Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  And nowhere is this more true than on the question of who will and should decide whether an individual pregnancy must be taken to its endpoint of birth and motherhood. It was because of my private feelings that my public profile became so determinedly that of an advocate for legal abortion.

  (A word on words here: the words we use to talk about abortion are among the most unsatisfactory in any public dialogue. Both pro-life and pro-choice are oversimplifications, and nothing about this issue is simple. So at a certain point I tried to give up both and simply refer to the two groups as those opposed to legal abortion, and those in favor of it. This adds words and, when 750 is your limit, added words are unhappy events. But the alternative was distortion by oversimplification, which is, to my mind, no alternative at all.)

  My Catholicism has in fact guided me to that position, because it first led me to the idea that the act of an individual examining her conscience to search for wrongdoing was honorable and proper. My three children, while the greatest joy of my life, were all wanted but exhausting, so that, having them and rearing them, I felt conscious of the potential damage to both mother and child of an unwanted pregnancy in a way I doubted many of the male leaders of the movement against abortion, so blithe in their assumption that one could make do, would ever be.

  But above all it is my continuing questioning and various ambivalences about the issue that have, paradoxically, brought me down most heavily on one side of the wall that seems to exist between those who favor legal abortion and those who do not. Some will be surprised by that; others will find it false. The profile of most feminists on the issue—and I am feminist, have been nearly all my sentient life—is that we believe flatly that women cannot be free unless they can control when they will carry a pregnancy to term. In some broad sense this is correct; in many ways it is an oversimplification, ignoring the complexity of one of our most complex questions.

  I have never sat down to write about abortion without feeling, at least for a moment, the complexities sweep over me like a fit of faintness: the complete life of the woman and the burgeoning life of the child, the primitive development of the embryo and the potential traits of the baby, the joy a pregnancy often brings and the despair it sometimes carries with it.

  There is no other issue that so often and so insistently forces me to wrestle with who I am, with what I believe; even when I still went into the dark cabinet of the confessional every single Saturday, I never examined my conscience as I do when I choose, often with a sigh and a sense of the futility of meaningful discourse, to write about abortion. The process of argument itself has taught me something about this most private of public issues, and that is that the most suitable battlefield upon which to play out its vast conundrums is the one inside my soul.

  THE ABORTION ACCOUNT

  April 8, 1990

  When I was growing up, my life was governed by nuns and priests. Don’t scratch in public, Sister said. Don’t roll your skirt up, Sister said. Don’t whisper in class. Don’t gossip. Don’t cheat.

  The priests were always more remote. What I remember best is the outline of their profiles against the confessional screen and the low murmur as they repeated the words of absolution while I said my act of contrition. In a church so often devoted to conformity and crowds, this seemed the great individual act, the confession of the soul, examining her conscience.

  The solitary claustrophobia of the confessional came back to me last week when American Catholic bishops announced their new campaign against abortion. They are prepared to spend as much as $5 million to convince the people of this country that their most bitterly contested right is a mortal sin. A powerful public relations firm and the pollsters who brought us Ronald Reagan have been hired to succeed where sermons failed. Examinations of conscience give way to examining the efforts of slick professional persuaders. For years we have bemoaned the hat trick with mirrors these people have made out of the ballot box. Now we admit them to the pulpit.

  My heart sinks.

  Five million dollars. My God, the good we could do with $5 million. The women carrying wanted babies who cannot afford the meat and milk to nourish them in utero. The babies just born who stare at the ceiling in hospital nurseries, waiting for someone to take them home, even to touch them for more than a few minutes. The babies born fifty years ago who now live in subway tunnels and cardboard boxes and the doorways outside the residence of John Cardinal O’Connor, who announced this campaign. If this is such an honorable battle, why did no polling group, no public relations outfit, offer its services free so we could spend this money on babies already born?

  I don’t mean to suggest that the Church does not help the disfranchised. The sad state of affairs today is that the compassion and intelligence of many priests and nuns and laymen are lost in the din surrounding the pronouncements of a very few. All over this city Catholics educate, feed, and house the poor. But they work unsung while we listen to Cardinal O’Connor speak of the dangers of heavy-metal music. It seems such a minor issue in a city where human suffering screams louder than any boom box.

  I do understand why the bishops have decided to do this. Around this issue all the frustration of conservative Catholic clergy has coalesced, the frustration they must experience every Sunday when they walk onto the altar and know they’ve lost them in the pews. For two decades they have looked out and seen Catholics who have gone their own way on premarital sex, birth control, divorce, and abortion, too. If they threw them all out, the churches would be denuded.

  Some Catholics would argue that I did not learn the most important lesson from my Catholic education: the Church makes the rules. Sister taught us that the priests were always right. But the Catholics who were children then are adults now. And many of them seem to have learned best what I did, the examination of conscience, the searching of the soul to discover whether they had done wrong.

  I do not believe the bishops understand the abortion issue, and not only for the obvious reason that they will never be pregnant or have a wife or daughter who is. It reminds me of all those years when our mothers came to them in the confessional and quietly pleaded: Five children in seven years, Father. Isn’t it enough? Isn’t there something that can be done? No one does that anymore. We already know the answers. Abstinence, abstinence, abstinence. This is how they lost us in the pews. They refused to look at our lives.

  The same is true today. They do not listen. The most notable exception is the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert G. Weakland, who, while his colleagues were loudly warning Mario Cuomo of hell, was quietly asking Catholic women on both sides of the divisive issue to come together and talk. He wanted them to listen to one another, and he wanted to listen to them all.

  His actions suggest the Church still honors its people.

  A multimillion-dollar payout to public relations and polling firms suggests something quite different. It tells those women convinced they are the best guardians of their own bodies that the Church believes they are shallow enough to be swayed by practiced paid persuasion, as though they were buying soap powder. It suggests that the bishops no longer see us as souls, but as votes. And in a country where people dine from Dumpsters, it is a monumental waste of money.

  MOM, DAD, AND ABORTION

  July 1, 1990

  Once I got a fortune cookie that said: To remember is to understand. I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers what it was like to be a reporter.

  A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.

  I remember adolescence, the years of having the impulse control of a mousetrap, of being as private as a safe-deposit box.

  And I’ve remembered it more keenly since the Supreme Court ruled that the states may require a pregnant minor to inform her parents before having an abortion.

  This is one of the most difficult of many difficult issues within the abortion debate. As good parents, we remember being teenagers, thinking that parents and sex existed
in parallel universes.

  But as good parents, it also seems reasonable to wonder why a girl who cannot go on a school field trip without our knowledge can end a pregnancy without it.

  The Supreme Court found succor in a Minnesota law that provides for something called “judicial bypass.” If you are fifteen and want to have an abortion but cannot tell your parents—the law provides that both must be informed, not simply one—you can tell it to the judge. You come to the clinic, have an exam and counseling. Then you go to the courthouse, meet with a public defender and go to the judge’s chambers, to be questioned about your condition, your family, your plans for the future.

  If the judge agrees, you can have the abortion.

  The Court did not find this an undue burden for a frightened fifteen-year-old.

  Tina Welsh, who runs the only abortion clinic in Duluth, remembers the first girl she took to the courthouse when the law went into effect. The young woman did not want to notify her father; he was in jail for having sex with her sister. Ms. Welsh remembers taking girls up in the freight elevator because they had neighbors and relations working in the courthouse. You can just hear it:

  “Hi, sweetheart, how are you? What brings you here?”

  So much for the right to privacy.

  But Ms. Welsh best remembers the young woman who asked, “How long will the jury be out?” She thought she was going on trial for the right to have an abortion.

  Much of this debate centers, like the first sentence of Anna Karenina, on happy families, and unhappy ones. Abortion-rights activists say parental notification assumes a world of dutiful daughters and supportive parents, instead of one riven by alcoholism, incest, and abuse. Those opposed to abortion say it is unthinkable that a minor child should have such a procedure without her parents’ knowledge.

  But I remember something between the poles of cruelty and communication. I remember girls who wanted their parents to have certain illusions about them. Not girls who feared beatings, or were pregnant by their mother’s boyfriend. Just girls who wanted to remain good girls in the minds that mattered to them most.

  Ms. Welsh remembers one mother who refused to let her husband know their daughter was having an abortion. “Twenty-five years ago,” the woman said, “we made a promise to one another. I would never have to clean a fish, and he would never have to know if his daughter was pregnant.”

  If parental-notification laws are really designed to inhibit abortion—and I suspect they are—Ms. Welsh’s experience suggests they are not terribly successful. Not one teenager who came to the Duluth clinic changed her mind, even in the face of public defenders and judicial questioning. If the point is to facilitate family communication, that’s been something of a failure, too. In the five years the Minnesota law was in effect, seven thousand minors had abortions. Half of those teenagers chose to face a stranger in his chambers rather than tell both parents.

  But perhaps there is another purpose to all this. If adolescents want their parents to have illusions about them, parents need those illusions badly. These laws provide them. They mandate communication. If she has nothing to tell you, then it must mean nothing is wrong.

  Ah, yes—I remember that.

  These are difficult questions because they involve not-quite adults facing adult decisions. The best case is the daughter who decides, with supportive parents, whether to end a pregnancy or have a baby. The worst case is the girl who must notify the parent who impregnated her. Or the worst case is Becky Bell, a seventeen-year-old Indianapolis girl who died after an illegal abortion. She could not bear to tell her parents she was pregnant.

  In the middle are girls who have been told by the Supreme Court that they must trade. They can keep a good-girl persona at home, but in exchange they must surrender some of their privacy and dignity. That is what adults want, and that is what we will have. We will take our illusions. The teenagers will take the freight elevator.

  THE NUNS’ STORY

  September 16, 1990

  Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey are no longer nuns. They did not leave the convent as so many others did, finding fulfillment within the smaller circle of marriage and mother-hood. These two spent years finding reasons to stay: to serve the poor, to fight for social justice. They resigned from the Sisters of Notre Dame in 1988, four years after a full-page advertisement appeared in The New York Times under this headline:

  A DIVERSITY OF OPINIONS REGARDING ABORTION EXISTS AMONG COMMITTED CATHOLICS.

  Ninety-seven people signed it.

  Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey were two of them.

  They have written a book about what happened after that day, and what their lives were like before it. It is called No Turning Back, and it is sure to be seen as an attack on the Church. That oversimplifies its most important message, contained in an anecdote about Barbara’s encounter at a poor parish in Massachusetts. A woman blurted out, “Sister, I had an abortion five years ago.” Barbara Ferraro was stunned. Finally she said, “Tell me about it.”

  Tell me about it. Tell me about the thing I have never experienced and cannot begin to understand. Tell me, as one of the girls did at the juvenile home where Pat Hussey worked, about the biker’s initiation rite, the gang rape that left you pregnant. Tell me, as that woman told Barbara, of the abortion when your marriage was falling apart and the children you already had were as many as you could support. Tell me about the lives I haven’t led, the demons I’ve never faced.

  Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey stayed in the convent because they saw it changing. When Barbara entered in 1962, she was given a habit that left only her face and hands uncovered. Her hair was shorn, her name was changed, and she was given a whip to discipline herself. By the time she resigned, she was wearing slacks and running a homeless shelter.

  In between she learned that “Tell me about it” would never be the motto of the Church to which she had given her life. Those nuns who signed the ad were given a choice: Retract or face dismissal. Barbara and Pat were eventually confronted by a Vatican representative and an apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Washington. The former pinched Barbara’s cheek and told her she reminded him of his grandmother. The latter said they would have a dialogue. “But I must insist,” he said, “that after our time together you must put in writing that you support and adhere to the Roman Catholic teaching on abortion.”

  They couldn’t do it. They had had too many women tell them about it.

  The Church is not a democracy. The editorial-page editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Boldt, referred to it several months ago as “un-American,” and was vilified by Catholics, from parishioners to cardinals. What he meant was that it is not democratic. The people cannot vote on Church positions. The decisions are made by the men at the top.

  They are uniquely unqualified to face the most pressing issues of their time. Birth control, the ordination of women, permission for priests to marry, abortion—all arise from sexuality and femininity. The primacy of the priesthood rests upon celibacy and masculinity. The Catholic bishops in this country decided last week to postpone indefinitely a final vote on a pastoral letter on women’s concerns. It is born to fail, a précis on women written by men who haven’t lived with one since they left their mother’s house.

  Last week, too, Judge David H. Souter was questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Souter archaeology,” they had been calling it the last time I was in Washington, and they had come up with barely a pottery shard on abortion. During the hearings Judge Souter said two things that captured my attention. He said as a young man he once spent two hours in a college dorm room talking to a young woman who was desperate to end a pregnancy. And he said, “What you may properly ask is whether I am open to listen.”

  Tell me about it.

  Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey judged the hierarchy of the Catholic Church on that basis. “The Vatican’s version of Catholicism is a culture of oppression,” they write, “a church that is only about itself.” Those are harsh words. These are h
arsh times. And faced with harsh laws of Church and of state, women like these will continue to speak, no matter what the consequences.

  Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey shouldn’t have been nuns in the first place.

  They should have been priests.

  OFFENSIVE PLAY

  January 24, 1991

  On Sunday the Super Bowl will be played in Tampa, and so, inevitably, my thoughts turn to abortion.

  If that seems like a preposterous connection, it is only because you have not seen Champions for Life, the video featuring scenes from the New York Giants’ last Super Bowl victory and six members of that championship team talking about their blocking, their passing, and their opposition to legal abortion. It might be reminiscent of Saturday Night Live if it weren’t so offensive.

  “The skies were sunny, the temperature a comfortable seventy-six degrees,” says the narrator as we-came-to-play music is heard in the background. Fans wave pompons. Players take to the field. “What follows are a few highlights from the game and some comments from the champions.”

  Mark Bavaro catches a pass, then appears in street clothes to say: “At the end of the game all the Giants players left the field champions. Now with the abortion death squads allowed to run rampant through our country, I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day.”