If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would be a Sacrament

Thirty five years ago (22 January 1973) the Supreme Court decided a case titled Roe v. Wade which held that until a fetus is viable outside its mother's body (twenty eight weeks), it is not a legal individual whose rights extend beyond the rights of its mother, that in fact the mother's health preempts any rights the partially formed embryo has.

This case overturned a law in Texas that criminalized abortion and reverberated through the states. According to the Roe decision, laws against abortion violated a woman's right to privacy under due process (in the Fourteenth Amendment). This decision superceded state laws restricting abortion.

Roe v. Wade is one of the most controversial cases in U.S. Supreme Court history. Even before it was decided there were men and women whose stomachs turned at the idea of abortion. The issue had been argued many times before in fairly recent history. In 18th century England, mothers accused of murder were not put to death if they could prove they were "with child." In infamous London prisons of the day there were "child-getters"--fertile men who could reliably make a woman pregnant. Some female criminals availed themselves of their services repeatedly so as not to be hanged.

In the early Soviet Union, abortion was freely available. It was later abolished because too many women were using it in place of birth control--which was hard for most women to get up until the sixties and seventies. Rich women had it, but often not the working classes. Remember Mary McCarthy's The Group? Vassar girls had diaphragms in the thirties--but not blue collar women who relied on condoms and men who would wear them or withdraw before ejaculation. As a seventeen-year-old freshman at Barnard, I got my first diaphragm from Planned Parenthood (a college tradition). I never got pregnant accidentally because I knew that an abortion would make me terribly sad. I loved children, dogs, cats and other living things, and I understood that terminating a pregnancy would be extremely hard for me emotionally. (But then I had sophisticated New York gynecologists all my life and grew up in liberal, enlightened Manhattan with parents who were bohemians of the thirties before they surprised themselves by getting rich).

In my own Manhattan high school years, girls disappeared from New York to darkest New Jersey or Pennsylvania to seek the services of illegal abortionists and many of them were accidentally sterilized while others may have died. Rich women in New York went to Flower Fifth Avenue hospital for a "D & C." My mother did this as late as 1960, but our housekeepers and baby nurses from Jamaica or the Deep South didn't have that option. A safe medical abortion (my mother referred to it in whispers as an "a- b") was expensive and hard to find. Many poor women got infected and died. In my mother's case, as I later learned, my father was adamant about not having another baby. There were already three girls growing up and needing private schools, hand-smocked party dresses, music lessons, art lessons, ballet, figure skating, charge accounts at Saks, Best and Company and Bergdorf's, Doubleday book stores (with their listening booths for LPS--which we quaintly called "records."

How interesting that the thirty-fifth anniversary of Roe comes on the very day that my daughter will go home from the hospital after having had twins. She had a really tough time, and has been warned that she would be at risk if she got pregnant again. She is not yet thirty and has had, thank the goddess, three beautiful children and a lovely husband. She also has generous parents and in-laws, step-parents who adore her and can refuse her nothing. But she was still terrified by a very difficult delivery (the details of which are hers not mine to describe. Since she is a much-published novelist, I'm sure she will).

The babies, a girl and a boy, are miraculous--like all babies--bringing back to me Ordinary Miracles, a book of poems about childbirth I wrote when Molly was born. (The phrase has entered the language--or been ripped off by various ASCAPniks and jingle writers). Babies are miraculous, especially just when they just wake to the world.

They seem to come from a better place which some call 'God,' some call 'Mother Nature,' and some call human evolution, depending on your point of view. (I happen to think that evolution is every bit as numinous as 'God'). But one thing is clear: Having them ain't easy. And that's long before you have to raise them.

For centuries, death in childbirth was woman's lot. In some places, it still is. In mountainous Afghanistan where women can't get to hospitals or there are none, in war zones, in occupied zones with barriers or curfews, in many parts of Africa, in rural India, and China, in rural America, giving birth is still no joke. Even in big cities, it can be dangerous. There is massive bleeding, the placentas don't always detach promptly, babies are often transverse or breach, just for starters. Then there is the question of medical care.

Again, in the eighteenth-century, my favorite period in English Literature, (at the dawn of the modern era--but before Louis Pasteur), accoucheurs (the precursors of obstetricians) killed many women with the microbes they unknowingly carried from the sickbeds of other patients. There was a great political struggle between midwives, who only dealt with women, and doctors who treated everyone, because the doctors wanted their monopoly.

Many women died of infection--like Charlotte Bronte--or nearly died like Mary Shelley. Women's health had always been a political football in the supposedly "civilized" Christian era. Many midwives (always specialists in women's health) were burned as witches throughout modern history.

Now we know about bacteria and viruses and we are much more aware of unconscious infection, but childbirth can still be a big deal--especially for older women, very young women, the ill, the malnourished, the poor, the mothers of multiple babies. It seems to me incredible that anyone without a uterus would try to dictate what a woman should do with hers.

So I am appalled that abortion remains under attack--and that birth control in America has been impeded. We came so far with so much struggle. To give it back now is no less than an assault on women's health.

Of course babies are precious and should be cherished. Nobody doubts that. But should a woman be forced by the law to give birth if she has health issues, a dead baby, twins or triplets, or can't get to a hospital or must be accompanied but a male relative--who may be at war or dead or unwilling? Fundamentalist Muslims, like fundamentalist Christians would deny her that.

No wonder the late great Florynce Kennedy said: If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

Comments

[SaintSatinStain]

Abortion is murder, even in cases when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. I state that as a moral position,not a legal one.Kill a human zygote, embryo, and fetus you kill a human life. That is biology, and I don't talk to folk who deny it. They belong with folk who still believe the earth flat.
Human zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are human; they are not persons. Personhood is a political and legal concept. Got it?
The state does not have the Constitutional power to tell a woman whether to have an abortion or not have an abortion. It's it is none of the state's business. No matter how immoral I believe it is, I have to defend the individual woman's right to have an abortion.

Abortion kills a human life; it does not kill a person. A woman is a person; she has rights, and one intuitive right is the control of her body.

[honorharrington]

Don't like abortion?

Then don't have one.

[nocore]

Erica,

I think you mean "sacrosanct". "Sacrament" doesn't make sense.

[glesslib]

Or, as my OB told me 30 years ago, " If women had the first baby, and men had the second one, there would be no third children."

[Superfelo]

Now let's go to abortion. Our society has no courses in any school to teach people, about relationships, between human beings. Our society, Western society, as well as Eastern society, and all the other societies that exist on the planet, do not have any way, yet, to teach people about love; about being human; about being sincere; and about being honest.
To speak the truth, it is all left to chance, and to those who have the means, or are lucky,
to be sent to those precious private schools, you mention. Although, I think, and the evidence proves it, that a lot of these private schools do not teach people how to speak with candor, how to be sincere, and how to be honest. Parental love is the only thing capable of teaching those.
We need a big look, a great re-structuring
at how we go about educating human beings to be humans and to be part of civilized society, so that we can eradicate poverty, envy, corruption, inhumanity to each other, etc.
They call it Utopia; I call it being really truly educated about what it is to be human.
I think we are all the victims of defective love. Anger and resentment are the order of the day; and until we harness positively the love that exists within us, by imparting it, as parents to our children, abortions, injustice, robberies, poverty, Giulianis, Keriks, and Bushes will never end.
The point is that yes, let"s advocates for a woman's right to privacy; but let's advocate
for an idea whose time has come: The education of human beings as to what it entails to be human, and the price that must be paid to be in a relationship, and the consequences.
The teaching of how to behave as human beings must be made a sacrament.

Yes, we can!

Enough said.

[Superfelo]

Erika,
I definitely support a woman's right to privacy, although I am a man, and the right to privacy of everyone else.
But our reasoning, so far, has been fundamentally wrong. We live in a society that usually looks for the more expedient way out. Take a Zoo bear, please.
A bear is a wild animal; it does not think, it does not reason; it lives a life of merely fodding for food and protecting itself from other animals. I mention this to make a point.
A child wanders into the bear's lair...maybe by neglect, inattentive parents, whatever. The bear resents the intrusion; or see food come into its cave, it attacks, kills. Then, it is immediately killed, or euthanized, I guess, to assuage the sensibility of those involved, and the rest of the humans.
I guess, the bear must pay the ultimate price....it killed a human.
(I do not fail to see the irony in all this)
It seems to me though, that the bear is not guilty because it does not reason, it does not think, and it is a wild animal that humans are keeping for their viewing pleasure.
I take this far-fetched example to describe how our society reasons. The bear killed a human it must be killed. It is the expedient way out. They do not say: "well the bear cannot reason, the bear is a wild animal, etc." continued below.......

[kellygrrrl]

if men had a menstrual cycle, everybody would get at least two freebie "sick" days each month

[zizyphus]

It is staggering to me that there is even discussion of repealing one of the few laws that actually has helped poor women.

Nowhere in nature is every seed brought to fruition. The idea that a woman must bear whatever gets fertilized in her womb is unnatural, an abomination, a horror, beyond my imagining. Men can have no appreciation of this, since they are blissfully unable to be impregnated. With all the modern medical marvels perhaps we can make it possible for this to happen now.

All men who oppose abortion should sign up to be fitted to carry unwanted fetuses to term. Let those men work three jobs while pregnant, pick up kids, make dinner, do the housework, and give birth over and over and over and over....as for the women who oppose safe health care for their sisters, I have no comment, except they are deluded by propaganda. Perhaps they would like to receive the fetuses and have twenty or thirty kids. I doubt it.

[ScienceLady]

The number of abortions should be reduced. This is done by education, not legislation. No law would make me carry a fetus to term that I didn't want. I use birth control, and so far it's been effective. I have two children, I am 46 years old.
Those who wish to ban this medical procedure want to control women lives.

[Tankan]

All things considered, would Adam ask for his rib back?

[flatus]

Erica,

"be fruitfull and multiply"

Successfully dismantle this little bit of biblical idiocy (read between the lines as: more people, more contributions to the church)
and you will no longer have to fight against those who incorrectly believe that they are saving lives.

[Kane]

When South Dakota passed a law banning abortion, they asked all U.S. Senators to please help them to defeat this law, and Barack Obama was the only U.S. Senator who stood up and raised money to help successfully turn over the ban on abortion in South Dakota. - Helen Halpin, Professor of Health Policy, U.C. Berkeley
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJK3x66gaww

Why Lorna Brett Howard, former President of Chicago NOW, switched from Clinton to Obama:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVuMYKs8iJs&feature=related

[Kassandra]

Erica, Your article ( and some of the comments from men) is more evidence to me that Neanderthals really DID intermix with Cro-Magnons...Maybe that's when men got so much bigger than wimmin?

I always love to point out that female animals STOP reproducing when there is insufficient food, non-optimal sexual partners or other circumstances inconducive to raising babies to maturity. With the tripling of the world's human population since I was born and the politically engineered food shortfalls, not to mention the takeover of the world by andro-centric corporations, I would think that human reproduction would grind to an absolute halt under natural conditions. Who knows? Maybe the pollution will get so bad that most wimmin will wind up infertile like in Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"...

then, we won't have to have this discussion! (ever again)

[rroy]

I again offer a question;How many people who participate in this debate,especially the Anti Choicers who mislabel themselves as Pro Life,have ever read Justice Blackmun's Opinion For The Majorety in Roe v,Wade?
It does not treat the question of when life begins lightly!It does illustrate that there really is no scientific` definative answer.Various opinions have been put forth throughout history almost all of them put forth by males of theological bent,but absolutely nothing of any scientific merit.
Another poser is,when we use the term "life"what kind of life are we talking about?Plants are alive when we pick them and cook them.Animals are alive when we slaughter them for sustinance.or for trophies.I don't know of anybody eating a wolf or a lion,or cheetah.Animals experience fear and pain,how do we convince ourselves we are not murdering them?
These questions are never answered beyond their religious or emotional signifigance.
And who is asked to pay the consequenses of our lack of substantive knowledge?The victim and no one else,the impregnated woman, regardless of the circumstances that got her into this situation.
Where is the justice in this attitude???

[amaraya]

I am a liberal who believes in ending abortion through means other than the law. However, I have a million problems with this article. I'll narrow it down to 3:

1) The title is my least favorite and the most absurd slogan of the pro-choice movement. It's simply untrue. At best you could argue that if men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't be a legal issue. But the "sacrament claim" is immediately going to turn most people off to anything else you say.

2) I don't refrain from getting abortions because I love puppies and kittens and other living things and an abortion "would make me sad". I don't do it, and women shouldn't do it, for the same reason I don't torture animals - it's the taking of a human life and, therefore, an immoral thing to do.

3) The pro-life movement does not oppose abortion because babies are cute. They are not trying to convince pro-choice advocates that babies are precious. We don't refrain from killing things because of their affect on our senses. We don't kill because of a moral code, wherever that code may come from (God, Mother Earth, evolution). We don't kill babies because they are human.