Andrea wasn’t worried that my parents would throw her out or beat her. She, like many minors who become pregnant, was more concerned about preserving her relationship with her family.
“I remember feeling like I can’t add this to the official roster of things I’ve done,” Andrea told me recently. “I was too young emotionally to have sex, but physically I wasn’t. Any conversation I would have had with mom and dad would have ended with them telling me not to do it.” She didn’t want them to know anything about what felt to her like “a big mistake.”
Andrea had $60 saved from her job at Burger King. I helped her raise the additional $200 she needed by borrowing it from an acquaintance at school. Although North Dakota had had an abortion clinic since 1980, there was also a law, in place since 1981, stipulating that both parents consent to a minor’s abortion. Andrea went through the process of getting a judicial bypass. The clinic steered her though an interview with an amenable judge, I got her the money just in time, and Andrea got her abortion. Although the experience was difficult for her, we were rather proud that we’d gone through it alone.
I’ve thought about Andrea’s story a lot lately, especially now that California—which, like New York, generally has very liberal abortion laws—is considering its first parental notification legislation. Missouri and other states are considering laws that would make it a crime to even counsel a girl about her options. Some thirty-three states enforce parental consent or notification laws. In fact, it is the most popular restriction among people who support Roe v. Wade. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center (released August 3, 2005) found that 73 percent of Americans supported some form of required parental consent. When asked why, people often cite the fact that a minor can’t have a wisdom tooth removed without parental consent, so why should she be allowed to have an abortion on her own?
But Andrea’s story always seemed proof to me that parental consent laws—logical as they may sound—don’t work. If a girl doesn’t want to tell her parents, she won’t, even if they are nice and pro-choice.
By necessity, many clinics know how to efficiently work around the restriction of parental notification. Jane Bovard, the clinic director of the Red River Women’s Clinic, who helped Andrea get her judicial bypass, told me she has never been turned down in twenty-five years of doing about two judicial bypasses a week. But many judges aren’t so willing, and in states where bypasses aren’t easy to come by, clinic workers are more likely to see a girl ask her boyfriend to beat her abdomen with a baseball bat (as in a recent Michigan case), than to see an increase in minors telling their parents. Bovard estimates that 80 percent of the minors she has worked with do tell their parents. The law mandating that they do so hasn’t changed that statistic.
“If you are looking at fourteen-year-olds or younger, it’s almost universal that they include their parents,” Peg Johnston, another longtime clinician, told me.
Johnston is the clinic director at Southern Tier Women’s Services in Binghamton, New York, and a founder and director of the Abortion Conversation Project (ACP). She says, “I appreciate the New York State legislature’s willingness to stay out of parental consent laws. State law says if you are old enough to get pregnant, you are already a mother, to some extent, and you get to choose what course your life will take.” She continues: “Having said that, it is a crisis and these young women need all of the support that they can get. Unfortunately, government statutes tend to be punitive, not supportive.”
ACP is working on a campaign called “Mom, Dad, I’m Pregnant” to help parents and kids talk to each other during this kind of crisis and to encourage open communication. The Reverend Becky Turner of Missouri’s Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice gave me advice more powerful than any law. When her own daughter was about fourteen, Turner accompanied her to a routine gynecology appointment and told the gynecologist she wanted her to write in her daughter’s chart that regardless of what the law is at the time, she can treat her daughter as an adult patient.
“I said: ‘I hope she will feel comfortable coming to me, but if for any reason she doesn’t, I want you to please give her what she needs. If she needs birth control, give it to her; if she needs an abortion referral, please make it and don’t feel like you need to call me for permission.’ I think, as a result of that, she tells me more than I want to know,” says Turner, laughing, “but it’s my moment that I am most proud of as a parent.”
Andrea did eventually tell our mother, who told our father. Our parents weren’t mad at her; they were heartsick and frustrated with me, too, for helping. I remember being angry that they didn’t appreciate why I’d helped her rather than turn to them. It took me a long time to begin to understand how devastating being excluded from Andrea’s pregnancy and abortion was to them. I’m still honored that Andrea turned to me, and grateful that she was able to get the abortion she wanted. But all these years later, in a time when abortion is, if anything, more stigmatized, I want to do anything I can to help girls and parents turn to each other—willingly.
—Originally published with Alternet, September 2005
EPILOGUE
My understanding of abortion politics has deepened and evolved with each passing year. I now openly acknowledge that I think the fetus is a life and that, for some, the taking of that life is traumatic. I can see more clearly how birth control and abortion can be deployed as a replacement for healthcare for impoverished women, and how that is far from reproductive “freedom.” One thing that has proven to be true, even as I learn more that provides nuance to my opinions about abortion, is that restrictions are, in a word, bad. They put medical decisions in the hands of (often male) legislators. Restrictions rarely cause someone to rethink having an abortion but rather make it so she has a later term, more expensive procedure.
Parental consent laws are particularly vexing, because they sound so logical. “If a girl has to consult her parents before getting her wisdom teeth pulled, certainly she should consult them for an abortion,” a friend’s father once boomed at me. “It’s serious!” But removing an unwanted pregnancy is different than extracting unwanted teeth. A pregnancy, unlike molars, invokes crucial elements of one’s identity: religion, self-image, relationship to family, and relationship to the person who helped conceive the pregnancy. Parental consent laws, often meant to help identify statutory rape or sexual abuse, don’t readily acknowledge incest and abuse by parents. As of May 2011, thirty-five states enforce parental consent or notification laws. According the Guttmacher Institute, the gold standard for statistics about reproductive issues, teenagers are more likely than older women to wait beyond fifteen weeks to have a procedure. Having more barriers to access, even ones we wish were helpful, contributes to later-term procedures, not to healthy family relationships.
TROUBLE IN NUMBERS
My friend Marion Banzhaf is the kind of feminist who wears an I HAD AN ABORTION T-shirt with TALK TO ME scrawled by hand beneath the message. Throughout the 1970s, she worked at feminist health centers, where she demonstrated vaginal self-exams and performed menstrual extractions. In its 1980s heyday, she was a pioneering member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP. She recounts the story of her abortion in a film I produced called I Had an Abortion.
The year was 1971, and there were only a couple of states, notably New York, where abortion was legal. Although her boyfriend thought they should drop out of school at the University of Florida and get married—they could live with his mother—Marion disagreed. She raised the money for her abortion in one afternoon by standing on the quad, asking for donations.
She then flew from Gainesville to New York, had her procedure, and, after she left the clinic, ran skipping down the street. “I was so happy to see that blood,” she says, in a trademark Marion Banzhaf way (somewhat shocking, totally confident). “It meant I had my life back.”
Dauntless radical though she is, there is one part of her abortion story she rarely tells. A year after her 1971 procedure, Marion got pregnant again
. This time, she didn’t have to worry about the money. Her new boyfriend pulled out his checkbook and put her on the next flight to New York City—and she knew it was the right decision. “But it was a much harder [abortion] for me personally. I felt I shouldn’t let myself get pregnant,” says Marion, now fiftytwo. “Even to this day, I have shame about it. An accomplished, consciousness-raised feminist like me!”
One abortion, that happens. Two? Well, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, two smacks of carelessness. My father, a doctor in Fargo, North Dakota, expressed surprise when I mentioned the secondabortion stigma to him: “It’s odd, given that it’s the exact same situation as before, no more or less of a life,” he said. “It’s as if women don’t really believe they have the right to have abortions.”
Dad, like Marion, is often shockingly logical. Still, abortion itself (whether your first or fourth) is so shrouded in secrecy, it’s easy to imagine that only certain kinds of women would ever make a mistake like that twice. If “she” did, this almost unconscious thinking goes, it’s clear “she” didn’t care enough to learn from the first one. Fears about these repeat cases contribute to the unlovely idea that, because terminating a pregnancy is legal, women use abortion as birth control, leading to a cliché of this debate: the “I’m pro-choice, but I don’t think it should be used as birth control” line.
In the clinic world, repeat visitors are called, not unkindly, “frequent fliers.” The reason that casual term is not an insult is due simply to how common multiple abortions are. “You have three hundred possibilities to get pregnant in your life,” says Peg Johnston, the director of an abortion clinic in Binghamton, New York. “A one percent failure rate—assuming the best possible use of contraception—is still three abortions,” she says. “In what endeavor is a one percent failure rate not acceptable?”
According to Planned Parenthood, two out of every one hundred women aged fifteen to forty-four will have an abortion this year and half of them will have had at least one abortion previously. Yet virtually everyone I’ve talked to about multiple abortions said she shouldn’t have let it happen again, implying it was her fault.
Why is that? Well, some of it is surely the anti-woman culture, a robust pro-life movement that, when abortion became legal, mobilized to scream at women on what is already not a fun day. But it’s not just a vast right-wing conspiracy. Many women—prochoice women—believe that abortion is taking a life (although not an independent life). What justifies that loss of life is the woman’s own life. It’s almost as if she is saying, “I recognize that this is serious, but my own life is too important to sacrifice for an unplanned pregnancy.” But each additional abortion makes it harder to believe she is making an honorable decision.
Or that he is. My friend Matt, like many men in my life, has been part of more than one abortion. When he was younger, he was “knee-jerk pro-choice.” If an unplanned pregnancy occurs in high school or college, he figured, of course you have an abortion. That’s just common sense. He didn’t revisit that with any sort of introspection until the first abortion, “But I wasn’t in love with [the woman in question]. We had no future together. I was comfortable saying we needed to abort,” Matt concludes. “I gave her money. She didn’t express any need for me to be there with her.”
He says, bluntly, that the second abortion felt “more like murder,” and that he was disgusted at himself for being the reason his girl was at Planned Parenthood, confronting scary, toothless protesters and enduring this awful procedure. The circumstances had changed—Matt did have a future with the woman he got pregnant with the second time, although having a baby just then, a few months into their relationship, wasn’t a good idea at all.
Mostly, though, it felt unseemly and immature to be there. “I sat at the clinic with all of these younger guys and I thought, I am too old to be here, man,” says Matt, now thirty-eight. “When do I stop giving myself the out? That is what abortion feels like—a free pass. But it’s not totally free. There are emotional consequences, and as you get older, the sense of taking responsibility for your actions grows.”
“There is something in that moment where you are supposed to smarten up,” agrees Jenny Egan, a young ACLU staffer who had an abortion at age sixteen. “That is your one fuck-up. [After that] birth control can’t fail and a condom can’t break.” But, as Jenny points out, the shame is often not the abortion itself—it’s not the idea of killing a second baby when we are only allowed to kill one. The shame is the shame of getting pregnant. It means that you don’t having enough control and power to take care of yourself.
Which brings us to a paradox of feminism. The success of the women’s movement is not just in its overhaul of all of the institutions that kept women down—although it has made inroads in all of them, including national abortion rights, birth control for single people, and sexuality education (all under fire, and that last almost eradicated in favor of abstinence-only education). The more profound revolution, though, was the raised expectations this once-utopian movement suggested to its daughters. The mantra of empowerment means that women feel like responsible actors in sex—not merely ignorant victims—and that knowledge makes it harder, in a way, to justify the “mistake” of unplanned pregnancy. If you’re so smart, if you read Our Bodies, Ourselves at age thirteen, if you knew about condoms, how did you get pregnant?
In I Had an Abortion, the film ends with dozens of women saying, “My name is ____ and I had an abortion.” A few—an older matron, a curly-haired professor type—admit, “I had two abortions.” One woman says, “I had three abortions,” and at a recent screening her presence provoked one young female audience member to wonder aloud why the multiple-abortion woman didn’t use birth control and should we, the filmmakers, be promoting that?
At that same screening, a well-known Second Wave feminist, the writer Alix Kates Shulman, replied to the requisite “where’s the birth control?” comment that she had had four abortions—“and not one was the result of carelessness.” A few audience members vigorously nodded their heads in a “hear, hear” manner. But it looked as if most people quietly wondered if the birth control girl—the one pointing out that once is funny but twice is a spanking—was right.
In September of 2005, Pauline Bart, another Second Wave woman of some reputation within the movement, suggested at a screening of I Had an Abortion that younger women learn to do abortions themselves, just as the collective of women known as “Jane” did pre–Roe v. Wade.
“It’s just like taking a melon baller and scooping out a melon,” she said, referring to performing an abortion in one’s own apartment. I nodded earnestly but thought, No, it isn’t. Or at least it isn’t to me. I don’t doubt that some women experience abortion as devoid of angst, as Pauline Bart depicts, and for them each abortion is created equal.
For many women, though, getting pregnant when you don’t want to be is because you made a mistake. Often the mistake is not your own fault—Alix was not told by her doctor that diaphragms could slip out of place; Marion got depressed on the high-dose pill and found it almost impossible to take. But if an abortion is meant to correct that mistake, is it anti-woman to presume a learning curve? I don’t know. Fertility and sexuality are very complex. Let’s be real: Some people are better at birth control than others. I’ve had unprotected sex more often than protected sex myself, so I’m hardly one to tsk-tsk.
Peg Johnston, the clinic director, thinks multiple abortions point to something larger than an individual snafu—occasionally that larger thing is carelessness, but usually in the context of a life out of control in other ways. Often it’s a woman who has several children already and a chaotic, stressful life. At around $30 a month for the pill, others can’t afford their birth control.
“That’s very common,” says Johnston, noting that a majority of the forty-five million uninsured in this country are women. Meanwhile, “some people are really fertile and others simply have lots and lots of sex. Frankly, if you have a lot of sex, you’ll get pregnant m
ore often.”
As for Marion Banzhaf, she did find a way to make sure she didn’t have another birth control failure but still had lots of sex. Soon after the second abortion, she came out as a lesbian.
—Originally published in Nerve, November 2005
MY BI-TRANS-FEMINIST POWER TRIP
December 25, 2010, I pull up at a Stop N Go in Fargo, North Dakota, to fill up my rental car. I’m catching a 6:00 AM flight the next day and don’t trust that I’ll be so organized at 4:00 AM with my two young sons in the car, a pitch-black sky, and the harsh tundra winds freezing my hands to the pump.
The checker at the counter is cute: a twentysomething wearing a loose black vest, button-down shirt, tie—a standard Stop N Go uniform, but on this River Phoenix lookalike, it looks stylish, I note approvingly. I feel a mildly flirtatious energy between us, one I often feel toward clerks, waiters, and bartenders whose job it is to be affable and bring me things for money. I accept my change and we exchange a second of genuine eye contact. You’re a pleasant surprise on this brutally cold day, my eyes say. I’m quietly confident and friendly, the checker’s eyes respond.
I push open the door and zip back to my car before the winds can whip through my coat and steal my body heat, thinking, Man, things have changed in Fargo. The checker was, I think, either a very butch young lesbian or a trans man, and I’d bet on the latter. I drive back to my parents’ home pondering whether the vested checker chose to work on Christmas because his family didn’t accept him, because he liked the overtime, or perhaps because he was Jewish—or all of the above.
A couple of decades earlier, there was another Stop N Go employee whom I also remember vividly. She was tall, with a carefully set hairdo and plastery pancake makeup. When I saw her, I’d feel an odd mixture of fascination and anxiety. Could it have been any more obvious that “she” was a man? I never ruminated about whether she had a family or wanted to work the late shift at Stop N Go. I assumed her life was tragic and lonely, like that of the Elephant Man. There was no meaningful eye contact with her; if anything, I labored to be neutral when I was so clearly uncomfortable, almost hysterical, in her presence. I’m amazed now at how easy it was for me to objectify the trans woman in 1985, especially given how easy it was to flirt with the trans man and see him as a human being today. I can’t help but assume that not only have I changed, but the world has, too.
F 'em! Page 16
