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 This decision superceded state laws restricting abortion.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

[peskyliberal]

If men could get pregnant, we would take birth control. Next!

[baldblackman]

If men could get pregnant they would be women!

[ReelBusy]

I used to in my stand up routines in the 80's and 90's say that if men could get pregnant Abortion would be in the Ten Commandments. Also Natural childbirth would be outlawed and epidurals would be mandatory starting in the third trimester. Also we would be a world of only children because men would never go through that twice.

[bushlies]

Bush wants us to over-populate simply to feed his war machine and creat more people to work for starvation wages for his corporate cronies.
Trust me: This ain't all about religion. The Bible-thumpers are just a convenient tool for this bunch.

[kappa08]

This is why I stay OUT of this debate. If you're a man you can't relate or win. Women will always pull rank at the end of the day.
However the last thing I am going to do is feel bad about being man. Erica you're on my list of favorites. But something tells me you would be the type of friend that would turn against me in a crowd of "your kind"...Th­at sucks because at the end of the day I will always fight for women's rights.
This blog comes off as a "bad day" for jaded women. Pretty sexist statement huh...touc­hé

[Gunfighter]

You know, that last line was just a bit too much. "If men could have babies, abortion would be a sacrement"?

Pardon the unintended pun, but isn't that being just a bit too holy?

[PauCK]

I would like to echo my 93 year old mother who says of abortion laws..."I am tired of MEN trying to write laws to tell WOMEN what they can and cannot do with their own bodies."

Enough said.

[oogabooga]

Whatever happened to the Pill, condoms and the day-after pill?

[LorettaSingbiel]

Children (by intent or accident) are not cheap.

$300,000 per MINUTE is being MISspent on the "Global War On Terrorism" in IRAQ. How about we siphon a few days' worth, to jump-start the Universal Health Care Fund?!

Next, let's use those IMMORAL WAR funds to provide HELP with child care, household chores, college tuitions. Let's provide families with more vacation time to "play together" to "stay together".

This could lower our DIVORCE rates.
This could lower our ABORTION rates.

Certainly our great "protector" of the "sanctity & procreation" of "marriage" SHOULD be in FAVOR of relieving the physical, financial and emotional STRUGGLES & STRESSES of our middle-class, two-income, married-wi­th-childre­n families?!

And yet...his CRIMINAL CRUSADE, CHAOS, and CARNAGE in the middle east seems to take precedence. Afterall, there's no sense in us ALL being HEALTHY and HAPPILY-EVER-AFTER MARRIED-WI­TH-CHILDRE­N, if we're not "SAFE" from the "evil-doers" and "the gays"!?

Stay safe, healthy and happy,
Love, Loretta

[thevineyard]

As my sister said, "It's easy to be against abortion until you need one."

And paraphrasing Margaret Cho for a little comic relief, "If men got periods, every bachelor pad would look like a crime scene."

[scooperss]

If men could get pregnant

the human race would die out.

[ScooterLiddy]

The Anti-Abortionists should move to Mexico and see how they like a state that prohibits abortion.

[Acebass]

Just what the movement needs a sexist comment like that. Why don't you just alienate all men? Our gender is random selection I had no more control over my gender as anyone else.
It was a congress of men who voted for Roe V Wade and men, including myself, have supported a womans right to choose. So why don't we get off the sexist bandwagon and work together!

[Mormondude]

The legality of abortion is based solely on an arbitrary line drawn at 'birth', where suddenly the legal system recognizes the baby as a human being with rights.

Biologically, there is no such line. Ethically, there is no such line. Only legally.

The question we all have to ask is why that arbitrary line trumps all others, and why it is drawn in the place it is.

The law is design to PROTECT people. In this case, the child. You can't give birth, commit infanticide, and expect the legal system to excuse that, because the law protects the child.

So again, why is the legal line drawn arbitrarily at birth, and why is a full formed, healthy fetus not just as worthy of protection?

[F150]

How come pregnant women call it a fetus if they don't want it and a baby if they do want it? So they won't have to think about the fact that they're killing a baby that's why. A little honesty would be refreshing but we wouldn't want women to actually feel bad about their terminal decisions.