INTRODUCTION

I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn’t tell me

about it, but from what I pieced together after her death from a
line in her FBI file, which my father, the old radical, had re-
quested along with his own, it was in 1960, so like almost all
abortions back then, it was illegal. The agent who kept her file
wrote that she was in the care of a physician for gynecological
problems that spring, which I like to think was his chivalrous
way of protecting her from further investigation, but perhaps
he too was in the dark and only put down what he knew. For a
while I was angry at her, the way one is angry at the dead for
keeping their secrets till it is too late to ask questions, and the
way one can be angry at one’s mother for having a life outside
her child’s ken. I thought she owed me this bit of woman-to-
woman realism and honesty, instead of, or at least in addition
to, tales of the nine marriage proposals she had received by
the time she met my father, and falling in love with him at
first sight, and eloping with him three months later when she
had just turned twenty-one. Knowing about her abortion might

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 2 PRO : RECL AIMING ABOR TION RIGHTS

have helped me. It might have given me a truer sense of life

as a young, very romantic woman who had no idea what was
what.
When I ask myself why I have been so preoccupied with
abortion rights for so long, I wonder if learning about my mother’s
abortion—its illegality, the fact that she didn’t tell my father,
the unknowability of her reasons or her feelings or the experi-
ence itself—is part of the answer. I find myself wondering: Was
whoever performed the procedure a real doctor? Was he kind to
her? Respectful? Did he do his best not to cause pain? Did she
take someone with her? I remember her talking with her friend
Judy about how another woman they knew had “had a D&C,”
which was often a euphemism for abortion back then, so maybe
her circle of women steered her to a good practitioner. Maybe
her friend Judy sat in the waiting room, if there was a waiting
room, and took her home in a taxi afterward and made her a
cup of tea. I hope so. It would have been so wrong if my tender,
fragile mother had had to go through that all by herself.
What did it mean that my mother had to break the law to
end a pregnancy? It meant that America basically said to her,
It’s the twentieth century, so we’re going to let you vote and go
to college, and have a family and a job—not a great job, not the
one you wanted, because unfortunately that job is for men—and
your own charge accounts at Bonwit’s and Altman’s and your
own subscription to the Heritage Book Club, but underneath all
that normal, forward-looking, mid-twentieth-century middle-class
New York life is the secret underground life of women, and that you
must manage outside the law. If you are injured or die or are trapped
by the police, you’ll only have yourself to blame, because the real
reason you are here on Earth is to produce children, and you shirk
that duty at your peril. I wonder if my mother knew that her own
grandmother died of an abortion after bearing nine children,

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 INTRODUCTION 3

back in Russia, during the First World War, or if her mother kept
that family secret from her as she kept her secret from me.
Women’s lives are different now—so much so we’re in danger
of forgetting how they used to be. Legalizing abortion didn’t just
save women from death and injury and fear of arrest, it didn’t
just make it possible for women to commit to education and
work and free them from shotgun marriages and too many kids.
It changed how women saw themselves: as mothers by choice,
not fate. As long as abortion is available to her, even a woman
who thinks it is tantamount to murder is making a choice when
she keeps a pregnancy. She may feel like she has to have that
baby—Jesus or her parents or her boyfriend is telling her she has
to do it. But actually, she doesn’t have to do it. She is choosing to
have that baby. Roe v. Wade gave women a kind of existential
freedom that is not always welcome—indeed, is sometimes quite
painful—but that has become part of what women are.
One thing Roe v. Wade didn’t do, though, was make abortion
private.
Sometimes I look up from reading about the latest onslaught
against abortion rights—while I’ve been writing this introduc-
tion, Louisiana passed laws like those that are forcing dozens
of Texas clinics to close, Missouri legislators passed a seventy-
two-hour waiting period requirement for its sole remaining clinic,
and a Montana health center that performed abortions as part
of a family practice was trashed beyond repair, allegedly by the
son of a prominent local abortion opponent—and I think, How
strange. Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade
was all about privacy, but the most private parts of a woman’s
body and the most private decisions she will ever make have never
been more public. Everyone gets to weigh in. Even, according to
the five conservative Catholic men on the Supreme Court, her
employer. If the CEO of the Hobby Lobby crafts store chain, a

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 4 PRO : RECL AIMING ABOR TION RIGHTS

secular business, decides that emergency contraception and IUDs

are “abortifacients” and banned by God, he is entitled to keep
them out of her health coverage—even though he’s wrong about
how these methods work. It’s religion—facts don’t matter, espe-
cially when the facts involve women’s liberty.
Maybe Blackmun’s mistake was thinking that a woman
could claim privacy as a right in the first place. A man’s home
is his castle, but a woman’s body has never been wholly her
own. Historically, it’s belonged to her nation, her community,
her father, her family, her husband—in 1973, when Roe was de-
cided, marital rape was legal in every state. Why shouldn’t her
body belong to a fertilized egg as well? And if that egg has a right
to live and grow in her body, why shouldn’t she be held legally
responsible for its fate and be forced to have a cesarean if her
doctor thinks it’s best or be charged with a crime if she uses ille-
gal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? Incidents like this
have been happening all over the country for some time now.
Denying women the right to end a pregnancy is the flip side of
punishing women for conduct during pregnancy, and even if not
punishing, monitoring. In the spring of 2014 a law was proposed
in the Kansas state legislature that would require doctors to re-
port every miscarriage, no matter how early in pregnancy.1 You
would almost think the people who have always opposed wom-
en’s independence and full participation in society were still at
it. They can’t push women all the way back, but they can use
women’s bodies to keep them under surveillance and control.
That thought gives rise to a wish. Surely, I find myself day-
dreaming, there is something, some substance already in com-
mon use, that women could drink after sex or at the end of
the month, that would keep them unpregnant with no one the
wiser. Something you could buy at the supermarket, or maybe

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 INTRODUCTION 5

several things you could mix together, items so safe and so ordi-
nary they could never be banned, that you could prepare in
your own home, that would flush your uterus and leave it pink
and shiny and empty without you ever needing to know if you
were pregnant or about to be. A brew of Earl Grey, Lapsang
Souchong, and ground cardamom, say. Or Coca- Cola with a
teaspoon of Nescafé and a dusting of cayenne pepper. Things
you might have on your shelves right now, just waiting for some
clever person to put them together, some stay-at-home mother
with a chemistry degree rattling around her kitchen late at night.
Something like the herbal concoctions Jamaica Kincaid re-
members from her childhood:

When I was a child, growing up on an island in the Carib-

bean, an island whose inhabitants were mostly descendants of
people forcibly brought there from Africa, I noticed that from
time to time my mother and her friends, all of them women,
would gather together at some spot in our yard and talk and
sip and drink some very dark hot drink that they had made
from various leaves and bark of trees that they had gathered.
Without them telling me anything directly, I came to under-
stand that the potions they were drinking were meant to
sweep their wombs clean of anything in it that would result in
them being unable to manage the day-to- day working of their
lives; that is, this clearing of their wombs was another form of
house keeping.2

Think of it: no pharmacist refusing to fill your prescription

for birth control or Plan B, no religious fanatics following
you through the clinic parking lot screaming “Baby killer!” and
taking down your license-plate number, hoping to raise your

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 6 PRO : RECL AIMING ABOR TION RIGHTS

blood pressure so high that you won’t be able to have your pro-
cedure that day, no need to notify your parents or get their per-
mission. The whole elaborate panopticon that governs abortion
today—gone. RU-486, the “French abortion pill,” now better
known as mifepristone, was supposed to accomplish that: Any
doctor could prescribe it in his office and no one need be the
wiser. A 1999 New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story
called it “the little white bombshell” that “may well reconfig-
ure the politics and perception of abortion,” pushing abortion
earlier and reintegrating it with regular medical practice. It’s
the age-old hope that a single technological or scientific ad-
vance will once and for all resolve a social issue, a fantasy that
means forgetting that the new thing will be embedded in the
existing system and involve the existing human beings. For a
variety of reasons—difficulties obtaining the drug, laws that
made medication abortions as heavily regulated as surgical
ones, fear of abortion opponents—few doctors not already in-
volved in abortion care took up the challenge of prescribing it.
That women want early abortion, that many women prefer
medication to surgery, that especially in rural areas it would be
a lot simpler and cheaper and less stressful for women to get a
prescription from their local OBGYN or GP than to travel long
distances to a clinic, that it would be a good thing to free
women from having to run a gauntlet of protesters—none of
that mattered. What women want in their abortion care is sim-
ply not important.
“Trust Women” is a popular motto in the pro-choice move-
ment. It sounds a little sentimental, doesn’t it? Part of that old
sisterhood-is-powerful feminism, it is fashionable to mock to-
day. But “Trust Women” doesn’t mean that every woman is
wise or good or has magical intuitive powers. It means that no
one else can make a better decision, because no one else is liv-

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 INTRODUCTION 7

ing her life, and since she will have to live with that decision,
not you, and not the state legislature or the Supreme Court,
chances are she is doing her best in a tight spot. Dr. George
Tiller, who provided abortion care in Wichita, Kansas, and was
one of a handful of doctors to perform abortions after twenty-
four weeks, wore a “Trust Women” button. Unlike the vast ma-
jority of Americans, he did not assume that a woman seeking
an abortion late in pregnancy was lazy or stupid or too busy
having sex to have attended to matters early on. He did not as-
sume that her body ceased to be her own because she was preg-
nant. Well, you see what trusting women got him: In 2009 he
was gunned down in church by Scott Roeder, a far-right Chris-
tian anti-government anti-abortion activist, who thought he
had the right to commit murder because, as he told a reporter,
“preborn children’s lives were in imminent danger.”3
When Roe v. Wade was wending its way through the courts,
and various states were reforming their abortion laws to permit
abortion for rape, incest, fetal deformity and the like, the radi-
cal feminist activist Lucinda Cisler, head of New Yorkers for
Repeal of Abortion Laws, warned against half measures that
left women regulated by the state and the medical profession.
She feared that qualifications of the essential right “would be
extremely difficult to get judges and legislators to throw out
later.” 4 At one meeting, she held up a piece of paper represent-
ing the ideal abortion law: It was blank. Cisler saw Roe v. Wade
as a defeat, and maybe she was on to something, because what
seemed at the time to be small details have proven to be criti-
cal fault lines. The extraordinary deference paid to physicians
and their judgment preserved the idea that the woman’s desire
to end a pregnancy was not enough in itself, it had to be ap-
proved by a respectable authority figure, at the time almost
always a man. (Roe placed the medical profession under no

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 8 PRO : RECL AIMING ABOR TION RIGHTS

burden to actually provide abortion care, and indeed few doc-

tors and few hospitals want anything to do with it.) Further-
more, the acceptance of a near total ban on later abortion
contained the germ of the idea that the fetus had rights that
trumped those of the woman. It isn’t hard to see how these
small seeds blossomed into the whole infantilizing rigmarole
we have today, which is all about disrespecting women’s capac-
ity to make an independent judgment about their pregnancies:
parental notification and consent, judicial bypass, waiting peri-
ods, crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), government-mandated
scripts full of anti-abortion propaganda that doctors must read
to patients, and so on. But Cisler was wrong in a way too: Had
the Supreme Court agreed in 1973 that the proper abortion
law was none at all, we would probably have ended up close to
where we are today because of the power and determination of
the anti-abortion movement and the qualms and hesitations
and lack of engagement of most who are nominally pro-choice.
It is just that hard to see women as belonging to themselves.
And yet, women keep trying. They put off the rent or the
utilities to scrape together the $500 for a first-trimester abor-
tion. They drive across whole states to get to a clinic and sleep
in their cars because they can’t afford a motel. They do not do
this because they are careless sluts or because they hate babies
or because they fail to see clearly what their alternatives are.
They see the alternatives all too clearly. We live, as Ellen Willis
wrote, in a society that is “actively hostile to women’s ambitions
for a better life. Under these conditions the unwillingly preg-
nant woman faces a terrifying loss of control over her fate.”
Abortion, wrote Willis, is an act of self-defense.5
Perhaps we don’t see abortion that way because we don’t
think women have the right to a self. They are supposed to live

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 INTRODUCTION 9

for others. Qualities that are seen as normal and desirable in

men—ambition, confidence, outspokenness—are perceived as
selfish and aggressive in women, especially when they have
children. Perhaps that is why women’s privacy has so little pur-
chase on the abortion debate: Only a self can have privacy.
And only a self can have equality. Many feminist legal schol-
ars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have argued that
the Supreme Court should have legalized abortion on grounds
of equality rather than privacy.6 Pregnancy and childbirth are
not only physical and medical experiences, after all. They are
also social experiences that, in modern America, just as when
abortion was criminalized in the 1870s, serve to restrict wom-
en’s ability to participate in society on equal footing with men.
Would we be living in a different world today had Blackmun
based abortion rights on the need to dismantle women’s subor-
dination? Or would the same people who don’t accept women’s
privacy rights say, Well, if women can’t be equal without abor-
tion, they’ll have to stay in their place?
As I write, reporters describe the return of illegal abortion in
states where clinics have closed. In Texas, women in the Rio
Grande Valley, now hundreds of miles from a clinic—no prob-
lem, said Judge Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit, just drive
fast—are going over the Mexican border to buy misoprostol,
which causes miscarriage and is sold over the counter there as
an anti-ulcer medication. Even where abortion is available,
some women won’t or can’t go to a clinic: They’re undocu-
mented immigrants and fear arrest, they have no money, there’s
too much shame around abortion to risk being seen by some-
one who knows them. But now, with clinics disappearing, more
and more women will have no choice but to turn to pills, as
women do in Ireland and other countries where it is illegal for

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 10 PRO : RECL AIMING ABOR TION RIGHTS

a woman to end a pregnancy. Some will end up in emergency

rooms. Some will be injured. Some may die. This is what laws
supposedly intended to protect women from “dangerous” clinics
will have accomplished. This is what the so-called pro-life
movement will have done for “life.”
As I mentioned earlier, a single discovery or invention rarely
lives up to its promise of deep social change. Even the birth-
control pill, an immense advance over the clumsy and fallible
methods that preceded it, has fallen short: Half of all pregnan-
cies in the United States are accidental. Still, I imagine my
mother, sitting at the kitchen table, in her pretty bathrobe with
the blue and yellow flowers, on an ordinary day in 1960, cut-
ting out articles from the New York Times as she loved to do.
She lights a Benson & Hedges and sips her very dark hot drink
while the sun pours in through the window facing the street.

I wrote this book because I wanted to put real women, women

like my mother, back at the center of the way we talk about
abortion. Abortion opponents have been very effective at shift-
ing the focus of moral concern onto the contents of women’s
wombs—even an unimplanted fertilized egg is a baby now.
Unless they are very brave, women who seek abortion have
been pushed back into the shadows. It’s one thing for a rape
victim to speak up, or a woman with a wanted pregnancy that
has turned into a medical catastrophe. But why can’t a woman
just say, This wasn’t the right time for me? Or two children (or
one, or none) are enough? Why must the woman apologize for
not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant?
It’s as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a wom-
an’s life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note

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 INTRODUCTION 11

from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her
door—even if, like most women who have abortions, including
my mother, she already has children. There is deep contempt
for women in that—and disregard for the seriousness of moth-
erhood as well.
For many years, pundits dismissed the notion that abortion
would ever be significantly restricted, and mocked as Chicken
Littles pro-choicers who warned that both rights and access
were at risk, and contraception, too. The conventional wisdom
held the Republican Party would not risk waking the sleeping
giant that is the middle-of-the-road more-or-less-pro-choice
voter. Now we are seeing the Chicken Littles were right. Where
is that giant? In some states, it is indeed stretching and stand-
ing up—Virginia is a blue state now because the Republicans
in charge went too far, closing clinics, trying to mandate trans-
vaginal ultrasounds, and so on. In others, the giant dozes on,
immobilized by conflicting, not-very-well-thought-out notions
about women, sex, family, race, government, and a general
sense that America is going down the drain.
Clinic doctors, nurses, directors, and employees risk their
lives to help women. Patient escorts, abortion-fund volunteers,
bloggers, organizers, lawyers, and thousands of other activists
work tirelessly to keep abortion legal, expand access, change the
discourse, and sway the vote. But it’s the millions of pro-choice
Americans who are so far uninvolved (and still complacent)
that will ultimately decide the fate of legal abortion in this
country.
It’s past time for the giant to rise.

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