A Human Being's Right to Choose

In 1973, when I was sixteen, the condom broke. My boyfriend and I made an appointment at Planned Parenthood and said I might need an abortion. Luckily, I didn't, but by the time I'd gotten my period, my psychoanalyst--like many an Upper West Side girl in the seventies in Manhattan, I'd been sent to an analyst--had fired a salvo: an abortion, he yelled, would have put me on the terrible slope of depression. Downhill all the way. Central casting's notion of a Viennese shrink, he assured me  "many women" came crying to him after abortions. They felt like they'd killed "the next U.S. president" or "a genius," he warned, adding insult to injury with "you're oversexed."

I'd had sex exactly once, and it had never occurred to me to imagine myself as a murderer killing the next U.S. president, a genius, or anyone else. I knew I wasn't ready to become a mother, nor did I want to incubate a child for nine months and give it away. I felt very grateful to know Planned Parenthood was there.

The Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decriminalized abortion nationwide in 1973. In April of that year, Ms. magazine published the police photograph of Gerri Santoro, dead, in a fetal position, blood soaking through towels between her legs. She looked as though she'd died in agony. That photo drove home to me the need for women to have access to safe, legal abortions. 

Published one year before Gerri Santoro's terrible death was revealed, Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen included an abortion scene, a woman home, in pain and terrified, lucky to have survived, taken to the hospital, where a doctor won't perform the D&C that would prevent complications, bleeding, infections. 

Until 2018, the Catholic church let Irish women die when a heart was still beating in the chest of a brain-dead fetus. Ten years ago, Savita Halappanavar, a dentist living in Galway, began bleeding, but because the non-viable four-month-old fetus still had a heartbeat, she was sacrificed on the altar of the Irish church, dying of blood poisoning. Medically trained herself, Halappanavar knew the risks of heavy bleeding during a miscarriage, and wanted to live. Six years after her 2012 death--at age 31, from entirely preventable sepsis--Ireland finally passed the Health Act, giving women the right to abortion.

I'll never forget the Irish woman who told me the story of her mother dying giving birth to her eleventh child--the child died too, she said. At the time of her mother's death in the early nineteen-sixties, Irish doctors who had to choose between the life of the mother and that of the baby picked the baby's life, on the grounds that the child was not yet baptized. 

Ireland has come a long way in advancing human and women's rights. The United States Supreme Court should not devolve, taking us all back to the days of coat-hanger  and back-street and other dangerous abortions. Abortion is a matter of personal health care and should remain protected. No woman should be berated for her choices, as I was, or prevented from making them, or offered anything but respect during what for many women is a difficult and painful decision.