Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  “Good news, you’re happy anyway,” Nancy added. “But bad news, you’ve got to have a great dinner and kick up your heels.

  “Benedict and I have had difficult periods,” she continued. “And we always faced serious, scary problems. But I have a theory about courage. I don’t think it’s a moment of bravery when you have a rush of adrenaline. Courage is something level, a kind of force that sustains you. And that’s what it takes to face difficult things, to make it through life successfully.”

  Maybe Nancy was right. It’s easy to congratulate yourself on your wisdom, your bravery when things are going well. The challenge is to trust in yourself, your work, your marriage, your gut, when they aren’t. I’d thought, as Kathy had, that seizing my destiny and finding true love would protect me from pain, bad luck, mistakes, failure. I’d clearly missed the point of the book. Those things aren’t avoidable; they’re actually the hallmark of a life richly lived.

  One meeting with my favorite authors did not erase years of struggle. There were still plenty of nights in our California home when the atmosphere felt as chilly as the Yukon’s. But over time, especially after the birth of our daughter, my husband and I found our way back to each other, just as Kathy and Mike had. Last summer, we celebrated our fifteenth anniversary, and we marked the occasion by rereading Mrs. Mike. This time, I felt a new appreciation for the bittersweet finale—the couple’s courage to forgive and their leap of faith in reconciling. I asked my husband what he had taken away from the book. “That’s easy,” he said, with a half smile. “Life is hard. But love is strong.”

  I already have plans for my next rereading: it will be in another few years, snuggled up in bed with my daughter. Maybe Mrs. Mike won’t be the book that changes her life. But when she hears Kathy’s story, and especially how it influenced my own, I hope she’ll be inspired to find the book that will.

  Part 2

  Body Language

  Does Father Know Best?

  My dad, who was a lawyer, once defended a back-alley abortionist in a criminal case. Seeing the horror of illegal abortion up close—all I know is that a coat hanger was involved—left him shaken, and adamantly pro-choice; at age ninety, his memory may fail, but he never forgets his annual contribution to Planned Parenthood. Early in my career, I wrote a number of articles on reproductive politics, mostly for Vogue. The victories of the 1970s were already eroding; today, Roe v. Wade has been gutted, and its overturn seems imminent. I’m including this story on the attempt to block women’s actions based on “father’s rights,” as emblematic of all my work during that earlier era. It was published in April 1989, just days before 500,000 people (myself included) convened in Washington to protest potential limits to abortion; until the Women’s March of 2017, that was the largest political demonstration in our nation’s history. The strategies anti-abortion activists use may have shifted over time, but most still seem ripped from the pages of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. I continue to believe what my own father taught me: that without reproductive rights—the ability to choose when and whether to have children—women have no rights at all.

  Shawn Lewis was twenty-four years old and three months pregnant when she was served a court restraining order last August. She had just packed up her infant son and fled her twenty-five-year-old husband, Carlton, a school custodian in Flint, Michigan, opting for poverty and public assistance rather than continue in a relationship with a man who had been arrested for repeatedly beating her, who regularly harassed her, destroyed her property, and even threatened to kill her. In dire straits, Shawn decided to have an abortion. The injunction, issued on behalf of her husband, told her she’d better think again: it said Carlton had the right to custody of his unborn child. Shawn Lewis was forbidden to have an abortion.

  Christine Anderson was a twenty-seven-year-old mother of three when her court order arrived last July. It wasn’t her first surprise that summer: her fourth pregnancy, which occurred a few months after her husband Timothy’s vasectomy, had also been a shock. The Minnesota couple was paralyzed by debt; their three-year marriage was on the rocks; and they had agreed that another child would be a disaster. Christine decided that to continue providing for her children—as well as to save her marriage—she had to terminate her pregnancy. Her pro-life husband went to court to make her change her mind.

  Since last March, U.S. lower courts have heard at least twelve angry men—husbands, ex-husbands, and boyfriends—demand that the women they’ve impregnated come to terms with coming to term. The cases have generally been brought to court under the banner of a fathers’ liberation movement, the idea being that the mother isn’t the only one who has an interest in the future of a fetus. “It’s a balancing of rights, the father’s versus the mother’s,” says James Bopp Jr., general counsel to the National Right to Life Committee, who has tried the majority of these cases. Bopp has also developed a “Fathers’ Rights Litigation Kit” for other lawyers interested in the cause. “Roe v. Wade [the 1973 Supreme Court decision that gave women the constitutional right to choose an abortion] gives a woman the right to her own body. On the other hand, a father also has a constitutional right to the care, custody, and companionship of a child; those rights are in conflict when the mother wants to abort that child.”

  Men’s rights groups across the country, even those that are pro-choice, support at least some aspects of the platform, but pro-choice organizations run by women are skeptical. The fathers’ rights argument, they say, is a ruse. The real issue is an attempt by men to control women’s bodies, and, equally dangerous, an attempt by antichoice forces to muddy the issues in the hopes of overturning the precariously perched Roe v. Wade.

  So far, even when lower courts have granted men’s requests, higher courts have unanimously overturned the decisions. Last fall, for the first time, Bopp took the pleas of rebuffed, estranged husbands Carlton Lewis and twenty-four-year-old Erin Conn, a toy store worker from Elkhart, Indiana, to the Supreme Court. In both instances, the court opted against hearing the cases (an earlier Supreme Court decision overturned a Missouri statute requiring written consent of a spouse for an abortion) and let the right of a woman to control her reproductive system—and her destiny—stand.

  “The Constitution certainly protects Mr. Lewis’s right to be free from government intrusion in his decision to have a child,” the National Abortion Rights Action League’s (NARAL) lawyers wrote in a brief urging the court to turn down one of the cases. “But it is up to Mr. Lewis, not lower court judges, to find a woman who will have a child with him. No individual, male or female, has a constitutional right to have a court compel another to procreate with him or her.”

  And that, one assumes, is that. After all, if the highest court in the land lets a decision stand, there isn’t much else a legal beagle like Bopp can do, is there? “The court simply decided not to hear the cases; they still may hear one in the future,” Bopp counters. “We’re still involved with two cases, both pending in the Indiana [Supreme] Court. I wouldn’t be surprised if the court does decide to hear them. This issue presents legitimate, important issues that have a broad impact, since in every abortion there’s either a husband or a father. The rights they have, which the lower courts have recognized, are important; and we hope the Supreme Court will eventually hear one of these cases and recognize them, too.”

  On the surface, the men’s rights argument can’t help but be compelling. Over the last twenty years, encouraged by increasingly independent women, the father’s expected role has changed from that of a peripheral authority figure who brings home the bacon and promptly falls asleep under the sports section after dinner to that of a sensitive, primary caretaker who can do a dish, change a diaper, and bandage a boo-boo with equal aplomb. We take for granted that fathers can gain custody of children in divorce suits—almost unheard of in the hoary days before Kramer vs. Kramer. In this new, equal-opportunity atmosphere, fathers’ rights groups point out, it follows that a man should have some say over the termination
of a pregnancy that he helped to create.

  “The fathers’ rights argument is different from what the Right to Life lawyers say,” says Dick Woods, executive director of the National Congress for Men and the first person to help a man obtain a court injunction against his pregnant wife. “We say that only when a father has a demonstrated interest in the unborn child, when he is ready, willing, and able to accept the emotional and financial costs of a child, does he have a valid argument going.

  “In several of the cases we’ve seen, the pregnancies were planned over a long period of time. The couple repeatedly went to clinics to get tests; when they finally conceived, there was a real celebration. In one case, the couple took an ultrasound picture and showed it to grandparents and friends and said, ‘This is our baby.’ The fathers made career decisions based on planning for the child; they gave up opportunities so they could have shorter hours or better health coverage. Some had gone to gynecologic appointments. Some had made financial commitments, such as contracting to remodel a room, or buying baby furniture. All these things established commitment to children.”

  Women’s groups, though, question whether painting the spare room is a commitment comparable to carrying through with a pregnancy. Or whether a man who would drag his wife through the legal system, in an attempt to force her against her will to endure a pregnancy and give birth to a child she doesn’t want, is demonstrating the caring and compassion necessary to be a good father. In two cases in Iowa, Woods was successful in convincing women to bring their pregnancies to term, but he refuses to comment on the subsequent relationships among the members of either family.

  Pro-choice advocates are quick to dismiss both Woods and Bopp. A father’s rights, they say, simply do not extend to dictating compulsory pregnancy. “It’s not in our tradition to compel people to undergo major medical procedures and burdens, which is what the risks and process of pregnancy are,” says Sylvia Law, a New York University law school professor. “Children can’t compel parents to give them a kidney or to give them blood marrow. I don’t have any problem with the notion that a man can’t tell a woman to bear a child.”

  Forcing a woman to give birth, to endure the dangers of pregnancy, pro-choice activists say, is tantamount to indentured servitude, a dystopian attempt to turn back the clock to the days before women could vote or own real property. “Fathers have the right not to engage in sexual intercourse,” quips Lynn Paltrow, staff counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “They do not have the right to control somebody else’s body. Women are not the property of the men they happen to have slept with.”

  “Right to Life lawyers talk about balance,” adds Marcy Wilder, staff attorney for NARAL. “But when there’s a conflict, only one person can decide and it has to be the woman. Any other outcome gives the control of reproduction back to the man.”

  As it happens, the vast majority of the cases that Bopp and his cohorts have tried are brought by angry, estranged husbands like Carl Lewis and Erin Conn. Or Michael Reynolds, a Salt Lake City man, who had his nineteen-year-old wife served with divorce papers and a “paternity” suit on the same day. Or last summer’s headline-grabbing case of wealthy Long Island orthodontist David Ostreicher, who claimed that his young wife, Toni, aborted out of malice; she was furious because he refused to rip up their prenuptial agreement. For her part, Toni insisted the abortion had been his idea, that he told her he didn’t want to support a baby. Lurid installments of the Ostreichers’ arguments were played out in newspapers across the country; the legal issues quickly moved from paternity to divorce.

  “It’s clear that these kinds of cases arise when there’s already a serious conflict in the relationship,” says Wilder. “The man is trying to exert control over his partner. This doesn’t happen when there’s a loving, caring man.”

  In fact, the only recent case that didn’t end in divorce was that of the Andersons in Minnesota. The court injunction against Christine was lifted, and she went ahead with her abortion as planned. The Andersons split temporarily; but eventually, without changing their respective stances on abortion, they reconciled.

  Both the ACLU and NARAL say there’s a hidden agenda in the fathers’ rights cases, especially as they’re being tried by Bopp: rather than merely trying to gain custody for a hapless father, the lawyers are attempting to undermine the Roe v. Wade decision by harassing women individually. “They get a woman up on the stand and they do a brutal cross-examination,” Wilder says. “They make her talk about her sex practices, her birth-control habits, all kinds of things. They hope to harass women and keep them from getting abortions on an individual basis.”

  Bopp, of course, takes umbrage at such a low blow. “Those people have a blind spot,” he sighs. “Their conception of reality is that there is no child, therefore it’s a dispute between the pregnant woman and the man. Roe v. Wade talked about the ‘unborn child’; it said the unborn child didn’t have a constitutional right to life, not that there was no child. The premise of our case is that there’s a relationship between a father and an unborn child that’s constitutionally protected.”

  The courts have continued to side with NARAL and the ACLU, but the victors are leery about winning a battle rather than the war. In a talk at the University of Arkansas last fall, Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who has always supported a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, said that Roe v. Wade could be overturned before 1989 was out. Solicitor General Charles Fried of the Justice Department has noted that the case of Reproductive Health Services v. William Webster, currently high on the docket, may well provide the opportunity. Certainly, President Bush would applaud a reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision.

  If Roe v. Wade is eliminated, the door will be open for each state to decide whether to allow, curtail, or prohibit abortions. Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, recently said that she’s only confident of pro-choice legislation in five of the fifty states: Hawaii, Alaska, Vermont, Oregon, and Washington; and with states like Arizona and Missouri already preparing antiabortion laws, the future for pro-choice women looks grim. Without the constitutional guarantee of choice, the states can institute any number of restrictions: they can make abortion impossible for poor women to afford; they can demand that both parents of a minor—even a minor who has never met one of her parents—give written consent before an abortion can be performed; they can even enact a provision that allows a potential father, whatever his relationship to the woman in question, to force a pregnant woman to bring a fetus to term and then turn it over to him.

  Thirty-Five and Mortal: A Breast Cancer Diary

  For weeks after my initial breast cancer diagnosis, I would jolt awake at three in the morning thinking, I might die! I would stumble out of bed to my computer, download everything that was in my head, and, only then, fall back to sleep. I had no intention of publishing the results, but after a while, largely because of my extreme youth, I believed I could tell a unique story. So I shipped off a raw, fifty-thousand-word manuscript to Adam Moss, then editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine and a dear friend. “I like it,” he replied. “Now cut it down to seven thousand words!” The piece ran as a cover story in June 1997. Subsequently, I would realize that much of what I wrote in it was inaccurate—especially the part about mammographic screening saving my life. That bothered me. A lot. Fifteen years later, I set the record straight in another New York Times Magazine cover story, “The Problem with Pink,” which follows. Even so, while I repudiate science in this essay, I stand by its emotional truth. I also couldn’t help but notice, in re-reading it, that I imagined (fairly accurately, I think) what contending with infertility might feel like; little did I realize that would be my next challenge.

  Dec. 19, 1996

  I got my first mammogram today at a place called the Breast Health Center in San Francisco. I’ve never really considered whether I had healthy breasts. Healthy knees, yes. Healthy gums, maybe. But healthy breasts? I don’t even do se
lf-exams, except when I read something about cancer in the paper.

  Thirty-five seems a little young to be going through this particular rite of passage, but my doctor said I should have a baseline and the health insurance pays for it, so I figured, why not? The procedure went pretty fast and it didn’t hurt; it was just sort of awkward. Mostly, I hoped that an earthquake wouldn’t strike while my breast was clamped in a vise.

  Jan. 9, 1997

  I almost skipped my second mammogram. When I got the letter saying they had to do a follow-up, I assumed they’d just botched the film. But when the technician took three rounds of pictures, I began to get nervous. I felt myself slip into shock when the radiologist showed me what they were filming: a bicycle-spoke-like pattern emanating from a central point in my left breast. No lump, just these lines in the tissue. I could barely see them. He said he is nearly 100 percent sure that it is nothing, but I should have it biopsied, “just to be 120 percent sure.”

  I called my gynecologist for a list of surgeons and chose the only woman among them, Nima Grissom. She did a biopsy on a friend of mine who liked her a lot. Unnecessary biopsies. You hear about them all the time.

  Jan. 14

  Nima turned out to be a blond, brown-eyed gal in her mid-forties with a wry streak. She examined my breast and didn’t feel a thing. Because there’s no palpable lump, she has to do a surgical biopsy in the hospital. The radiologist will inject blue dye into the tissue so she can see what to cut out. I’ll be home by noon. “Really, though,” she said, “the chances are 98 percent that this is nothing.” Steven came with me to the appointment. He’s the calmer one in our marriage. When I get scared, he repeats “98 percent.”