My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke….
What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […]
It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child.
But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children.
The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents….
But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear.
H/t J.A.
Comments
11 responses to “I would have borne a child for them: the authorities, the fundamentalists”
Oh my.
That woman could write.
Truth.
I find that both profound and very moving. One also does not have to look very far in order to find inconsistencies in the ‘women must have no rights or final say’ school – eg the Catholic Church.
If human life begins at conception, then to be consistent the priesthood of the Catholic Church should insist that women bring any used sanitary pads or tampons to the priest for last rites and a proper funeral: just in case there is a zygote or early stage embryo in there that they might not be aware of.
I suggest nobody hold their breath waiting for the Black Brotherhood to do that.
She’s always been one of my favorite authors.
Or how ’bout sending them to your forced-birther GOP Congressperson and Senator? I’d love to see mine (formerly with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition) get some.
1, 2, 3 – agreed. Maybe we need to form a book club?
Already exists in fiction.
Oops, forgot:
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Ready-Robin-Buckallew/dp/1387668226/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=blood+ready+robin+buckallew&qid=1558582131&s=gateway&sr=8-1-spell
It’s as good as done, then. After all, the Christian doctrine of sin and redemption is based on the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden, and a rather persuasive talking snake. Something tells me that on the face of it, and all things being considered, that story is probably more likely fiction than fact.
So it’s fiction all round. Win-win if you like.
;-)
@iknklast #8+9
And well worth reading (though profoundly disturbing).
oops, make that @iknklast #7+8