Choice Words Read online

  If nature is beautiful then so is rain and snow and slippery snakes. Grass and gases and tardigrades and fluke worms and flat worms and round worms. How, if fluke worms are beautiful, can abortion not be? It’s not because it signals absence—vacuums and sleep and silence, space and time and free lunch are beautiful. It’s not the non-baby that makes abortion not beautiful.

  It might be the stirrups and the blood that make abortion not beautiful but that is the stuff of women and some women are found to be beautiful even while lying back in stirrups and while bleeding. Perhaps beauty here just means fuckable but indeed every abortion signals some level of fuckability. Whether the fucking was by consent or by rape, the sex itself still worked.

  Rape and abortion are two unbeautiful things that go together in many sentences. Some people won’t even let a raped refugee in the custody of ICE get an abortion. Those people might become Supreme Court justices. I would like to know those people’s opinion on beauty.

  Maybe abortion cannot be beautiful because beauty is not something you can do. You can possess beauty and be beautiful. You can look for beauty and call truth beauty but you cannot beauty your day away. Choice is about verbs, and beauty does not move. Beauty is permanent, memorialized, stuck in a place. Choice winds its way through canyons and through fluttering trees, cutting down mountains and making mulch for next year’s buds. What a gift it is to be able to move like wind.

  MAGDALEN

  Amy Levy

  All things I can endure, save one.

  The bare, blank room where is no sun;

  The parcelled hours; the pallet hard;

  The dreary faces here within;

  The outer women’s cold regard;

  The Pastor’s iterated “sin”;—

  These things could I endure, and count

  No overstrain’d, unjust amount;

  No undue payment for such bliss—

  Yea, all things bear, save only this:

  That you, who knew what thing would be,

  Have wrought this evil unto me.

  It is so strange to think on still—

  That you, that you should do me ill!

  Not as one ignorant or blind,

  But seeing clearly in your mind

  How this must be which now has been,

  Nothing aghast at what was seen.

  Now that the tale is told and done,

  It is so strange to think upon.

  You were so tender with me, too!

  One summer’s night a cold blast blew,

  Closer about my throat you drew

  That half-slipt shawl of dusky blue.

  And once my hand, on summer’s morn,

  I stretched to pluck a rose; a thorn

  Struck through the flesh and made it bleed

  (A little drop of blood indeed!)

  Pale grew your cheek you stoopt and bound

  Your handkerchief about the wound;

  Your voice came with a broken sound;

  With the deep breath your breast was riven;

  I wonder, did God laugh in Heaven?

  How strange, that you should work my woe!

  How strange! I wonder, do you know

  How gladly, gladly I had died

  (And life was very sweet that tide)

  To save you from the least, light ill?

  How gladly I had borne your pain.

  With one great pulse we seem’d to thrill,—

  Nay, but we thrill’d with pulses twain.

  Even if one had told me this,

  “A poison lurks within your kiss,

  Gall that shall turn to night his day:”

  Thereon I straight had turned away—

  Ay, tho’ my heart had crack’d with pain—

  And never kiss’d your lips again.

  At night, or when the daylight nears,

  I hear the other women weep;

  My own heart’s anguish lies too deep

  For the soft rain and pain of tears.

  I think my heart has turn’d to stone,

  A dull, dead weight that hurts my breast;

  Here, on my pallet-bed alone,

  I keep apart from all the rest.

  Wide-eyed I lie upon my bed,

  I often cannot sleep all night;

  The future and the past are dead,

  There is no thought can bring delight.

  All night I lie and think and think;

  If my heart were not made of stone,

  But flesh and blood, it needs must shrink

  Before such thoughts. Was ever known

  A woman with a heart of stone?

  The doctor says that I shall die.

  It may be so, yet what care I?

  Endless reposing from the strife?

  Death do I trust no more than life.

  For one thing is like one arrayed,

  And there is neither false nor true;

  But in a hideous masquerade

  All things dance on, the ages through.

  And good is evil, evil good;

  Nothing is known or understood

  Save only Pain. I have no faith

  In God, or Devil, Life or Death.

  The doctor says that I shall die.

  You, that I knew in days gone by,

  I fain would see your face once more,

  Con well its features o’er and o’er;

  And touch your hand and feel your kiss,

  Look in your eyes and tell you this:

  That all is done, that I am free;

  That you, through all eternity,

  Have neither part nor lot in me.

  THE YEAR THE LAW CHANGED

  Carol Muske-Dukes

  Waiting hours, each of us in a curtain-stall.

  Two men outside, mopping the floor and hall,

  Shouting “Murderers!” at us. Were they janitors?

  Or medics who’d read our charts & diagnosed?

  If men could get pregnant, it would end up

  a sacrament, Gloria said. Simone said, We

  know that no woman takes it lightly. So

  could both be true. In class in San Francisco

  our teacher spoke of his wife who lost

  a child to leukemia, haunted by her ghost

  & told by her shrink to write about blood.

  She wrote about a vampire and her book shot

  to fame so maybe she forgot the one who

  never grew into her name. When my name

  was called I went to have it done and then knew

  I had my life back but covered myself with blood—

  mine and some not—but still of me. I don’t know

  what I mean by “of me,” it’s undefined & even

  the shouting accusers won’t cross that line. I had to

  swear I was clinically mad to have it done. What’s

  madness to the men in white: they clean the world

  of residue like me and all the blood from both of us.

  I BLOOMED

  Angie Masters

  In my womb

  freedom bloomed,

  Intoxicated with blood

  With the glow of the moon.

  My veins burned,

  My heart beat fast

  A thousand fingers aimed at my forehead.

  My wings are not white,

  From deep within

  I birthed myself anew.

  I loathed that which was established for me,

  I was born again, tearing up the earth.

  Let the rose become violet,

  Let the tender find strength.

  I reemerged fertile

  I am the mother of my ideas,

  I am the mother of my works.

  I renounced the idea

  of an obligation that must be fulfilled

  That instead of giving me wings

  made me suffer against my will.

  I accept my nature

  and my ovulation

  I take it back

  and I take b
ack my decision.

  FROM “CORONA AND CONFESSION”

  Ellen McGrath Smith

  III

  I was sixteen and chosen to deliver the Word,

  one of a handful of city spies reporting

  to the Human Life Group in the suburbs.

  Some students played music, some sports—

  but we did more: We were concerned

  for the unborn child. On meeting nights,

  I’d have them drop me off before the turn

  onto my street, then take my flight

  into the dark, not wanting them to see

  where I lived (not split-level,

  scruffy lawn). They took my energy

  with them, in their smart cars, out to Bethel

  Park, a wholesome place for wholesome families.

  I was one of them, not one of these.

  IV

  I was one of them, not one of these

  hard girls who sprayed their hair stiff,

  lugged large combs, let their feet freeze

  waiting for some guys to drive by. If

  I noticed them at all, it was

  by way of contrast. There was one

  I’d heard had two abortions, in my class,

  and with that knowledge my eyes ran

  over her as she came in to morning roll

  call. At one of our assemblies,

  as we showed the cacciatoried, pulled-

  apart fetuses on the wide and trembling

  portable screen, I thought of D with a cruel

  precision, gloried in the anguish of her soul.

  V

  They glory in the anguish of the souls

  who try to quickly enter clinics

  ten years later. Children fed full

  of venom damn them passing, mimics

  of their parents and their pastors.

  It is not a grand conversion, how I left them.

  I was in college, no longer ruled by my father,

  no longer cowed by my church, when D came

  into focus as a living, feeling woman

  (that I’d failed to see is hardest to confess):

  dim auditorium, her long legs on platforms,

  the nun stepping from the aisle to let her pass;

  then, minutes later in the girls’ room,

  sobbing, her friends murmuring Come on.

  VI

  A sob in the midst of friends—how commonly

  a woman’s body melts to this in labor,

  sorrow, grief. But the Virgin had been summoned

  from the circle and cycles of her neighbors,

  set apart from her gender’s company.

  I’d been praised by my parish priest

  for my efforts, my unwitting complicity

  in an ages-old patriarchal contest.

  In art class, I drew a full-figured body

  on her knees praying—to God, to the moon—

  for her period to come, a blue hooded

  sweatshirt pulled over a bloated abdomen.

  That frightened young woman was me,

  and I understood what I had done.

  THE PROMISE

  Tara Betts

  we had a talk pregnant with pauses

  about what I could not write about

  while still able to pray and breathe.

  I agreed to that small silence since

  she wanted my moment to dodge

  judgment, gossip about mothering.

  I promised on Catholic-school skirt

  communion dress dragged deep

  into dreams, I would not say a word.

  FROM “A HEALING ABORTION CEREMONY”

  Jane Hardwicke Collings and Melody Bee

  ALL journeys of the womb deserve tending,

  each and every one.

  When we feel forced to split off from our stories as women,

  be they stories of joy or pain,

  love or fear, hope or despair, we split off from the fullness of our power,

  our beauty, our wisdom.

  And so, may all women,

  everywhere, be supported to be in the fullness of their stories.

  Around the world may we all be supported to be safe and whole,

  in both body and heart,

  may we be supported to be heard,

  and may we be honoured always as the wise shapers and crafters

  of these our own Sacred Lives.

  Let’s stand in a big circle

  Hold hands

  Big breath in, and out with a sigh

  say a tone together

  Feel your sister’s hand in yours

  Feel all the sisters’ hands in yours

  send love, send healing, send hope

  and now let’s put our hands on the earth

  and send healing love to all the women in the world

  who cannot access safe legal abortion … may they be safe and held.

  Hug each woman beside you,

  Thanks for coming

  Blessèd Be.

  A BIRTH PLAN FOR DYING

  Hanna Neuschwander

  A week before my daughter was born, I typed up her birth plan. Reading it now, it sounds strange and stilted. “If the baby is born alive, we would like both a birth and death certificate… I have fears that laboring will be painful without the joy of knowing we will be giving birth to a healthy baby who will come home with us. I have fears that I will be deeply sad during labor/at birth instead of happy to meet our daughter.”

  How do you organize anguish? How do you bureaucratize grief and fear into bullet points?

  River’s birth was scheduled for September 26. She would be born in the same hospital where I had given birth to our daughter, whom I’ll call M, two years before. The staff were ready for us. A kind nurse checked us in at noon and led us to a delivery room with a small sign on the door—a leaf with droplets of water that looked like tears. It’s a secret code. It alerts everyone who comes in the room that your baby is going to die, so people don’t accidentally congratulate you for being there.

  It’s hard to know how to give birth under these circumstances. While you wait for the Pitocin to kick in and get labor started, do you read? Do you make small talk with your husband? Can you will yourself to disappear? I had trouble sitting still. I went out into the bright afternoon sun and walked a paved labyrinth in the courtyard. As I circled toward the center of the labyrinth I imagined I was coming to meet her. As I unwound, I prepared to say goodbye.

  Once the Pitocin-induced contractions got going, they were intense bursts of knotty pain with just twenty or thirty seconds’ rest in between, very different from the long, rolling waves I recalled from my first delivery. It was tiring. I paced around the room, tried to lie down, paced again. As the sun was setting, we went for another walk. Twilight had painted a dark rainbow at the edge of the sky, and Mars or Jupiter or some planet was twinkling just above it. It would have been beautiful except for the ugly parking lot we were walking through. I remember being confused and then excited about the large silhouette I took to be a horse statue at the end of the sidewalk—what is that amazing statue doing in this ugly parking lot, I wondered—arriving at it only to realize it was a dumpster.

  * * *

  When I was around twenty weeks pregnant, after an abnormal ultrasound made it clear that something was wrong but not exactly what, my struggle with language began in earnest. First there was the fog of her diagnosis, what amounted to a cavernous hole in her brain, surrounded by a bunch of misshapen junk. When the genetic counselor first called to give us the results—there was a “large midline cyst,” some “nodularity,” “agenesis” (lack of formation) of a structure called the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres—each word she spoke was a fragment, unmoored from any meaning I could discern.

  We had a follow-up ultrasound appointment in which the perinatologist flipped through a diagnostic textbook, looking for clues to help her identify what she was seeing. She ha
d no idea. Meanwhile, the wobbly underwater music of River’s fetal heart tones played in the background. There was back-and-forth with the radiologist. I had an amniocentesis. I was sent for an urgent fetal MRI. The fragments multiplied. There were frantic, dissatisfying conversations with specialists, endless PubMed searches for scientific papers that might contain clues (there were none), calls with genetic counselors. River didn’t have a nameable disease, something straightforwardly awful like Trisomy 13, just a mounting pile of abnormalities in her brain.

  It was all so vague that for a few days, I teetered frantically between a profound optimism—perhaps she would read below grade-level—and crushing despair that her life would be an unimaginable cascade of suffering that my love would not be large enough to break.

  No one could give us a concrete prognosis, not even an educated guess about whether she would live, or how long she might live, or what her quality of life would be. We did receive a lot of grim looks. At some point, it became clear that we were expected to make a decision. No one named the decision. When my doctor called with the MRI results, the first thing she said was “It’s worse than we thought.”

  * * *

  In the delivery room, at midnight, I called for an epidural. Sitting with my back curled so they could slip the needle next to my spine, I furiously rubbed a small stone in my hand and tried to breathe through an icy terror. Soon my legs felt like big, dumb stumps—the way your lips feel an hour after getting a cavity filled. The relief was immediate, but not being able to walk off my jitters was distressing. I felt marooned on that small metal bed—just me and the reality of what I was there to do. So I slept, as hard and as long as I could. A thick, empty, opioid sleep.

  The room was empty of sound. There were no monitors on, none of the maniacal beeping that usually accompanies a hospital birth. It took me a while to realize why. Fetal monitors allow the hospital staff to search for signals of something gone awry. They search so they can rescue, so they can intervene if anything goes wrong. We were there for River’s birth and her death. It was her life that was wrong. There wasn’t any point in monitoring us. That night, I remember gliding up through my oblivion to the surface and hearing only my ragged breath, John rustling under a blanket on the bench beside me, someone padding quietly down the hall outside the door. I felt I could hear River, swimming quiet laps inside me.