When a deliveryman comes to the sliding glass window by the reception desk and tilts a box toward me, I hesitate. I read the packing slip, assess the shape and weight of the box in light of its supposed contents. We request familiar faces. The doors are carefully locked; I have learned to half glance around at bags and boxes, looking for a telltale sign. I register with security when I arrive, and I am careful not to bang a door. We are all a little on edge here.
CONCERN ABOUT SIZE and shape seem to be natural, and so is the relief that follows. We make the powerful assumption that the fetus is different from us, and even when we admit the similarities, it is too simplistic to be seduced by form alone. But the form is enormously potent—humanoid, powerless, palm-sized, and pure, it evokes an almost fierce tenderness when viewed simply as what it appears to be. But appearance, and even potential, aren’t enough. The fetus, in becoming itself, can ruin others; its utter dependence has a sinister side. When I am struck in the moment by the contents in the basin, I am careful to remember the context, to note the tearful teenager and the woman sighing with something more than relief. One kind of question, though, I find considerably trickier.
“Can you tell what it is?” I am asked, and this means gender. This question is asked by couples, not women alone. Always couples who would abort a girl and keep a boy. I have been asked about twins, and even if I could tell what race the father was.
An eighteen-year-old woman with three daughters brought her husband to the interview. He glared first at me, then at his wife, as he sank lower and lower in the chair, picking his teeth with a toothpick. He interrupted a conversation with his wife to ask if I could tell whether the baby would be a boy or a girl. I told him I could not.
“Good,” he replied in a slow and strangely malevolent voice, “’cause if it was a boy I’d wring her neck.”
In a literal sense, abortion exists because we are able to ask such questions, able to assign a value to the fetus that can shift with changing circumstances. If the human bond to a child were as primitive and unflinchingly narrow as that of other animals, there would be no abortion. There would be no abortion because there would be nothing more important than caring for the young and perpetuating the species, no reason for sex but to make babies. I sense this sometimes, this wordless organic duty, when I do ultrasounds.
We do ultrasound, a sound wave test that paints a faint, gray picture of the fetus, whenever we’re uncertain of gestation. Age is measured by the width of the skull and confirmed by the length of the femur or thighbone; we speak of a pregnancy as being a certain “femur length” in weeks. The usual concern is whether a pregnancy is within the legal limit for an abortion. Women this far along have bellies that swell out round and tight like trim muscles. When they lie flat, the mound rises softly above the hips, pressing the umbilicus upward.
It takes practice to read an ultrasound picture, which is grainy and etched as though in strokes of charcoal. But suddenly a rapid rhythmic motion appears—the beating heart. Nearby is a soft oval, scratched with lines—the skull. The leg is harder to find, and then suddenly the fetus moves, bobbing in the surf. The skull turns away, an arm slides across the screen, the torso rolls. I know the weight of a baby’s head on my shoulder, the whisper of lips on ears, the delicate curve of a fragile spine in my hand. I know how heavy and correct a newborn cradled feels. The creature I watch in secret requires nothing from me but to be left alone, and that is precisely what won’t be done.
These inadvertently made beings are caught in a twisting web of motive and desire. They are at least inconvenient, sometimes quite literally dangerous in the womb, but most often they fall somewhere in between—consequences never quite believed in come to roost. Their virtue rises and falls outside their own nature: they become only what we make them. A fetus created by accident is the most absolute kind of surprise. Whether the blame lies in a failed IUD, a slipped condom, or a false impression of safety, that fetus is a thing whose creation has been actively worked against. Its existence is an error. I think this is why so few women, even late in a pregnancy, will consider giving a baby up for adoption. To do so means making the fetus real—imagining it as something whole and outside oneself. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is sometimes so difficult and confounding that it creates an enormous demand for immediate action. The decision is a rejection; the pregnancy has become something to be rid of, a condition to be ended. It is a burden, a weight, a thing separate.
Women have abortions because they are too old, and too young, too poor, and too rich, too stupid, and too smart. I see women who berate themselves with violent emotions for their first and only abortion, and others who return three times, five times, hauling two or three children, who cannot remember to take a pill or where they put the diaphragm. We talk glibly about choice. But the choice for what? I see all the broken promises in lives lived like a series of impromptu obstacles. There are the sweet, light promises of love and intimacy, the glittering promise of education and progress, the warm promise of safe families, long years of innocence and community. And there is the promise of freedom: freedom from failure, from faithlessness. Freedom from biology. The early feminist defense of abortion asked many questions, but the one I remember is this: is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.
Oh, the ignorance. I take a woman to the back room and ask her to undress. A few minutes later I return and find her positioned discreetly behind a drape, still wearing underpants. “Do I have to take these off too?” she asks, a little shocked. Some swear they have not had sex, many do not know what a uterus is, how sperm and egg meet, how sex makes babies. Some late seekers do not believe themselves pregnant; they believe themselves impregnable. I was chastised when I began this job for referring to some clients as girls: it is a feminist heresy. They come so young, snapping gum, sockless and sneakered, and their shakily applied eyeliner smears when they cry. I call them girls with maternal benignity. I cannot imagine them as mothers.
THE DOCTOR SEATS himself between the woman’s thighs and reaches into the dilated opening of a five-month pregnant uterus. Quickly he grabs and crushes the fetus in several places, and the room is filled with a low clatter and snap of forceps, the click of the tanaculum, and a pulling, sucking sound. The paper crinkles as the drugged and sleepy woman shifts, the nurse’s low, honey-brown voice explains each step in delicate words.
I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. “Let’s do an abortion,” they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting needles striped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls. Abortion is the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it is still violence—merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death.
Maggie, one of the nurses, received a call at midnight not long ago. It was a woman in her twentieth week of pregnancy; the necessarily gradual process of cervical dilation begun the day before had stimulated labor, as it sometimes does. Maggie and one of the doctors met the woman at the office in the night. Maggie helped her onto the table, and as she lay down the fetus was delivered into Maggie’s hands. When Maggie told me about it the next day, she cupped her hands into a small bowl—” It was just like a little kitten,” she said softly, wonderingly. “Everything was still attached.”
At the end of the day I clean out the suction jars, pouring blood into the sink, splashing the sides with flecks of tissue. From the sink rises a rich and humid smell, hot, earthy, and moldering; it is the smell of something rece
ntly alive beginning to decay. I take care of the plastic tub on the floor, filled with pieces too big to be trusted to the trash. The law defines the contents of the bucket I hold protectively against my chest as tissue. Some would say my complicity in filling that bucket gives me no right to call it anything else. I slip the tissue gently into a bag and place it in the freezer, to be binned at another time. Abortion requires of me an entirely new set of assumptions. It requires a willingness to live with conflict, fearlessness, and grief. As I close the freezer door, I imagine a world where this won’t be necessary, and then return to the world where it is.
Harper’s, October 1987
I began my long relationship with Harper’s by sending this essay in cold, “over the transom.” It has since been reprinted in anthologies and textbooks many times, sometimes with a set of ham-handed study questions attached. That means I’ve corresponded with a lot of college students—and a few high school students—over the years. Many of them wonder whether I am “still pro-choice,” and a few wonder if I have ever been pro-choice. The ambiguity—far more apparent to others than to me; I think this essay is indubitably pro-choice—is intended. I think the most appropriate response to problems as complex and nuanced as abortion must be complex and nuanced itself. But I have always been a stalwart supporter of reproductive rights and express this in time, money, and votes.
This story began my long conflict with my editors at Harper’s over titles. It was originally published as “We Do Abortions Here.”
The Only Harmless Great Thing
THE BEST TIME TO WATCH THE ELEPHANTS AT THE WASHINGTON Park Zoo is in the early hours of a sunny day, when their bulky bodies cast wide, dark shadows in the bright, transparent sunshine. The elephants are more energetic in the morning, more likely to wrestle in one of the wading pools or sing in a frequency that I can hear. (A variety of elephant calls are pitched too low for human ears.) The elephant barn, a complex of chambers and yards partly surrounded by a dry moat, is at the far end of the zoo, tucked along a curving terrace carved from a steep hill on the west side of Portland, Oregon. The largest of the yards, at the back of the complex, is separated by the moat from a small railroad track, travelled every half hour by the open-air zoo train, on its way to the Alaskan tundra and back to the bear grottoes; on the slope beyond the track is a thick stand of fir, vine maple, and alder, tangled with ivy and ferns, and hiding from the elephants’ sight a neat Japanese garden, tiers of award-winning roses, and a cluster of distant skyscrapers. I like the crowds in the morning, too: most of the people pressed against the glass wall of the viewing room are young mothers with children in strollers; on a hillock above the moat, toddlers waddle beside a wood-and-wire fence, oblivious of the giants below.
These are Asian elephants, slightly smaller than their African cousins and, I think, more diffident. The Asian and the African elephant not only are separate species but belong to separate genera, and are the only surviving members of the order Proboscidea, which once covered much of the planet and may have included more than three hundred species. The genesis of the modern elephant is, in fact, a point of debate; its evolutionary tree is filled with dozens of branches that failed to bloom. On the basis of the sometimes obscure elements of taxonomy, the elephant’s closest living relatives are the hyrax, a furry rodentlike animal; the rotund ocean-dwelling manatee and dugong; and the aardvark.
The Asian elephant has smaller ears than the African, one rather than two “fingers” on the tip of its trunk, a long narrow face under a giant domed skull of airy bone. The Asian has smaller tusks, if any; the popular image of the elephant—huge ears flung wide, long rails of ivory below the face—is of the African. But it is Asians we see as the centerpiece of circuses and in zoos. They are considered far easier to train—more amenable and less skittish. The Asian has been the elephant of domestic life all the years of recorded history and is sacred in many religions. It is still used as a work animal in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand. According to trainers, the Asian is more willing to enter the intimate, emotionally complex relationship that domesticity requires. Pliny the Elder ascribed to the elephant the senses of modesty, shame, and delight, and in this herd—the most prolific herd of elephants in the Western Hemisphere, with twenty-four births in twenty-six years—I imagine a sense of style, too. Even in the spacious, sandy backyard, they move with a jungle delicacy.
It has taken me a while to learn to distinguish one elephant from another—by noting the pattern of pink freckling on their ears, the number of creases on the lower leg (a kind of fingerprint), and the angle and set of the ears, which are shaped like ginkgo leaves. Elephants rarely stand completely still; they pass among others, lean, touch, and blend into a single, soft contour. The trunk, which is both nose and upper lip (it is also the elephant’s hand, with control fine enough to pick up a dime), never rests; it waves slowly, restlessly about. A few in the herd of eleven are easy for me to spot: Tunga, a bull, because he is the only one with tusks (they are banded in brass); Rosy, the oldest cow, who has a pleasing shape and the balance of an elder; Belle, a few years younger, who has the wrinkles. The elephants scratch themselves—foot to knee, head against pillar—and caress each other with their heads and trunks, and all this motion is oddly quiet. The elephant foot is encased in a fatty pad, and it is this wide cushion that makes elephants so silent and stealthy in the wild. They can pass undetected a short distance away from people, even at an easy lope. When standing, elephants swing their front legs one in front of the other in perfect time; sometimes two elephants will rock in rhythm, heads swaying in counterpoint to the beat.
I think it is a human trait to exaggerate difference—to imagine an odd thing as odder than it really is. I expected, when I first met elephants, to have exaggerated their size in my imagination. But elephants are so big, so much bigger than any other creature we meet on land, that I found the opposite to be true: I had actually reduced them in my mind, diminished their size and their difference. Up close, within reach, an elephant is a transcendent thing, entirely alien. Elephants resemble us in funny ways—they catch colds, get sunburns, babysit each other’s children. Rosy and I even have the same body temperature. But I am really nothing like Rosy, and she is nothing like me; still, as I watch her and her kin pass by, my strongest feeling is one of society and relation.
At Washington Park, the elephants are guests, family, and royalty; they are by far the most popular animals on exhibit. One morning in early June, I watched as Sunshine, a five-year-old adolescent cow, bullied Chang Dee, the herd’s only calf, into fetching a ball from the wading pool in the front yard; she shoved the bristly haired, short-trunked baby toward the edge of the water until he tumbled in. The mothers and cousins nearby ignored the children, and threw leaves of lettuce on their own and each other’s backs, using each other as tables. In the backyard, Hugo, a bull, paced, and dusted himself with sand, and the people leaning on the fences sighed with pleasure. He was the Elephant, in myth an earthbound rain cloud, the beloved beast known variously as God’s messenger, earth’s egg, the carrier of the world. But Hugo is also a research animal, as they all are, and is subject to the keepers’ law. Washington Park’s elephants are participants in research aimed at protecting their species from extinction; through Hugo, Sunshine, and the others, certain essential mysteries are beginning to unravel.
The real key to recognizing elephants is personality. The keepers at Washington Park indulge in a cheerful and unapologetic anthropomorphism when discussing their charges, but this is a matter more of the conventions of language than of biological inaccuracy. All are quick to bristle at explanations of elephant behavior—such as the common assumption that Hugo dusts himself with sand in order to cool off. “We don’t know why Hugo or any of them do what they do. How could we?” says Jay Haight, who has been a keeper at Washington Park for nine years. Each man brings his own degree of familiarity to each elephant, and it varies from a rude slap on the rump or a gentle stroke and whisper to a respectfully wi
de berth.
Between chores, the keepers tend to gather for a cigarette or a cup of coffee in the barn’s central room, a huge, concrete-floored chamber with a cathedral ceiling split by skylights. This particular room, in spite of its size, isn’t used by the elephants; its dominant feature is an enormous pile of timothy hay. Along one wall are a counter and a dusty, paper-strewn desk below a row of dusty cupboards; elephant cartoons are tacked on the cupboard doors. This room and the viewing room next to it are part of the original barn, which was completed in 1959. Behind a hydraulic door labeled with a red danger sign is a later addition: a hallway and several large rooms. One of these contains the crush, a contraption of hydraulic barred walls, which is used to confine the animals—painlessly, despite the name—for care. Asian bull elephants are subject to a recurrent phenomenon of unknown purpose called musth, which lasts anywhere from a few weeks to several months (longer in healthy, well-nourished elephants like these) and is marked by violent, unpredictable behavior. This and an inveterate need to dominate are what characterize the bull. The keepers will go into a room with cows, mingle with them, many times a day; they generally approach a bull only after he is settled in the crush. Few zoos have the equipment, the experience, or the will to care for even one full-sized bull; there are three at Washington Park, thanks largely to the crush. It is not a new idea: log or bamboo cages have been used in Burmese work camps for hundreds of years. Every elephant here goes in and out of the crush nearly every day—it also functions as a door to the backyard—and each is rewarded for the trip with a bunch of carrots or bananas or an armful of hay. The thick walls of wide-spaced bars slide both horizontally and at angles, shifting noisily, with simple controls, to match the animal’s form. Here the periodic foot care is done, to prevent bacterial infections and overgrowth of toenails, and here medicine, vitamins, and other medical treatment are given. It is also in the crush that the trickiest part of reproduction research—sperm collection—takes place.
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