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 This decision superceded state laws restricting abortion.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

[WoodyCPM]

If men could get pregnant they'd be women.

[spiffarino]

Understand that the anti-abortion crowd goes way beyond what the vast majority of Americans believe. To anti-abortionists, birth control is abortion and should be treated as a crime.
Their ultimate goal is to ensure that women are a permanent underclass. If they can't take command of their own bodies, they're much easier to control. That's the goal.

[mommadona]

Thank you.

And, let's put the energy
where it's needed.

Male Responsibility in the Process.
Sperm = Those 'Family Jewels'
It takes two.

[jsarets]

Huh? I reject the premise of this piece. Every Democratic candidate has a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood. The reproductive rights issue is just as black and white as it has been for decades: Democrats believe that the federal government should protect choice, while Republicans are somewhere between states' rights and a federal abortion ban.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the Republicans to come around on this issue. The social conservatives believe in legislated morality. They do not see this as a freedom of choice issue as conservatives tend to do with economic policy.

Most Republican women are pro-life. This isn't a gender issue as you imply. People who believe every word of the Bible are deeply opposed to abortion and don't want to live amongst people that don't share their views.

I personally find it useless to debate why certain religious doctrines oppose abortion and homosexuality, because you can't question that which is purported to be beyond question. Jesus is a direct adaptation of the Egyptian Sun God Horus, and as surely as the Sun rises, devout Christians will believe what they believe.

[YcCoSQ]

it wasn't all golden when Bill Clinton was President. Bill Clinton is a big reason George Bush became President. Democrats lost congress under Bill Clinton.

[belikejeanvaljean]

One rarely-mentioned situation surrounding abortion is the fact that many women are pressured by the men who impregnated them to have an abortion. For a man, it is an easy way out, a way to avoid responsibility. And for a newly-pregnant woman, this often angry demand that she terminate the preganancy comes at a time when she herself is most vulnerable, feeling at least a little conflicted and often ill from the changing hormones flowing through her body.

Women's rights advocates who trumpet a "woman's right to choose", need to strongly support a woman's right to choose not to have an abortion, even in the face of the father's insistance that she have one. They need to promote the obligation of fathers toward the baby they have fathered and its mother. Unfortunately, the fact that abortion is now legal and readily available in this country, hasn't helped men in the responsibility department.

[desmirl]

Thanks for re-echoing a sentiment that has been around for a long time. But beware of diminishing the size of the problem by reducing it to a cliche. In this nation, some knuckleheaded huckleberries have decided that the wombs of American women are the property of the state, and that once a fetus is in that womb, it gets to stay there until birth. It must be very frustrating to be a woman of breeding age and to be considered only as a container for a state-owned womb. Oh, wait! We have Roe V. Wade which reverses the idea that the state owns womens' wombs. Ladies, it wouldn't hurt my feelings if you all were a bit more activist and together on protecting your right to your wombs and keeping the intrusive minions of the government out of your bodies. There are people who are enemies of Roe V. Wade and you know who they are. DON'T VOTE FOR THEM!

[SamanthaJaneSalem]

Hillary Clinton gave a disturbingly anti-abortion speech a few years ago:

http://www.slate.com/id/2112712

She said:

"There is no reason why government cannot do more to educate and inform and provide assistance so that the choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstan­ces."

That's more like "safe, legal and NEVER" rather than "safe, legal and rare."

But the "safe, legal, rare" argument gave in too much to the advocates of anti-choice. It tried to demonize women who choose to have an abortion they maybe don't need unless it is the last, last resort (and that's up to the State?). The moral high ground was given to "pro-lifers" and they were able to win the P.R. battle.

[Mother77]

I believe Erica is doing us a favor by reminding us of history so easily forgotten if not retold. As with the holocaust or any ethnic cleansing, we must not forget the persecution of women for their service to others. She is not belaboring the point when she speaks to this evangelical Christian based country which would put a woman at risk when that woman is making one of the toughest decisions in her life. Abortion is not a "choice", it is a "decision" which belongs to the woman.

[docinaustin]

Well said.
As a child who was given up for adoption and raised by fundamentalist Christian parents, abortion was always a difficult matter to discuss. While, personally, I am glad that I wasn't aborted, there are a multitude of situations that you cannot simply generalize as to why or why not a woman is getting or needs an abortion.
Should we have had universal healthcare that treated life as precious out of the womb as an unborn fetus, there wouldn't be a debate on abortion. If every American had access to every bit of contraception and education that must come with it, again, there wouldn't be a debate on abortion.

[ebbtide]

Who is attacking abortion? It seems you are trying to bring up an old subject here, when this question is not as much a crisis as it was thirty five years ago. I see extremist religious groups doing so, but mostly, people are not. There are plenty of men around, dear Erica, who also leave it fully up to the mate to decide, realizing it is her body and not his. They are not the enemy. Women use birthcontrol and I bet they are in a majority of the women in this country,. No one, except for extremist religious groups is trying to get rid of birth control pills. It has been around for a long time now and NO ONE is going to stop women from taking birth control pills. Many women also personally would not choose abortion, but they are supportive of allowing others to have the choice to do so,

World wide, many women probably do die in childbirth. That can be helped through efforts of this country and instead of trying to bring up those rotten men who have it in for women , we should work for aid to those countries that have the greatest prevalence of childbirth deaths in any way this country can.

Women are far better off today than they were thirty five years ago. Far better off than they were fifty years ago, or sixty or a hundred. They are lawyers, doctors, soldiers accountants and are able to enter into professions that previously were closed to them.

As for the burning of witches--m­ythology/r­eligion in those days prescribed the criteria.

These days, there is nothing comparable to the burning of witches in our lexicon. Stop already.

Women can accomplish great things, as can men. We need the two sexes for society to proceed . Old feminists are not doing a favor to come round again mentioning the plight of witches in medievil times. This article is Divisive--between the sexes and also between other women.

[Arielman]

I've also read that in the 1930s an oral contraceptive was available (precursor to the "pill") for the very rich and it was made from a bean and was expensive. It was in an introduction to an evolution of agriculture treatise I once read for grad anthropology at Stony Brook U.

[angeranddespair]

Hey it doesn't really matter what side of this debate you are on the only reality is white men over 40 years old who make in excess of 160 thousand a year and don't pay for their health insurance should not be making this decision for or about womens bodies.

[hippynanainblingland]

Great post, Erica!

Just a little addition: It always annoys me when men claim that only they take risks on behalf of the human race, (going to war, policing, etc.) and so they should be the ones deciding policy and wielding power, as if women hadn't been taking risks on behalf of the race, since, well, forever, even before we were human... because childbirth is such a piece of cake, everytime, of course.

Blessings and peace, Hippy Nana

[olephart]

Sweetheart, if men could get pregnant the birthrate would fall to zero. Roe v Wade would be a moot point.