The stories we don’t tell
Letter from Away — December 9, 2021
This isn’t the column I started two days ago.
Like many of my friends and, I’m guessing, a whole bunch of folks I may never meet, I find life in the 21st century to be somewhat disturbing. People far younger than I say things move too fast, change happens somewhat ahead of our ability to adjust to those that started months, years, even decades ago.
Some of us haven’t adapted to the end of The War Between the States, still arguing the outcome or the cause more than 150 years after General Lee surrendered the Confederate Army at Appomattox Courthouse. Meanwhile, one United States citizen for every eight can’t walk, without risking arrest, in neighborhoods where it is assumed no one of their demographic would have a reason to be.
The column I didn’t write wasn’t about that. It was more personal, something that happens to affect a portion of the population that includes me. People who, at one time or another in their lives, could become pregnant.
There has been a lot of panicked conversation about the recent Supreme Court hearings in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Constitutional arguments rise to the Court when lawyers think they can win. Sometimes they are people who have personally experienced the issue at hand; often they are advocates looking for a lever with which to move history. When lawmakers fail to take the electoral risks laws end up being crafted by the militant, the desperate, and the cynical.
For those who want to know who or what lies behind this particular case, The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the only medical facility in Mississippi that provides abortion services. Dr. Thomas Dobbs is an epidemiologist who works as Mississippi’s state health officer, and brought the question to the Court in this case.
Dobbs is asking the justices to decide if lower courts are correct in setting aside a 2018 Mississippi law that restricts abortion to within 15 weeks of a womb-bearer’s last period (rather than the far more flexible trimester-based calendar imposed under Roe V. Wade), except in instances of medical emergency or fetal abnormalities.
I’m almost ready tell you about Claudia, but first, consider this.
I was 20 years old when Chief Justice Warren Burger’s court voted 7–2 to remove barriers to first trimester abortions throughout the United States, saying the right of a woman to choose an abortion is “fundamental” and tying that right to the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, passed a handful of years after slavery ended and half a century before women were granted the right to vote.
In opposing the decision, Justice William Rehnquist said, “ … the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment,” effectively suggesting that because the Congress of 1868 didn’t know women would ever be their fully-enfranchised constituents, there was no way they might have wanted to protect their right to make a private and personal decision.
Roe v. Wade, and Justice Rehnquist’s attempt at constitutional logic, was six years after my middle-school classmate Claudia, raped by a family member and unable to seek outside help, took the risk that ended two lives. Looking back, as I have done many times over the decades since, I still see no way out for my friend.
The sorrow attendant to this whole miserable question overwhelms our ability to talk about it with reason and compassion. Right and wrong are not immutable. The fact that we still seem to need to tell ourselves to share the great privilege of human community with others should not have to be written into law. And yet, we continue to restrict the movements of citizens based on their appearance. We call our country rich, have enough to squander taking pot-shots at asteroids, and we begrudge fellow humans a safe bed for the night, a healthy diet, and access to the kind of medical care other nations take for granted.
What has always been missing from the conversation about abortion, other than actual conversation, are the stories of women who faced that choice. Demons or heroes, we live with the results of our actions. Those of us who were fertile before Roe v. Wade opened the doors to clean, well staffed, legal and regulated medical intervention may have known someone, or even been someone who risked her life because rape was not an exception and incest was not an exception. In 30 states, before 1973, there were no exceptions; the ending of a pregnancy before birth was a crime.
The polarizing arguments, and their refusal to seek an imperfect consensus, are not going to get any of us into heaven. I don’t envy any woman who has made the choice to seek a safe, medical abortion. I’ve made tough decisions and this is not one I would make for someone else.
As I said at the start, this is not the story I started to write. Like Claudia and so many people you probably know, I have my own story. Not as dramatic or compelling, and not one I want to tell here, on the pages of a newspaper read by friends and neighbors and total strangers in a place where we all know so much about each other already. Or think we do.
I won’t tell my story here, but if you ask I might sit down with you, over coffee or something, and we can swap our tales.
