by
Jennifer Baumgardner on 21 November 2005 on www.Alternet.org
Even among pro-choice activists, why does having more than one abortion
imply a woman has been 'careless'?
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.
She worked at feminist health centers throughout the 1970s 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 Speak Out: 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 a 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 -- 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 fifty-two. "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 second-abortion
stigma to him: "It's odd, given that it's the exact same situation
as before, no more or less of a life," my father 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
flyers." The reason that casual term is not an insult is simply
due to how common multiple abortions are. "You have 300 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 100 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 -- pro-choice 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
commonsense. 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 need 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 abortion last year 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 twenty-five-year-old 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 Speak Out, 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 -- say "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 was funny, but twice is a
spanking -- was right.
In September, Pauline Bart, another second wave woman of some reputation
within the movement, suggested at a screening of Speak Out 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 ones' 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 clinician, thinks multiple abortions points 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
more 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. |
