Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Joan Kemp sees abortion as a solution “imposed by a society that places too much importance on male lineage and not enough on the value of each human being.” In that regard, she categorizes the pro-choice movement as antifeminist. Some women who become pregnant after rape refer to the ensuing childbirth as a “second rape”; antiabortion feminists refer to the abortions that such women may choose to have as the “second rape.” For some women, an abortion might be more traumatic than bearing a rape-conceived child. The pseudonymous Denise Kalasky writes of how she was put under involuntary anesthesia for the abortion of the pregnancy that began when her father raped her, so her parents could keep their reputations intact. Here, the abortion clearly constitutes another assault characterized by lack of choice.

  Among those who would block the right of rape victims to choice, none is more determined than David C. Reardon, founder of the Elliott Institute. There is no eponymous Elliott; the institute’s website explains that the name was selected to sound official and impartial. Starting in the early 1980s, some pro-life advocates opposed abortion even for rape victims on the basis that it could lead to a condition they named “postabortion syndrome,” characterized by depression, regret, and suicidality—a condition formulated as evidence that the Supreme Court had been wrong, in Roe v. Wade, when it averred that abortion was a safe procedure. The ultimate goal of the Elliott Institute is to generate legislation that would allow a woman to seek civil damages against a physician who has “damaged her mental health” by providing her with an elective abortion. On the topic of impregnated survivors of rape and incest, Reardon states in his book Victims and Victors, “Many women report that their abortions felt like a degrading form of ‘medical rape.’ Abortion involves a painful intrusion into a woman’s sexual organs by a masked stranger.” He and other antiabortion partisans often quote the essay “Pregnancy and Sexual Assault” by Sandra K. Mahkorn, who suggests that the emotional and psychological burdens of pregnancy resulting from rape “can be lessened with proper support.” Another activist, George E. Maloof, writes, “Incestuous pregnancy offers a ray of generosity to the world, a new life. To snuff it out by abortion is to compound the sexual child abuse with physical child abuse. We may expect a suicide to follow abortion as the quick and easy way to solving personal problems.”

  Younger women and girls, who don’t have a clear idea of their own future, often decide to continue or end a rape-related pregnancy in rebellion against or compliance with the wishes of parents and other elders. Other women are in denial: one-third of pregnancies resulting from rape are not discovered until the second trimester. Any delay in detection or action reduces women’s options, but many women are still recovering from being raped when they are called on to make up their minds whether to carry through their pregnancy. No matter which choice is ultimately made, pregnancy after rape can lead to depression, anxiety, insomnia, and PTSD. Rape is a permanent damage; it leaves not scars, but open wounds. As one woman I interviewed said, “You can abort the child, but not the experience.”

  The philosopher Susan Brison, herself a rape survivor, has said, “Trauma not only haunts the conscious and unconscious mind, but also remains in the body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic event.” A pregnancy literalizes this condition by staying in the body until abortion or delivery. In describing the problems of treating raped women, Croatian psychiatry professor Vera Folnegovi-Šmalc said, “We frequently encounter a loss of vital instincts or even a death wish. Suicidal thoughts are evident above all.”

  • • •

  Melinda Stephenson knew from childhood that she wanted to go into deaf education. Her father was deaf and her mother, hearing; as a hearing child, fluent in Sign, she served as her father’s translator. He had completed only fifth grade, and her mother had graduated from high school; Melinda was determined to go to college. In her native Indiana, Ball State University was the only college that gave degrees in deaf education, so that’s where Melinda went. In her sophomore year, she lived off-campus and commuted via the university-run shuttle service. The shuttles were driven by students, and Melinda occasionally chatted with them, including one, Ricky, who was a childhood-education major.

  One evening on her way home, Melinda noticed a car idling in front of her building. She assumed it was someone dropping off her roommate, who usually returned from volleyball practice about that time, so she left the door unlocked. When she heard it close, she turned and saw Ricky. “He shoved me on the bed and said, ‘If you scream, I will kill you.’ I remember looking at my clock. It was eight forty-seven.” The phone was ringing—she found out later that her mother was calling—but he cut the cord. “I was banging on the wall, I was kicking him, but then he showed me a knife, and I wanted to live. He left at eleven twenty-three.”

  Melinda sat on her bed without moving until five thirty the next morning, when she finally asked a friend to take her to the hospital. The nurse expressed doubt that it had been a rape and did not offer emergency contraception. She did, however, summon the police, and Melinda made a report; the police asked if she wanted to press charges, and she said she couldn’t. Melinda finished the fall semester with plummeting grades and dropped out halfway through the spring semester, paralyzed by anxiety. “I was petrified to leave my apartment,” she recalled.

  She moved back in with her parents and enrolled at Ivy Tech Community College, although it had no deaf-education program. When she realized she was pregnant and told her mother, it was already too late for an abortion; Melinda couldn’t bear the thought of relinquishing the baby anyway. “I had to change and adapt, or be stuck in fear,” she explained. “So I changed and I adapted.” Many of the adaptations were painful. Anxious and deeply depressed, she was hospitalized twice—once on suicide watch. She was offered a job in deaf education out of state, but was terrified to live on her own.

  When her son, Marcus, was born, Melinda’s parents refused to treat him as their grandchild. “We have a secured area in the living room where we stay,” Melinda explained. When her father is home, Marcus has to stay within five feet of her. “Marcus went to touch the TV the other day,” she said, “and my dad went to hit him, and I yelled, ‘You touch him, and you’ll never see me again.’” When her sister adopted a daughter, Melinda’s parents would take the little girl to the park and go to Grandparents Day at her school. But when a coworker asked Melinda’s mother how her grandson was doing, she said, “What grandson? I don’t have a grandson.”

  After college, Melinda got a job with Head Start. By then, she had developed compulsions, could not tolerate having different foods touch, began cutting herself, and couldn’t go to a new place on her own, even a Starbucks. “If you get into my bubble,” she warned, “I get angry.” A child at Head Start wore a stocking cap one day that was identical to Ricky’s, and she took it out of his cubby and threw it away. “He was four years old! I’ve got to fix this,” she said.

  Melinda started seeing a therapist who was a rape survivor herself. At first, Melinda couldn’t talk about what had happened. When she did, she insisted that the door be locked first. Her therapist suggested that Melinda send anonymous postcards to Ricky laying out her accusations, as a way of getting it off her chest. She sent one every other day, from different towns. Sometimes she would print them out on a computer, other times she’d paste together words she’d cut out of magazines or imitate a child’s handwriting. She mailed some to his job, others to his home.

  After six months of postcards, Ricky brought charges against her for stalking, so she was fired from Head Start, where employees cannot be the subject of a criminal investigation. “I’ve worked at a job for two years, I’ve never been in trouble, I’ve never been late, I’ve never missed a day, nothing. And you’re going to fire me over a postcard?” she said. Ricky then announced that he was going to sue for custody, and Melinda broke down. She took Marcus to Child Protective Services (CPS) and announced that she was signing h
im over. Her therapist met her there and convinced her to take Marcus home, but her mother offered to drive her back to CPS if she changed her mind again.

  Melinda found another job in a toddler day-care center. Her mental state remained fragile, and the line between Marcus and Ricky seemed blurred for her. “I feel like they’re connected, and there’s no one-or-the-other,” she said. “He’ll touch me and say something, and I’ll think, ‘That’s your dad.’ What if I go to hurt him, thinking he’s his dad? I’m petrified. Marcus is the spitting image of my rapist.” She got a glazed look. “There’s some things that he does, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, I’m so proud of you.’ And then he’ll talk to me and suddenly I can’t even acknowledge him. Without him, what’s going to make me get up in the morning? I guess I’m much less likely to kill myself if I’ve got him.”

  Within a year, Melinda wrote to me that she’d been dating a man for eight months and they were expecting a child. “Marcus is excited about being a big brother,” she continued. “I am happy, therapy is going in a good path, and the best part, my parents can’t tell us what to do anymore.” Two months later, she wrote, “The guy I had been dating decided that I wasn’t for him. He is now living in Michigan with his new wife. I named my daughter Eliza. Sad news is she was born dead. My pregnancy with her was so different than with Marcus. With Eliza I made sure that everything I did was in the best interest of Eliza. Kinda odd, huh? Wanted to ignore Marcus and hope it would go away and I have him, and then I do everything I can to take care of myself and my Eliza and I lose her.” Six months later, she gave up Marcus; he was placed with a foster family that was considering adopting him. “I see him as much as I want,” Melinda wrote, “which is not as much as I should. He is getting everything that I could not provide. I am not allowed to spend time alone with him, and I think that is very smart. I struggle a lot with losing Eliza. For Eliza’s birthday I am having a cookout with some friends. I am so excited to make her ‘gunk’ cake. It’s a 9 x 11 yellow cake with peanut butter icing covered in birdseed with whatever writing I decide to put on it. I will be putting this cake on her grave so that the wildlife can enjoy her presence and life as all of us do every day.” So Melinda struggled on, in love with a child who was dead, and unable to love the one who was alive. Rape engenders both rage and sadness, and even as it had made Marcus the object of Melinda’s displaced fury, it had made Eliza the safer receptacle of her despair.

  • • •

  Recent theorists have applied evolutionary theory to surmise that rape is primarily a reproductive strategy, the genes for which are likely to be selected. Jonathan and Tiffani Gottschall, who teach at Washington & Jefferson College, propose that rapists “target victims not only on the basis of age but based on a whole complement of physical and behavioral signals indicating a victim’s capacity to become pregnant”—many of them the same signals that underlie nonrape attraction. Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, authors of A Natural History of Rape, argue that men who commit rape spread their seed far and wide, thus fulfilling the self-perpetuating drive of the selfish gene.

  The idea that fantasies of forced reproduction often course through the minds of rapists accords with feminist theory. The scholar Catharine MacKinnon has emphasized this construct, writing, “Forced pregnancy is familiar, beginning in rape and proceeding through the denial of abortions; this occurred during slavery and still happens to women who cannot afford abortions.” Susan Brownmiller has proposed that reproduction is the primary motive for many rapists. “Men began to rape women when they discovered that sexual intercourse led to pregnancy,” she writes. In the developed world, rape may be an effective reproductive strategy within abusive relationships, but hardly otherwise: most victims do not become pregnant; most of those who do have abortions; and rapists are sometimes imprisoned, curtailing their reproductive potential. Mary P. Koss, a clinical psychologist at the Arizona College of Public Health who studies sexual violence, has said that rather than choosing between evolutionary and social explanations for rape, we must figure out how to integrate them.

  Rapists are often repeat offenders; it is less well-known that women who have been raped before age eighteen are twice as likely as other women to be raped as adults. Sexual abuse perpetuates itself. The two statistics have an appalling symmetry. As aggression is rewarded in the rapist, the victim’s ego becomes frayed and vulnerable. Then her understanding that the world is unsafe becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  • • •

  Growing up in Milwaukee, Lori Michaels had a friendly relationship with Fred Hughes, who lived across the street with his wife and three kids. When Lori was twelve, Fred started buying her candy and taking her for rides in his car. After he’d built up some trust, he took her to a garage, put a 9 mm gun to her head, and made her perform oral sex on him. It happened four times over a couple of months; then Fred and his family moved to Chicago. She never told anyone.

  When Lori was nineteen, Fred moved back to Milwaukee. Lori was staying with someone who knew him and sometimes she would wake up at night to find Fred in her room with his gun. He would take her back to the same garage, time and again for more than a year. Lori kept quiet about it; she feared what her mother, Clarabel, might say if she found out. One night her landlord’s sister said, “Lori, Fred’s been bragging about sleeping with you. Was that willingly?” Lori said it was not. “I didn’t think so” came the response. “He did it to my daughter Ginger, too.” Ginger was fourteen at the time. Ginger’s mother called the police on Lori’s behalf, and Lori took them to the garage. Ginger had already led them to the same place. “Who knows who else he was hitting up?” Lori remarked.

  Not long afterward, Lori realized she was pregnant. She told her boyfriend, Bud, that either he or Fred could be the father. Fred was black, and Lori and Bud were white, so she figured she would find out when the child was born. When Clarabel got wind of what had happened, the harsh judgment Lori feared didn’t materialize. “Are you going to get an abortion, put it up for adoption, keep it?” Clarabel asked. “If you keep the child, you can’t take anything out on that child. And if you’re not going to keep it, it’s best to make a clean break and be done with it immediately.” Clarabel listed the problems Lori would face, starting with racism if it was Fred’s, and said it was hard work being a single mother. After a day of pondering, Lori told Clarabel she was going to keep the child, and her mother said, “I knew you would. I just wanted you to think before you made that choice.”

  Lori moved back home, but she sank into depression and slit her wrists when she was eight months pregnant. Bud found her and called 911. Lori insisted that the rape, not the pregnancy, had engendered her despair, that if she hadn’t been pregnant, her suicide attempt would have been successful. “My son is what’s kept me going,” she said, echoing a frequent refrain among mothers of such children. That Lori had put up with years of rape without a suicide attempt and then made one during pregnancy called her logic into question. When the boy was born, he looked white. “And then when I went to change his diaper, his penis was black,” Lori said. “So they told me, ‘Mulatto babies come out white and their penises are black.” Lori named him Bobby and took him home, where Clarabel did much of the caretaking.

  Fred was prosecuted for his rapes of Lori and Ginger. Sentenced to two and a half years, he was released after two years for good behavior. Genetic analysis showed that Bobby was his son, and Fred requested custody, which he was not granted. Nevertheless, his wife repeatedly accosted Lori, demanding access to Bobby. Lori and Clarabel and Bobby eventually left Wisconsin and resettled in the Southwest. A few years later, Fred was in jail again, pending trial on charges that he had raped five girls and assaulted another so severely that she nearly died. The DA sought two life sentences plus fifteen years, but he filed paperwork incorrectly and the case was dismissed. Fred soon moved, and the system lost track of him. “Each time he rapes someone, it’s more violent,” Lori said. “And now he’s free.”

  When I
met Lori and her family in the trailer park where they were living, Bobby was twelve. Lori said she rarely thought about Fred when she looked at Bobby. “My sister calls Fred ‘the sperm donor,’” she related. “I believe Bobby’s my miracle boy.” The rest of her family have also been accepting. “My whole family was racist, the older generation,” Lori added, “but they treated Bobby very special. My great-grandma, she slipped once and called him a nigger. She looked at me and wanted to cry, and she never slipped again.” Many of Lori’s romantic relationships had been troubled, and Bobby had grown up defending his mother in violent domestic situations. Her work history has also been spotty—in part because she has Social Security income on grounds of PTSD, and if she earns too much money, she’ll lose those benefits. So she’s worked at Burger King and Taco Bell, but she runs out of steam quickly and finds it hard to deal with other people on the job. The family mostly lives on the income Clarabel earns at Walmart.

  Clarabel had thought the right time to discuss Bobby’s origins with him was when he began to ask questions. So when he was seven, Lori told him she had been raped by his father, who’d put a gun to her head. “I don’t want to know him,” Bobby told me. Good-looking, friendly, and rather self-possessed at twelve, Bobby is also high-strung and moody. He has been diagnosed with ADHD and other learning disabilities—possibly inherited from Fred, who was illiterate. One clinician suggested that he may be bipolar as well. He has run into problems with teachers and bounced from school to school. Bobby is the apple of his grandmother’s eye. “Weekends or early in the morning,” Clarabel said, “he comes and sits up on my bed, and I watch National Geographic and nature movies with him.” Still, the emotional life of the family remains complicated. “I do a lot of hollering,” Lori said. “I’m in anger management on Tuesday nights. We do family counseling, and I’m on meds till I get back on track.” Bobby loses his temper with his friends and once threw a TV while fighting with his mother. “The counselor says he’s not going to hit me,” Lori said, “but he’s seen so much violence.”