Abortion Fight Is Over Choice : A Daughter’s Questioning Proves That Point

The local broadcaster announced that after the commercial he would be interviewing a leader in the anti-abortion movement. “Turn it off,” I snapped at my daughter, “I can’t bear to listen to that.”

She gave me the kind of look children in the 1960s gave parents who refused to watch anti-war demonstrations on TV news. That look asked how could I have such a closed mind? How could I be so Establishment? And how could I be so curt, so final, so decisive about what my 13-year-old daughter says she regards as possibly the killing of babies?

Standing there in my kitchen, biscuit dough on my hands, I felt the full force of the abortion backlash. At that moment, my daughter saw me not as a soft-hearted liberal--a political persona I’ve grown comfortable with--but as a cold-hearted killer, one who sacrifices the unborn in the name of some abstract right to privacy. It was not the fact that she disagreed with me that was so disturbing. She’s a teen-ager, she disagrees with me every day. What was so disturbing was the success of the anti-abortion movement at depicting people like me as heartless, amoral abstractionists who care more about rights than about life.

It seems to me that this is where I came in some 20 years ago. Only back then the opponents of abortion laws were the ones who were the heartless killers. Back then, we charged them with caring more about abstract principles than real life. Back then, we were the ones who showed the gruesome pictures--of women butchered on dirty kitchen tables, of women dead from unnecessary infections, of fetuses punctured by coat hangers, of women poisoned from drinking lye.

The movement for abortion rights did not begin and was not fueled by a passion for the right to privacy. That is the principle that convinced the Supreme Court, but the heart of this movement is nothing so anemic as a legalistic principle. The heart of this movement is a deep concern for the lives, the health and the well-being of American women.

That is the point I tried to make to my daughter. As the biscuits cooked and the interview came on the television, we sat and discussed the matter as only a mother and adolescent daughter can. Which is to say that we were alternately snarly and sensitive; there were bursts of honesty as well as of anger; there were questions and accusations; there were tears and occasional smiles. We were momentarily locked a primal tug of wills over the most primal of issues.

We began, of course, with the fundamentals. “How do you know you’re not killing a person?” she asked. Because I know that a 10-week-old fetus cannot survive outside a woman’s womb, I know that it has no cognitive abilities, I know that it has no capacity for love or work, I know that it has no relationships or responsibilities. And I weigh that knowledge against the certitude that a pregnant woman is, most definitely, a person with relationships and responsibilities that only she can calculate.

I know that the research on women considering abortions shows that they aren’t consumed with the question of privacy rights; they’re consumed with the question of responsibilities--to their other children, to their parents, to their employers or teachers, to their husbands or lovers, to themselves, to that embryo. Few women make this decision casually; no women make it because they want to assert their right to privacy. Women decide to abort pregnancies because the ties that bind them in every other corner of their lives take priority over the very tenuous tie that binds them to that very tenuous bit of life in their wombs.

My daughter paid attention to these remarks, but seemed unmoved.

The television interview intruded. “What advice do you give to single women?” asked the interviewer. “We advise chastity,” responded the pretty, powdered, softly bow-tied lady on the screen. I looked sideways at my daughter.

“What do you think of that?” I asked her. “Well,” she sniffed, “I don’t think people should be irresponsible about sex.” That answer should have warmed the cockles of my maternal heart, but it didn’t. It sounded cold-hearted, abstract--a principle unrelated to real life uttered by one who has yet to experience her first kiss.

My innocent child holds the conviction that women are--or should be--sufficiently in control of their lives so that they could always prevent pregnancy, either through contraception or by simply saying “no.” It seems that she is, after all, the daughter of a feminist. This child of the women’s movement expects women to be in charge of their lives. After all, her mother had only one child and no abortions--why can’t everyone else be similarly well regulated? So great is women’s progress (on TV and among the privileged white elite of my daughter’s experience) that she simply cannot imagine women as victims of either the law or contraceptive failure or male sexual demands.

In abstract principle, she’s right of course. In the best of all possible worlds, women would have the personal socialization and the economic independence that would allow them to say “no,” and they would have medical and legal protections against unwanted pregnancies. But we don’t live in abstract principle, and this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, and despite what the softly bow-tied lady on TV said, making abortion illegal will not decrease premarital--or “irresponsible”--sex. It will only bring back all those couples who “had” to get married and all those women who were maimed or killed by underworld abortionists and all those mothers who abandoned all personal goals and resigned themselves to the vagaries of reproductive chance.

My daughter’s eyes glazed over a bit, the way they do when I started sounding like a history professor. This story doesn’t end with her throwing her arms around me and swearing her allegiance to my politics. It ends with my husband serving some almost-burned biscuits and my daughter and me making amends at a funny matinee.

She’s not going to acquiesce to me on this. She wants the autonomy to make her own choice about abortion. And in that, she is true to the proud tradition of the abortion rights movement.