Choice Words Page 7

  Folks were paralyzed in their seats.

  Cora went on: “They preaches you a pretty sermon and they don’t say nothin’. They sings you a song, and they don’t say nothin’. But Cora’s here, honey, and she’s gone tell ’em what they done to you. She’s gonna tell ’em why they took you to Kansas City.”

  A loud scream rent the air. Mrs. Art fell back in her chair, stiff as a board. Cousin Nora and sister Mary sat like stones. The men of the family rushed forward to grab Cora. They stumbled over wreaths and garlands. Before they could reach her, Cora pointed her long fingers at the women in black and said, “They killed you, honey. They killed you and your child. I told ’em you loved it, but they didn’t care. They killed it before it was…”

  A strong hand went around Cora’s waist. Another grabbed her arm. The Studevant males half pulled, half pushed her through the aisles of folding chairs, through the crowded dining room, out into the empty kitchen, through the screen door into the backyard. She struggled against them all the way, accusing their women. At the door she sobbed, great tears coming for the love of Jessie.

  She sat down on a wash-bench in the backyard, crying. In the parlor she could hear the choir singing weakly. In a few moments she gathered herself together, and went back into the

  house. Slowly, she picked up her few belongings from the kitchen and pantry, her aprons and her umbrella, and went off down the alley, home to Ma. Cora never came back to work for the Studevants.

  Now she and Ma live from the little garden they raise, and from the junk Pa collects—when they can take by main force a part of his meager earnings before he buys his licker.

  Anyhow, on the edge of Melton, the Jenkins niggers, Pa and Ma and Cora, somehow manage to get along.

  YOU HAVE NO NAME, NO GRAVE, NO IDENTITY

  Manisha Sharma

  More girls in India and China are eliminated every year than the number of girls born in the U.S. Over the last decade, six million plus girls were eliminated before birth in India; this is more than the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust by the Nazis.

  —Sabu M. George, MA, PhD, and member of India’s Campaign Against Sex Selection, 10 September 2013

  “Praise be to the goddesses,” the curly-haired mother of two boys,

  my gynecologist, spoke in code for: it’s a girl, a D & C must be done.

  At dawn for your father’s lunch, I seal the lid on hot tomato-tempered dal,

  two pale-hued roti discs, crescent-shaped grains of brown rice (a fistful)

  sour yogurt (a measured cup). I pack for myself in a wide straw basket:

  a cotton sari, blouse, petticoat, a bundle of soft rags for post procedure

  drowned under loads of reams of razor-edged pages. Your father

  drowned under unexplainable jars of illness, your grandmother.

  Your uncle drops me a block from the clinic on the corner of X and Y.

  Collapsed on a sterile, sanitary-pad-shaped stretcher, I feel:

  my hospital-gowned body sensing cool clinic sheets,

  my groggy eyes seeing disappearing green drapes,

  my fingers pinching my nose to ward off sharp disinfectant,

  my ears hearing stretcher wheels squeaking like rats

  chewing away old linen in the luxury of the night.

  On my right: white tray on a white table, foggy forceps,

  scissors that grow bold and big then shrink like raisins.

  I soak every night for your father.

  Everything is a blank, an erased memory.

  All I know is this:

  you will have no name, no grave, no identity, my girl,

  you would have been my second child.

  FIVE MONTHS VULNERABLE

  Burleigh Mutén

  Entitlement never entered my mind.

  I was pregnant, five months vulnerable,

  when a doctor suggested I have an abortion.

  This is why we do amniocentesis, he said.

  I was pregnant, five months vulnerable,

  an extra X chromosome in every cell.

  This is why we do amniocentesis, he said.

  This fetus will develop breasts in his teens.

  An extra X chromosome in every cell.

  No real concept of diversity in 1984.

  This fetus will develop breasts in his teens.

  No words: pangender or transgender.

  No real concept of diversity in 1984, a

  science-based, legal procedure, that’s all.

  No words: pangender or transgender.

  No social, evidence-based research, just

  a science-based, legal procedure, that’s all

  when a doctor suggested I have an abortion.

  No social, evidence-based research, just

  entitlement never entered my mind.

  FROM PAST DUE

  Anne Finger

  I am walking out the back door and I see a plastic jar of tissue and blood waiting to be sent to the path lab, and in the plastic jar a tiny, perfect white hand; it looks like the hand of a not very realistic doll. Anti-abortion propaganda often shows just a hand or just a foot, because feet and hands develop so much earlier than everything else. The hand looks human, while the heart is still a primitive thump, the brain no bigger than a pea, the whole a white jelly-thing. But it’s close, too close not to trouble me.

  That flat palm reaching up through a wine-red wash of blood. Why does that stay with me? Surely it isn’t looking human that makes us human.

  Would I have asked myself these questions ten, twelve years ago? Would they have been doubts that niggled at the edge of my mind, never forming into words? Is it the current political climate that does this?

  A few months later, back in San Francisco, I went to another meeting of the Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights. We watched a video, “Silent Scream,” purporting to show the scream of a fetus being aborted. Then we talked: about the shift in emphasis from the woman to the embryo/fetus; do we address people’s questions about when life begins or does that mean letting the Right set the terms of the debate; how do we talk about the ethics of abortion?

  Another disabled woman had joined CDRR. She was blind and hadcerebral palsy. In CDRR, everyone raises their hands and waits for the chair to call on them before they speak. Except for Jaime, who kept talking out of turn, and no one would tell her to raise her hand and wait till she got called on, but they would with anyone else. And I thought: “Fucking liberals.”

  And then somebody said that life is socially defined, and that the biological definitions of life are not the ultimate ones. When we have that sort of broad-ranging discussion in CDRR, we write with felt-tip markers on butcher paper the boiled-down essence of what we’re saying. It’s a way of holding together all the disparate views, making sure that ideas don’t get lost in the shuffle.

  And so someone wrote in blue felt-tip: “Life does not equal the right to live.”

  Oh, great, I thought. Life is socially defined. Now, who gets to make the definitions and who gets defined out of existence? Disabled people? Jews? Old people?

  I wanted to say something then, but I didn’t. Because I didn’t want to sound like a crank, like a woman with a one-track mind. Because I didn’t want to get accused of calling people Nazis.

  About the same time, I read an article in Ms. on anti-abortion terrorism. It said:

  Joseph Schiedler [a leader of the movement to disrupt abortion clinics] made the extremist claim that abortion is the American Holocaust, the equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust. The irony is that Hitler was anti-choice; he outlawed abortion in Nazi Germany, and one of the key goals of the Third Reich was to force Aryan women to have as many children as possible.

  I wrote a letter saying that’s only partly true. Abortion was illegal but widely tolerated during the pre-Nazi period of the Weimar Republic. And while the majority of women found abortions impossible to obtain in the Nazi period, Hitler did legalize abortion for women who were carrying fetuses believed to b
e “defective”—almost always women who were themselves disabled or who had a disabled family member. These women were often forced to have abortions.

  One researcher who studied deaf survivors of the Nazi era reported that most of those who underwent abortion were past their fifth month. Obviously, those women who were “defectives” or married to “defectives” tried to hide their pregnancies.

  I try to see the faces behind that statistic. I see a deaf woman sitting in a frayed overstuffed chair, crying, her makeup running down her face, in a third-floor flat, waiting for the policeman to come up the stairs, her hand pressed against her belly to feel the last kicks of what should have been her child. Who turned her in: the worker at the deaf social club? Her resentful sister who just joined the Nazi Party?

  Sister, we who should remember you have written your memories out of our history.

  How do I put these things together? These random facts, not so random:

  Nearly 80 percent of all people in the U.S. support abortion in the case of (unspecified) “fetal defect.”

  When you are pregnant, suddenly everyone is asking you: “How old are you?” (i.e., Are you over thirty-five?)

  That health has become the overriding metaphor for what is good in our society. If women have doubts about whether or not they did the right thing in having an abortion, they’ll often tell you they had an abortion because they were worried about their health, or about their future child’s health.

  That the Nazis drew tremendous metaphoric power from their claim to be creating the heilanstaat, the healthy state. The healthy body and a healthy state became one. Genocide began as a cleansing of the defective, disease-ridden dregs.

  If abortion is acceptable because a fetus’s brain isn’t fully developed, and therefore they aren’t human, then what is a person with brain damage? Even though I base my beliefs about abortion on women’s rights and status, not on that of the fetus within her, plenty of people don’t.

  I like living in hard places. Well, I’m not so sure I like it: I just seem to find myself there a lot.

  ABORTION

  Ai

  Coming home, I find you still in bed,

  but when I pull back the blanket,

  I see your stomach is flat as an iron.

  You’ve done it, as you warned me you would

  and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper

  for me to look at. My son.

  Woman, loving you no matter what you do,

  what can I say, except that I’ve heard

  the poor have no children, just small people

  and there is room only for one man in this house.

  FROM SHRILL: NOTES FROM A LOUD WOMAN

  Lindy West

  I’m not sure how I got pregnant—we were careful, mostly—but I don’t know, sometimes people just fuck up. I honestly don’t remember. Life is life. If I had carried that pregnancy to term and made a half-Mike/half-me human baby, we may have been bound to each other forever, but we would have split up long before the birth. Some people should not be together, and once the stakes are real and kicking and pressing down on your bladder, you can’t just pretend shit’s fine anymore. Mike made me feel lonely, and being alone with another person is much worse than being alone all by yourself.

  I imagine he would have softened, and loved the baby; we would share custody amicably; maybe I’d move into my parents’ basement (it’s nice!) and get a job writing technical case studies at Microsoft, my side gig at the time; maybe he’d just throw child support at me and move away, but I doubt it. He was a good guy. It could have been a good life.

  He didn’t want to be in Seattle, though—New England pulled at his guts like a tractor beam. It was all he talked about: flying down running trails at peak foliage; flirting with Amherst girls in Brattleboro bars; keeping one foot always on base, in his glory days when he was happy and thrumming with potential. He wanted to get back there. Though it hurt me at the time (why wasn’t I as good as running around in circles in Vermont and sharing growlers of IPA with girls named Blair!?), I wanted that for him too.

  As for me, I found out I was pregnant with the part-Mike fetus just three months before I figured out how to stop hating my body for good, five months before I got my first e-mail from a fat girl saying my writing had saved her life, six months before I fell in love with my future husband, eight months before I met my stepdaughters, a year before I moved to Los Angeles to see what the world had for me, eighteen months before I started working at Jezebel, three years before the first time I went on television, four years and ten months before I got married to the best person I’ve ever met, and just over five years before I turned in this book manuscript.

  Everything happened in those five years after my abortion. I became myself. Not by chance, or because an abortion is some mysterious, empowering feminist bloode-magick rite of passage (as many, many—too many for a movement ostensibly comprising grown-ups—anti-choicers have accused me of believing), but simply because it was time. A whole bunch of changes—set into motion years, even decades, back—all came together at once, like the tumblers in a lock clicking into place: my body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public, and complex as any man’s. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big, grown-up decision—the first time I asserted unequivocally, “I know the life that I want and this isn’t it”; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder.

  So, I peed on the thingy and those little pink lines showed up all, “LOL, hope u have $600, u fertile betch,” and I sat down on my bed and I didn’t cry and I said, “Okay, so this is the part of my life when this happens.” I didn’t tell Mike; I’m not sure why. I have the faintest whiff of a memory that I thought he would be mad at me. Like getting pregnant was my fault. As though my clinginess, my desperate need to be loved, my insistence that we were a “real” couple and not two acquaintances who had grown kind of used to each other, had finally congealed into a hopeful, delusional little bundle and sunk its roots into my uterine wall. A physical manifestation of how pathetic I was. How could I have let that happen? It was so embarrassing. I couldn’t tell him. I always felt alone in the relationship anyway; it made sense that I would deal with this alone too.

  It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that there was anything complicated about obtaining an abortion. This is a trapping of privilege: I grew up middle-class and white in Seattle, I had always had insurance, and, besides, abortion was legal. So, I did what I always did when I needed a common, legal, routine medical procedure—I made an appointment to see my doctor, the same doctor I’d had since I was twelve. She would get this whole implanted embryo mix-up sorted out.

  The nurse called my name, showed me in, weighed me, tutted about it, took my blood pressure, looked surprised (fat people can have normal blood, NANCY), and told me to sit on the paper. I waited. My doctor came in. She’s older than me, with dark, tightly curled hair, motherly without being overly familiar. “I think I’m pregnant,” I said. “Do you want to be pregnant?” she said. “No,” I said. “Well, pee in this cup,” she said. I peed all over my hand again. “You’re pregnant,” she said. I nodded, feeling nothing.

  I remember being real proud of my chill ’tude in that moment. I was the Fonz of getting abortions. “So, what’s the game plan, doc?” I asked, popping the collar of my leather jacket like somebody who probably skateboarded here. “Why don’t you go ahead and slip me that RU-486 prescriptsch and I’ll just [moonwalks toward exam room door while playing the saxophone].” She stared at me.

  “What?” I said, one hundred combs clattering to the floor.

  Turns out, THE DOCTOR IS NOT WHERE YOU GET AN ABORTION.

  I’d been so sure I could get this taken care of today, handle it today, on my own, and move on with my life—go back to pretending like I had my shit together and my relationship was bearable, even good. Like I was a normal woman that normal men lov
ed. When she told me I had to make an appointment at a different clinic, which probably didn’t have any openings for a couple of weeks, and started writing down phone numbers on a Post-it, I crumpled.

  “That’s stupid,” I sobbed, my anxiety getting the better of me. “You’re a doctor. This is a doctor’s office. Do you not know how to do it?”

  “I covered it in medical school, yes,” she said, looking concerned in an annoyingly kind way, “but we don’t do them here at this clinic.”

  “Well, why did I even come here? Why didn’t they tell me on the phone that this appointment was pointless?”

  “You want reception to tell everyone who calls in that we don’t do abortions here, no matter what they’re calling about?”

  “YES,” I yelled.

  She didn’t say anything. I heaved, and cried a little bit more, then a little bit less, in the silence.

  “Is there anything else I can do for you right now?” she asked, gently.

  “No, I’m fine.” I accepted a tissue. “I’m sorry I got upset.”

  “It’s okay. This is a stressful situation. I know.” She squeezed my shoulder.

  I went home, curled up in bed, and called the clinic (which had some vague mauve nighttime soap name like “Avalon” or “Dynasty” or “Falcon Crest”), still wobbling on the edge of hysteria. Not for all the reasons the forced birth fanatics would like you to think: not because my choice was morally torturous, or because I was ashamed, or because I couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny fingernails of our “baby,” but because life is fucking hard, man. I wanted someone to love me so much. I did want a baby, eventually. But what I really wanted was a family. Mike wasn’t my family. Everything was wrong. I was alone and I was sad and it was just hard.