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| Image credit: Photo by Bethany L. King on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
The day I had my abortion, or maybe the day after, I was lying in bed, resting. I'm an obsessive record keeper, and I know that I could go back and look up what day it actually was, but I'm finding that I don't want to revisit that time so closely just yet. (And I'm smiling to think that I'm not ready "just yet," when just yet has been four years already.)
As I lay in bed, I decided to distract myself by cleaning out my e-mail inbox and catching up on correspondence with friends. I opened my mail to find a message from my friend Jeremiah, an evangelical Christian who was looking to dissect the results of the previous day's 2004 presidential election. Jeremiah forwarded, for discussion, a piece on abortion written by a conservative Christian who believed that so called "values voters" had swung the election in Bush's favor.
Jeremiah knew nothing of what was going on in my personal life, but reached out to me because he liked and respected me and knew I was a committed feminist and progressive who was passionate about the election. Still, coming within hours of both the termination of my pregnancy and the end of a bitterly contested and emotional election, this seemed seemed cruelly ill-timed. My political pain was being laid at the feet of my personal pain and my personal pain was being politicized.
Also on the list of recipients were two other friends: a liberal academic and a libertarian businessman. I felt privileged to be part of this diverse little discussion group of highly intelligent and well-informed people, so in another spectacular example of my inability to take care of myself, I dove right in. I was consumed (as always) by a need to understand why and unable to acknowledge that engaging in an intellectual debate on this topic was not the most brilliant idea for me at that moment.
I felt... It's hard for me to say how I felt even now. I've struggled with writing this post and the tone is always more detached than what I want, because trying to capture that particular mix of thoughts and emotions feels like trying to grab mist with my hands only to watch it slip through my fingers...
What I felt most of all was Other. Separate. Alienated. Alone on one side of the world's balance.
I read the piece Jeremiah had sent me, which posited that the morally questionable nature of the war in Iraq, in fact all questions of morality, paled in comparison with the world's greatest wrong: the taking of an innocent life in abortion. I looked at myself -- one woman, making one decision about one family -- balanced against an entire war and somehow coming out (in one man's view of God's eyes) more weighted down with the chains of evil than any who led us down the road to Abu Ghraib. I saw George W. Bush standing with me before the Catholic God of my youth, on clouds in the cold white sky, waiting to be judged for our crimes. And in the balance against me was one small soul. And in the balance against George W. Bush were the thousands and thousands of souls sent to their death in Iraq. Yet those souls were lighter.
I discussed abortion in the abstract with three (wonderful) men. I was the only woman. The only one who could bear children. The only one who had borne children. The only one who had had an abortion. The only one who could. I watched these intelligent men assume (as is so common, I've noticed) that abortion is something that happens to young, poor, unmarried women who either lack access to birth control or choose not to use it. Married, middle class, well educated, white mothers in their late 30's with good health care and reliable birth control aren't the demographic people are talking about when they talk about abortion. And maybe, I thought, I'm worse: worse than those other women who had better reasons than I did because they have less than I do.
I know I flew off the handle and ranted and cursed at my friends and cried as I typed, but I never told them why. That's me. Passionate on the issues.
And when the discussion died down, I found I still wanted to know why: why my experiences as a woman made me so separate from these three wonderful male friends of mine and why the God of my youth and the people who followed Him thought my sins alone were greater than an entire war.
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