Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0)

by Anna Quindlen

  That’s no surprise. We’ve become accustomed to movie actors and bass guitarists who believe that notoriety has given them a flair for geopolitics. But whether or not a pregnant woman should be allowed to end a pregnancy is a serious, complicated subject. Using football wrapped around self-righteous bromides to sell opposition to legal abortion is a little like using sex to sell cigarettes. It’s permissible. And it’s unseemly. Like the moment in the video when Jim Burt holds his young son on his shoulders and the kid says, in a way I assume is meant to sound unscripted, “It’s great to be alive.”

  There are surely fans, men and women seen cheering wildly on that tape, who would be appalled to discover that they are part of such an effort. Deborah Kent, a hypnotherapist who was once such a megafan that she was profiled in the sports pages of this paper and who was sent a copy of the video after complaining to Mr. Mara about it, now says, “Whenever I see Mark Bavaro I hope he drops the ball.”

  Of the players who made Champions for Life, only Mr. Bavaro will play Sunday. Phil Simms is injured, Jim Burt plays for San Francisco, and the other three are retired. But Mr. Mara remains co-owner of the team, and he remains devoted to this cause. So while you may look out over the field and see a spectacular pass, a tragic fumble, a triumphant run into the end zone, he may envision a colorful and lively backdrop for another ten-minute sermonette linking athletic prowess and moral superiority. It’s his right to do that. I just think it’s out of bounds.

  RUST, ROE, AND REALITY

  July 17, 1991

  I never thought I would have a good word to say about Rust v. Sullivan, the ridiculous Supreme Court decision upholding regulations barring doctors in federally financed clinics from discussing abortion with pregnant patients.

  But the advantage is in the adjective. It seems to me that many Americans who paid no mind to abortion rights have been perplexed by the ridiculous nature of the ruling. (It has also generated terrific editorial cartoons, cartoonists being among our finest commentators. I can’t decide which I prefer, the one of the doctor with a gavel in his mouth, or the one of the clinic sign: The Supreme Court has prohibited us from informing you that having an ABORTION IS A LEGAL ALTERNATIVE.)

  The universe that once consisted only of those of us who might need an abortion or have friends and relations who might need one was enlarged to include those who have asked a physician for complete information. “I don’t like the idea of abortions,” one elderly woman said, “but a doctor should have to tell you the truth, even if there’s politics involved.”

  This expansion of the universe, this recognition that politics has no place in a doctor’s office, this appreciation of the ridiculous provisions of a federal gag rule, may come in handy in the future. What was once a what-if has now become a how-soon: the Supreme Court as constituted by Ronald Reagan and George Bush is a total loss in terms of reproductive freedom, and next term there is considerable likelihood that it will overturn Roe v. Wade. Whether Clarence Thomas is confirmed or not probably makes little difference. The president is not going to turn around and nominate Laurence Tribe instead.

  If it is true, as polls tell us over and over again, that the American people believe abortion is a private matter, they will now have to prove it in the voting booth. They will have to press their elected representatives for federal law ensuring the right to an abortion. Failing that, they will have to push legislators to make abortion legal in their states, and elect legislators who will do so.

  State courts have begun to move into the breach. Eight have found a right to privacy that includes reproductive choice within their state constitutions. In New York the Court of Appeals will consider that issue this fall when it hears arguments in a challenge by the New York Civil Liberties Union of Medicaid-funding bans. The case is Hope v. Perales: Hope for short, and for sure.

  Alternatives to constitutional protection will be neither easy nor ideal. The courts are meant to be places of principle, but the legislatures are bastions of compromise. Legislative guarantees are likely to come with strings attached. Parental notification. Waiting periods. With state-by-state action, geography is destiny. A state constitutional right to privacy in New York is cold comfort to a girl in Louisiana who doesn’t have bus fare. All the jockeying, the lobbying, the campaigning will be quietly enraging for those who believe that what may be growing within them is uniquely their own business, not the business of a lot of men in suits. The what-if is upon us. You’d think the Republican leadership, which incorporated opposition to legal abortion in the party platform in 1980, would be jumping up and down. The reaction has been somewhat different. The uproar over Rust v. Sullivan has been so considerable, and the House rejection of clinic restrictions by a 353-to-74 vote so decisive, that the president said last week he might be amenable to some compromise. And just a few days ago the Young Republican National Federation considered removing an anti-abortion plank from its platform. Many delegates at the group’s convention thought the position was a political liability.

  Interesting that that should happen now, that some political opposition softens as the removal of the constitutional protection draws nearer. Many women have thought of Roe as an umbrella, sheltering our rights. But it has protected politicians, too, from the necessity of taking a stand anywhere but behind the podium. It will be interesting to see if George Bush will maintain his manufactured opposition to legal abortion if it means not merely appointing conservative jurists to the country’s highest court, but vetoing federal legislation and thereby directly, conclusively denying the right of choice to millions of women. Who vote.

  HIDDEN AGENDAS

  August 10, 1992

  At first glance there is something terribly confusing about what is going on in the life of Patrick F. Kelly, a federal judge in Wichita, Kansas, who may be wondering why he didn’t go to dental school. Judge Kelly has forbidden members of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion search-and-destroy group, to block access to abortion clinics in town.

  In return, his jurisprudence has been attacked by his own government and his life has been threatened. One man reportedly left a message on the judge’s home answering machine, describing how his body would be dismembered after he was killed.

  Now, let me get this straight: it’s wrong to destroy an embryo, but it’s O.K. to kill a full-grown federal judge.

  Judge Kelly hasn’t had much to do with the abortion issue in his eleven years on the federal bench, but he’s getting a fast and dirty education since Operation Rescue decided to make Wichita a high-profile battleground. And the judge is discovering an essential truth of the movement: things are not always the way they seem. Getting a death threat from a person who pretends a keen interest in the right to life is the least of the contradictions.

  The intervention in this matter by the Justice Department is described by officials as simply a dispute over the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allows federal courts to protect a class of people from conspiracies to violate their civil rights. Judge Kelly relied on that law when he sent in federal marshals to safeguard entrances at the clinics. He also promised to jail anyone who defied his order—even the governor.

  Operation Rescue lawyers argued that the 1871 act doesn’t apply, and the Justice Department supported them in an amicus brief. Amicus means friend, and that’s exactly what Justice is being to the anti-abortion folks, talking jurisdictional disputes and playing politics. President Bush continues to court the right-to-life vote, and Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, who turned in his resignation yesterday, is running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. Most of what we need to know about Justice Department intervention in this case is contained in election contests, not legal papers.

  So many men, so little candor. Randall Terry, who runs Operation Rescue, has been most honest when he has talked about the proper subservient role of women in society. His colleagues wear tiny fetus-feet lapel pins. But what some of them seem to oppose is not abortion but the rise of individualism and the changing roles of wome
n. When they talk about innocent life, they are talking about what they see as a more innocent time, when the same moral strictures applied to everyone, when gay people were in the closet, sex resulted in conception, and women stayed at home.

  In her book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, the sociologist Kristin Liker describes the abortion battle as a referendum, a conflict between those who think raising children is one part of a woman’s life, freely chosen, and those who think it is the center of a woman’s life, her essential destiny. Supporters of legal abortion often say that their opponents are not interested in women, only the unborn. But some of those opponents are keenly interested in maintaining traditional roles, in pushing back the tide of change.

  Like all the other abortion battles, at base the one in Wichita is about how we live now. It’s hard to see how the man who threatens to cut Judge Kelly into little pieces is choosing life. Instead I would imagine that he is enraged that others are choosing a life of which he does not approve.

  The administration has chosen to support that sort of rage, and thousands of protesters are throwing one American town into a tumult to vent it. The Justice Department sent them a message; while the entrances to the clinics cleared in the wake of Judge Kelly’s order, the demonstrators were back yesterday, trying their best to inhibit women from exercising a clear constitutional right.

  It seems contradictory that liberals are demanding law and order and conservatives are justifying disruptive protests. But that is no more contradictory than the rest of this sorry episode, in which the so-called Department of Justice sides with the law-breakers, and those who march beneath the banners that say CHOOSE LIFE deny others their choice and disrupt the lives of thousands.

  THE ABORTION ORPHANS

  February 19, 1992

  The photograph on the postcard is of a Gibson girl, hair piled atop her head, lace on her rounded shoulders, and a face in profile that is not so much pretty as soft and very young. Beneath the picture are these words:

  CLARA BELL DUVALL WAS A 32-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF FIVE WHEN SHE DIED OF AN ILLEGAL ABORTION IN 1929.

  On the other side is written in a strong slanting hand, “My mother in her wedding picture at 18 years of age.”

  “The image of her in her casket is seared in my brain,” said Linn Duvall Harwell, who had just turned six when her mother died.

  The hospital listed the cause of death as “pneumonia.”

  She used a knitting needle.

  She had a son and four daughters.

  “She was a beautiful mother,” says Mrs. Harwell. “That must be understood. She was loving and affectionate. We were poor and it was 1929, but we were cared for. The minute she died, it all changed.”

  “I can’t help but think how my life would have been different,” says Gwendolyn Elliot, who is a commander in the Pittsburgh Police Department. She was five when Vivian Campbell, her mother, died in 1950; she and her brother were raised by their grandparents. When she was eighteen and ready for college, she tried to cash in some bonds her mother had left her and was told she needed a death certificate. And there it was, under cause of death: the word “abortion,” followed by a question mark.

  The abortion orphans may be the shadow of things to come. Those of us who believe that abortion must remain legal are flailing about for a way to make vivid what will happen if it is banned once more. We have had the right so long that we have forgotten what the wrong is. Meant to evoke bloodstained tables and covert phone calls, the term “back alley” does not resonate for women who grew up with clean clinics and licensed doctors.

  But there is indeed a kind of endless alley in the lives of Linn Harwell and Gwen Elliot, the dead end in your heart when you grow up without a mother. They tell us something about banning abortion that is both touching and chilling, these two little girls who grew up to become activists because of what happened to them. Which likely means many little girls, and boys, too, who do not know, who still believe pneumonia did it, or who are ashamed, who keep the secret.

  This is the shadow of things to come. Someone’s mother will die. That’s not how we commonly think of this. We usually think of children having children, even though statistics show more than half of the abortions performed in the United States last year were performed on women over the age of twenty-five.

  We think of cases like the horrific one unfolding in Ireland right now, in which a fourteen-year-old girl who says she was raped has been forbidden by the courts to travel to England to have an abortion. Her parents made a critical mistake: they were good citizens. They asked police about having fetal-tissue tests done as evidence. The attorney general stepped right in to enjoin the girl’s planned abortion.

  It is a great mistake to believe that if abortion is illegal, it will be nonexistent. Ireland has the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, and still several thousand of its citizens travel elsewhere to end their pregnancies each year.

  Some kind of douche, some kind of drug, some kind of tubing: women will do it themselves. They always have. They become pregnant for reasons we know nothing of, reasons not as easily quantifiable as being raped by a friend’s father at age fourteen. Linn Harwell’s mother had had five children, eight pregnancies. Gwen Elliott’s mother had two small children and had just separated from her husband. Their reasons died with them. What lived on were their motherless children.

  “My father said that when they took me to the cemetery somebody told me she was sleeping,” says Commander Elliott, “and I thought that anytime he wanted he could go get her. My father says I used to ask ‘Why don’t we go get Mommy?’ but I don’t remember it.”

  That is the shadow of things to come.

  AT THE CLINICS

  April 5, 1992

  Last fall a thirty-year-old woman named Eileen Moran pulled into the parking lot of the Aware Woman clinic in the space coast town of Melbourne, Florida. Ms. Moran was not surprised to see demonstrators; that is commonplace. The surprise came the next day, in a manila envelope full of color photographs of bloody fetuses, anti-abortion tracts, and a letter warning her about procedures performed at the clinic.

  “I felt very violated,” says Ms. Moran, who is now five months pregnant and had gone to the clinic only for a checkup. “The idea that they could trace my name and address through my license plate and have something in the mail that day was pretty terrifying.”

  At Aware Woman, it is pretty ordinary. Ms. Moran got off easier than the teenager whose envelope was sent to her parents. And her experience pales in comparison to that of doctors who receive middle-of-the-night hang-up calls on their unlisted lines and whose homes are picketed constantly. Opponents of the Melbourne clinic have issued WANTED posters, offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to “the arrest or conviction” of one doctor who works there.

  The poster, which describes him as “a hired assassin in that he kills unborn babies for a fee,” includes his photograph, his home phone number and that of his mother, and the license-plate number of his car. The poster was taped to the office doors of other gynecologists in central Florida; written at the bottom was “You Are Next.”

  Today in Washington, D.C., there will be a rally for abortion rights, for constitutional protections and federal legislation. But while we have been looking at the big picture we have forgotten something important. What if they gave us abortion and nobody came—no doctors, no clinic administrators, no nurses?

  The people who run abortion clinics are a tightly knit group, as folks who are under fire tend to be. Their carpenters have been persuaded not to make repairs, their medical labs to turn away their business. Their children have been accosted and told that they are the spawn of murderers. I couldn’t blame any of them if they decided that they’d had enough of being the real people behind the legal arguments.

  You can find the place where the founder of the Melbourne clinic lives because there is a groove in the grass out front, where every morning a woman walks back and forth with a sign that says PAT
WINDLE, STOP KILLING GOD’S BABIES.

  Few new doctors are learning to perform abortions, and those who do, concerned that publicity like the WANTED posters will ruin their practices, often return to the happier task of delivering babies. The big medical organizations, which can lobby like nobody’s business when they want to, have been uncommonly low-key. They were more fired up about our right to choose breast implants than they have ever been about our right to choose abortion.

  Ms. Windle says that a reporter scoffed when she described this as a civil war. But it is a war, and there is battle fatigue. There has sprung up a thirst for some middle ground. Sometimes the talk is of promoting contraception, sometimes of curtailing the period of pregnancy during which abortion is permissible, sometimes of merely allowing abortion while making clear that it is not desirable.

  But this battle is not being driven by those with a will to compromise. The people who are harassing doctors, patients, and clinics consider any means permissible in their quest to prove that they know what’s better for you than you do. The ordinary American standards of personal privacy and personal property don’t apply. “God’s law is higher than man’s law,” says Randall Terry, the leader of Operation Rescue, who said in Buffalo that he would be using investigators to dig up dirt on doctors who perform abortions, a part of God’s law that I missed in my study of the Bible.

  And so it is important today to remember a T-shirt slogan: Think Globally, Act Locally. Many of us who speak out in favor of legal abortion have had little to do with the day-to-day happenings at the clinics, perhaps because we were focused on sweeping safeguards, perhaps because it is easier to see abortion as a crusade than as a business. The truth is it must be both. Freedom of the press is only as meaningful as the willingness of one person to publish a newspaper. The right to choose abortion is empty if the people who provide it are harassed out of existence.