsome nape of her neck by the light of the blue-gray effects menu on the left-hand screen. Esther shifted, crossed and uncrossed her legs, leaned forward and back during the hours she spent fishing for my project’s redemption in the graphics bin. I shifted this way and that to study Esther as if the salvation of my soul depended on memorizing her measurements, neck to chin and thigh to knee. I also lectured myself.
“You’re crazy,” I told myself. “You’ve made it through twentyplus years of marriage, only to piss away your marriage that’s been the only thing that’s lasted and ... you LOVE Genie!”
My internal arguments—or should I say “our” internal arguments—continued something like this:
“I blame your mother! We were brainwashed!” moaned My Penis. “We never had a chance! And you know what?”
“What?” I asked.
“Those way too few Girls we did explore before Genie annexed our lives were wasted on us! Neither of us knew what we were doing! You barely looked at their delectable bodies because you were in such a hurry to climb on top of the ones who let us, and I freely admit that I was a bit hasty, too.” Then My Penis shrieked, “Those were very short excursions we took into their loamy loins! We didn’t even pause to enjoy the scenery!”
“La! La! La! I can’t hear you,” I sang to drown out My Penis’s incessant blather.
“Esther’s a wholesome, Meg Ryan type,” My Penis whispered.
“Genie’s classically beautiful!” I yelled. “You said yourself that she’s—and I think I’m quoting you word for word—‘a Sophia Loren type with brains and good taste and limitless kindness.’”
“Yes, but we’ve always liked those wholesome types,” My Penis retorted. “Maybe Genie is too beautiful!”
“Now you’re just being stupid,” I snorted.
“Don’t you see that there must be something wrong with a woman that beautiful and smart going for a twerp like you? There’s something to be said for the ‘girl-next-door’ type.” My Penis lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “Esther reminds us of that nice little French Girl Who Let Us!”
“The French Girl didn’t let you near her,” I snapped.
“Now if only we’d savored several thousand Vaginas, we’d have a respectable, some might even say scientific, point of reference. As it is, how do we know what we’ve missed?”
For fifteen months or so, on the days I wasn’t on location with the camera crew shooting interviews with executives on their product lines and companies, I sat a couple of feet to the right and slightly behind Esther while she edited the dull footage. The edit suite was about ten by fifteen feet. Six linked hard drives, a U-shaped edit console, and two chairs and a small couch filled the space. What was left over was a phone-booth-sized patch of floor that forced Esther and me to sit so close together that it would have been rude anywhere else but in a subway at rush hour.
One day Esther brought some family photos to the edit suite. I happened to mention that Genie and I had twenty-three photo albums, one for each year we’d been married at that time. Es
ther begged me to bring the albums to work. Genie said that as long as I remembered to return them, and only took two or three at a time, she didn’t mind.
Genie also said she thought it sweet of Esther to take such an interest in our family. I thought that the albums would provide a good excuse to sit next to Esther, thigh to thigh on the client couch, as we turned the pages.
Once I started to bring the albums, Esther lingered over everything in them, from faded snapshots of our daughter Jessica’s birth to last year’s Christmas dinner photos, fresh and glossy as the day we had picked up the double prints. As Esther looked at the albums, she asked questions related to marriage, babies, and parenthood as if they were geographical locations she hoped to soon visit.
During one of our midmorning coffee breaks, Esther told me that she’d had a steady boyfriend from her junior year in high school until a couple of years after college. I’ll call him Charles. Reading between the lines, I figured that she’d had sex only with this one young man. So on top of everything else—Esther’s warmth, shared confidences, and solid-citizen recognition of what life is really all about (Love and Family)—it turned out that when it came to old-fashioned values, she was very much like the Girls I’d been raised around at L’Abri. That fact plugged my feelings for Esther into a powerful current of longing-drenched nostalgia. It was as if I’d time-traveled back to meet one of The Girls who had always been so unavailable because I was a child and they were grown-ups and (mostly) born-again, Jesus-Following virgins.
“We’re still friends,” Esther said. “I always keep my friends.”
“How can you be friends after turning him down?” I asked.
“At about every other lunch I have to turn poor Charles down again!”
“Does he keep asking?”
Sex, Mom, and God Page 21
