Unborn in the USA

This week a movie that I produced on the history of the anti-abortion movement, Unborn in the USA: Inside the War on Abortion, comes out on DVD. I hope you will buy it and watch it. But in the meantime, has anyone noticed that there are five Catholic justices on the Supreme Court? I'm Catholic so this is not a problem for me, but I think the Pilgrims would not have been thrilled.

The Pilgrims got on a ship and came to the "New World" from Britain so they could practice the religion of their choice. Catholicism was Britain's state religion until numerous wars, beheadings, eviscerations and divorces of King Henry VIII spawned a new one, the Church of England.

The Pilgrims -- though not all that tolerant themselves -- were cautious people with long memories. Thus, a Catholic was not elected to the presidency of the United States until John F. Kennedy in 1960. Growing up, I heard again and again that a Catholic could never be president. Being Catholic was almost as big an obstacle as being a woman or being African American (black men got the right to vote 50 years before any woman, by the way).

At Catholic school, one of the things my teachers hammered home was the importance of the separation between church and state. This was what enabled Catholics to practice their religion without being beheaded as happened to my namesake St. Suzanna in ancient Rome. Suzanna became St. Suzanna, because she was Catholic, married, monogamous, and refused to marry her husband's father in addition to her husband. Roman soldiers beheaded her for her choice.

In Unborn in the USA, people of many religions speak out. Most of them want the Supreme Court [which has one woman, a non-Catholic, among its nine members] to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that supported Jane Roe's [not her real name] right to privacy about what happened inside her body. Subsequently, foes of abortion [Catholics among them] proposed a new type of citizen called the "unborn" or "pre-born" and began seeking equal rights for them under the law.

I can't think about the "unborn" without thinking about the already-born. When I was very young, my then-boyfriend introduced me to his sweet, old, Catholic grandmother who lived in Astoria, Queens, wore a housedress, pinned back her gray hair, and smelled of fresh baked bread. Reminiscing about the old days, she told me how her husband would get his pay check, get drunk, come home and get her pregnant. She had one daughter, a mentally retarded son, and the recollection of many trips to someone she called "the back alley butcher" in Coney Island. I was naïve and thought the butcher was where she bought her meat. "No," she corrected, "the butcher -- with the coat hanger?" I winced. "What else was I going to do?" she asked. "I couldn't feed the kids I had." The vision of this kind, old Catholic grandmother in her younger years with a coat hanger up her uterus...I've never quite shaken it.

In Unborn in the USA, the protagonists fight their war against abortion, sometimes with information, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat. Sometimes they succeed in changing people's minds about abortion, but they never succeed in compelling obedience to the unenforceable.

Perhaps the Supreme Court will see fit to continue agreeing to disagree about the 14th Amendment, choosing privacy as a reasonable boundary among citizens. Remembering the Pilgrims, St. Suzanna, and my old boyfriend's grandmother, I hope so.

Let me know what you think of the movie.

Suzanne O'Malley lectures at Yale University and is the author of Are You There Alone?:" The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates. She is also a former writer of Law & Order.

Comments

[gallstones]

I truly do not understand how LEGAL abortion foes believe that making it illegal will stop abortions. They seem to be amnesic about pre-1973 illegal abortion America. Abortions still happened--have been happening for eons--it's just that more women died or ended up sterile from "back alley butchers".

[BMSstudy]

Are you saying that people should not want RvW overturned because it will lead to back alley 'butcher' jobs? I wholeheartedly agree that I do not want anyone to face the ugly prospect of having a back-alley abortion that could cause life long (if you live,) physical issues.

I have heard (please be kind,) that a reasonably large percentage of the prison population is there on drug related charges. If we legalize pot we could reduce the current population of prison and decrease the rate of new inmates. If that is not enough, we could then address legalizing the next level of drugs and so on until we reach a prison population and make-up (crimes) that we as a society feel is appropriate.

I am not saying all arguments of the pro-choice crowd are wrong, but this one sure seems pretty weak. We will not address a law (make a new one or over turn an existing one,) because of what it will make people do.

[GawdFraud]

This issue makes my head hurt. The only way it will ever be resolved will be to get the religious fanatics out of the equation. I"m older than Spam and younger than dirt and can remember the years long before Roe/Wade became a reality. To think that abortions were uncommon before this decision is to demonstrate an idiot"s grasp of reality. And the difference between those who got abortions and the rest of the population was money.
Birth control was difficult. Long before medical contraceptives were developed, only condoms existed and they were expensive, not always of good quality, and available only behind drugstore counters.
The town where I lived had a small maternity hospital catering mostly to an upscale clientele. However, most women going there went for D & C"s (disguised abortions???) rather than for births. It was pretty common knowledge that this was its principle reason for existence. In fact, several years after Roe/Wade the hospital went out of business.
Also, a couple blocks from where we lived there was a large, nondescript looking two-story residential building that had an abnormally large parking lot in the rear, - the local abortion mill owned and operated by a politically connected family. Traffic of women wearing head scarves or veils, in and out, was relentless.
These were also times when it was not uncommon for women to be dumped unceremoniously at the emergency door of local hospitals suffering complications from botched abortions. Since this was before antibiotics, death and sterility were the most common results.
The thought of a reversion of Roe/Wade is horrifying to me. Yet all of the above is exactly what we will revert to if the act is reversed.