And it seems all the more savage because there is such a simple fix: Give us the right to make provisions for when we want to go. Give families the ability to make a fair case of enough being enough, of the end’s, de facto, having come.
Not long after visiting my insurance man those few weeks ago, I sent an “eyes wide open” e-mail to my children, all in their twenties, saying this was a decision, to buy long-term-care insurance or not, they should be in on: When push came to shove, my care would be their logistical and financial problem; they needed to think about what they wanted me to do and, too, what I wanted them to do. But none of them responded—I suppose it was that kind of e-mail.
Anyway, after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.
Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.
Texas Monthly
WINNER—PUBLIC INTEREST
Texas Monthly calls itself “the national magazine of Texas”—which sounds pretty big until you take a look at the record. Then you might think the editors there are thinking too small. After all, this year Texas Monthly received three National Magazine Award nominations for long-form journalism and won two awards (go back and read “The Innocent Man” right after you finish this story), and it was only three years ago that the magazine won the Feature Writing award for Skip Hollandsworth’s “Still Life.” In fact, this is the fourth Mimi Swartz story to be nominated for an award and the second to win Public Interest. Little wonder. The judges called this look at the impact of anti-abortion legislation “a public-policy epic written by a master storyteller.”
Mimi Swartz
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, Wives
There are things about women that most men would just as soon never discuss. The stirrups in a gynecologist’s office, for one; the tampon aisle at the grocery store, for another; and pretty much any matter involving words like “cervix,” “uterus,” and “vagina.” At least, that’s how it was until March 2, 2011. Back in January of the same year, at the start of that legislative session, Governor Rick Perry had pushed as an emergency item a bill requiring all women seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound twenty-four hours beforehand. As Sid Miller, the legislator who sponsored the bill in the House, put it, “We want to make sure she knows what she is doing.”
At a public hearing on the bill the following month, Tyler representative Leo Berman took the mike and insisted that 55 million fetuses had been aborted since Roe v. Wade—or, as he called it, “a Holocaust times nine.” The author of a book on abortion rights gave a somewhat overwrought speech about the differences between “a zygote and a baby.” A woman named Darlene Harken described herself as “a victim of abortion” because, she maintained, she wasn’t warned about the mental and physical fallout from the procedure; Patricia Harless, a representative from Spring, thanked her for her “bravery” and “strength.” Alpine’s Pete Gallego countered by expressing his resentment of “people who stop caring after the child is born.”
In March the bill reached the House floor, where debate raged for three days, as much as ten hours a day. Tensions ran high in the chamber, which was lit by a benevolent winter sun that glinted off the manly oak desks and super-sized leather chairs. On the first day, March 2, Miller, a burly man with white hair and a sun-lined face that wrinkles into a bright, inviting smile, explained the legislation. A former school-board member from Stephenville, he has a loamy Texas accent and favors a spotless white Stetson. If you stare at him long enough, you might easily forget that it’s the twenty-first century.
Miller described his bill in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he were pushing a new municipal utility district. “What we’re attempting to do is to provide women all available information while considering abortion and allow them adequate time to digest this information and review the sonogram and carefully weigh the impact of this life-changing decision,” he began. Miller then listed everything his bill would require before an abortion could be performed. A woman would have to review with her doctor the printed materials required under the 2003 Woman’s Right to Know Act. While the sonogram image was displayed live on a screen, the doctor would have to “make audible the heartbeat, if it’s present, to the woman.” There was also a script to recite, about the location of the head, hands, and heart. Affidavits swearing that all of this had been properly carried out according to Texas law would have to be signed and filed away in case of audits. A doctor who refused could lose his or her license.
As soon as Miller finished, Houston representative Carol Alvarado strode up to the podium. There could have been no clearer contrast: her pink knit suit evoked all those Houston ladies who lunch, its black piping setting off her raven hair. Her lipstick was a cheery shade of fuchsia, but her disgust was of the I-thought-we’d-settled-this-in-the-seventies variety.
“I do not believe that we fully understand the level of government intrusion this bill advocates,” she said tersely. The type of ultrasound necessary for women who are less than eight weeks pregnant is, she explained, “a transvaginal sonogram.”
Abruptly, many of the mostly male legislators turned their attention to a fascinating squiggle pattern on the carpet, and for a rare moment, the few female legislators on the floor commanded the debate. Representative Ana Hernandez Luna approached the back mike and sweetly asked Alvarado to explain what would happen to a woman undergoing a transvaginal sonogram.
“Well,” Alvarado answered helpfully, “she would be asked by the sonographer to undress completely from the waist down and asked to lie on the exam table and cover herself with a light paper sheet. She would then put her feet in stirrups, so that her legs are spread at a very wide angle, and asked to scoot down the table so that the pelvis is just under the edge.”
At this point, if there had been thought bubbles floating over the heads of the male legislators, they almost certainly would have been filled with expletives of embarrassment or further commentary on the carpet design.
“What does this vaginal sonogram look like?” Luna asked, ever curious.
“Well, I’m glad you asked,” Alvarado answered, “because instead of just describing it, I can show you.”
And so the state representative from Houston’s District 145 put both elbows on the lecturn and held up in her clenched fist a long, narrow plastic probe with a tiny wheel at its tip. It looked like some futuristic instrument of torture. “This is the transvaginal probe,” Alvarado explained, pointing it at her colleagues as she spoke, her finger on what looked like a trigger. “Colleagues, this is what we’re talking about…. This is government intrusion at its best. We’ve reached a”—she searched for the word—“climax in government intrusion.”
Those who could still focus gaped at Alvarado. No one spoke. The silence seemed to confirm for Alvarado something she had long suspected: most of the men in the House chamber didn’t know the difference between a typical ultrasound—the kind where a technician presses a wand against a pregnant belly and sends the happy couple home with a photo for their fridge—and this. She locked Miller in her sights. “What would a woman undergo in your bill?” she asked.
Miller seemed confused. “It could be an ultrasound, it could be a sonogram,” he began. “Actually, I have never had a sonogram done on me, so I’m not familiar with the exact procedure—on the medical procedure, how that proceeds.”
“There are two different kinds of sonograms,” Alvarado said, trying again to explain. “The abdominal, which most of our colleagues may think [of as] ‘jelly on the belly’—that is not what would be done here. A woman that is eight to ten wee
ks pregnant would have a transvaginal procedure.” Miller stammered a response, but Alvarado was not done with him. She continued the grilling for several more minutes, keeping Miller on the ropes with a sustained barrage of icky female anatomy talk. Ultimately, however, the room was stacked against her.
On March 7 Miller’s bill passed 107–42.
Over the next few months, as the Senate passed its version of the bill, which was sponsored by Houston senator Dan Patrick, and as Governor Perry signed the legislation into law at a solemnly triumphant ceremony, the exchange between Alvarado and Miller stood as a glaring reminder of the peculiar way in which women could be largely boxed out of decisions that were primarily concerning them. (A number of female Republican legislators supported the bill too, but the overwhelming majority of the votes cast in its favor were from men.) Of course, women have rarely held the reins of power in Texas, but there has also seldom been a season as combative on the subject of women’s health as the one we have experienced in the past eighteen months.
Miller’s bill was only the beginning of what turned out to be the most aggressively anti-abortion and anti-contraception session in history. In the words of one female reporter who covered the Legislature, “It was brutal.” Not only did the sonogram law pass, but drastic cuts were made to statewide family planning funds, and a Medicaid fund known as the Women’s Health Program was sent back to Washington, stamped with a big “No thanks.” When the dust settled, Texas had turned down a $9-to-$1 match of federal dollars, and the health care of 280,000 women had been placed in jeopardy. And that wasn’t all. Earlier this year, around the time that the new laws began to take effect, an epic, if short-lived, fight broke out between Planned Parenthood and the Susan G. Komen Foundation, pitting two of Texas’s most powerful women against each other and highlighting the agonizing, divisive nature of the debate over women’s health. No sooner had this conflict subsided than the Legislature’s decision to kill the Women’s Health Program was dragged into the courts for a series of reversals and counter-reversals that is still not resolved.
These conflicts could all be seen as the latest in a long struggle, as women in Texas try to gain control over not just their own health-care decisions but their own economic futures and those of their families. This is the state, after all, from which the modern abortion wars originated in 1973 with Roe v. Wade, a case, let’s not forget, that pitted a twenty-one-year-old Houston woman and two upstart lady lawyers from Austin against formidable Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade. It’s a decades-old battle between the sexes over who knows best and, more importantly, who’s in charge. And over the past year, the fighting has intensified. On the one side are the Carol Alvarados of the world; on the other, the Sid Millers. The outcome will determine nothing less than the fate of Texas itself.
For most of Texas history, even during the seemingly halcyon period that was Ann Richards’s governorship, the goal of Texas women to achieve parity with Texas men has been out of reach. The men who settled the state were a tough bunch. They had to survive a harsh, unforgiving climate; murderous Comanche; soil that was in many places relentlessly resistant to cultivation; rattlesnakes; bandits; long, lonely cattle drives; and more. But women—to paraphrase Richards—had to do most of that barefoot and pregnant and without any of the liberties or rights that men enjoyed. As the saying goes, “Texas is heaven for men and dogs, but it’s hell for women and horses.”
Many frontier women learned quickly that they were effectively on their own—the downside to hooking up with a rugged individualist far more comfortable with his cattle than with his wife. They bore, raised, and, too often, buried their kids. They figured out how to make do in the face of cruel poverty. Women had to contend with a challenging contradiction: on the one hand, the clearly defined sex roles of the nineteenth century dictated a courtliness and paternal protectiveness on the part of Texas men that survives to this day. On the other hand, the state was settled in most cases by force, fostering a worship of physical strength and a visceral contempt for anyone too weak to make it on his or her own.
Modern Texas history is filled with stories of women who were held down by what academics like to call “the patriarchy” and the rest of us might simply call “macho white guys.” When trailblazing federal judge and legislator Sarah Hughes ran for reelection to the House in 1932, for instance, her opponent suggested that her colleagues “oughta slap her face and send her back to the kitchen.”
Governor John Connally’s Commission on the Status of Women, established in 1967, found numerous inequities in education and the workforce—but also noted that “overly enthusiastic soapboxing oratory can do the feminine cause more harm than good.” It has been frequently pointed out that Kay Bailey Hutchison, one of the most successful females in recent Texas history, became a television reporter in the sixties because, after finishing law school, she couldn’t find work as an attorney. During Barbara Jordan’s entire term in the Legislature, which lasted from 1967 to 1973, she was the only woman in the Senate; across the hall, there was only one female in the House: Sue Hairgrove, followed by Sissy Farenthold.
What their male counterparts seemed slow to grasp was that, having endured the same adverse frontier environment as their husbands, fathers, and brothers, Texas women developed many of the same characteristics: the indomitable independent streak, the persistent optimism in the face of lousy odds. But instead of speculating in cotton or oil or real estate, women focused on sneaking power from men.
The pseudonymous Pauline Periwinkle campaigned for improved food inspections in 1905 by suggesting that a woman lobby her otherwise uninterested husband after he “has broken open one of those flaky biscuits for which your cuisine is justly famous.” During the Depression, when contraceptives were among the obscene materials the Comstock law deemed illegal to send through the mail, one Kate Ripley, from Dallas, used boxes from her husband’s shirt company to disguise the contents of illicit packages that she shipped to women all over Texas.
As the twentieth century advanced and women began to win seats at more influential tables, several distinct types emerged. For many years, before it was considered politically incorrect, a woman in the political arena was known as a good ol’ girl or a man’s woman. This complimentary description meant she could drink, cuss, and cut a deal and probably never cried in public. Many of these women were what today we’d call liberals, people like Jordan, Farenthold, Sarah Weddington, Richards, and Molly Ivins. They may have endured the hollow loneliness of public scorn, but they managed to get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified in Texas in 1972. It’s probably no accident that these particular heroines came from the liberal tradition—it’s the one that has been most likely to let women talk, even if they weren’t always heard.
But conservative women made their presence felt as well. The most successful ones, like Hutchison or Harriet Miers, played an inside game, making nice—or at least appearing to make nice—while quietly accumulating power. Beauty helped, especially when combined with a rich husband, as Joanne Herring has demonstrated. Barbara Bush took a page from sturdy Republican club women and made herself a commonsense heroine in low heels and pearls. In other words, there were various ways to get around men and grab the steering wheel, and over the years Texas women used them all.
Regardless of their politics, both Democratic and Republican women used their power to advance the cause of family planning. During the time when abortion was both dangerous and illegal—before 1973—volunteering for Planned Parenthood was a socially acceptable, even admirable, thing for many middle- and upper-middle-class women to do. It isn’t surprising that Farenthold and Richards were big family-planning advocates, but so were the very social Sakowitz and Marcus families, the arch-conservative Hunt family, and George and Barbara Bush (at least until he joined the anti-abortion Reagan team in 1980). Partisanship just wasn’t in the picture.
“Over the years, everyone wrote a check,” said Peggy Romberg, who worked for Planned Parenthood in Au
stin for seventeen years. The issues seemed very different in the sixties and seventies: women had husbands who made them remove their IUDs, or who made them quit school to tend to their babies. A woman’s sexual history was allowed to be admitted in court during rape cases. Married women who wanted credit cards in their own name needed their husbands to cosign for them.
Then came that landmark moment in the history of women all over the United States. The story of Roe v. Wade is, in many ways, the story of Texas women. Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe), raised in poverty in Houston, a high school dropout at fourteen, beaten by her husband, and pregnant with her third child in 1969, tried first to lie in order to get a legal abortion—she claimed she had been raped, which would have permitted the procedure in Texas—and then she tried to get an illegal abortion, but her clinic of choice had been shut down by the authorities. Eventually, two Austin attorneys, Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed suit on her behalf, arguing that her right to privacy included her right to have an abortion. (A San Antonio oil heiress, Ruth McLean Bowers, underwrote the legal costs of the case.) In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that state laws banning abortion were unconstitutional. The vote was 7–2.
Nearly forty years of legal abortion have followed, along with an endless stream of bitter arguments and toxic political strife. McCorvey, who wound up having her baby as the case progressed through the courts, later did an about-face, becoming an activist with the pro-life group Operation Rescue. Weddington went on to become an icon of the women’s movement. In time, the case they launched emerged as one of the most divisive and politically expedient issues in American politics. Maneuvering from the governor’s mansion to the White House, George W. Bush used it to successfully solidify conservative Republicans around his candidacy. Though Bush said he was against overturning Roe v. Wade, he talked about promoting a “culture of life,” signed the Abortion Ban Act, in 2003, and campaigned vigorously on the issue, using it to draw a sharp distinction between himself and both Al Gore and John Kerry.
Best American Magazine Writing 2013 Page 24
