Going Public on Abortion : More high-visibility women are ‘coming out,’ hoping to prevent a return to the horrors of’the back room.’ But critics wonder whether celebrity revelations really make a difference.

The reason I’m talking about this now is that I don’t ever want that to happen to young girls again--it’s a horror, a nightmare . . . --Rita Moreno I spoke out because I suddenly realized that there was a possibility that what I had lived with would happen again. --Polly Bergen From “The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion” The power of these voices is not diluted by anonymity. They talk frankly, emotionally, about their abortions: Barbara Corday, Anne Archer, Whoopi Goldberg, Polly Bergen, Jill Clayburgh, Linda Ellerbee, Margot Kidder among them.

In contemporary lexicon, it’s called “coming out.” Gays and lesbians, child- and sexual-abuse victims, alcoholics and drug abusers have been doing it. And now, high-visibility women are going public with their most intimate stories.

In first-person narratives, they recall their abortions: both the legal ones and the horrors of “back room” operations before the Supreme Court upheld Roe vs. Wade in 1973. They want no one to forget that, less than 20 years ago, women faced abortions that were illegal and dangerous.

But do celebrity revelations really change people’s minds over a subject so controversial and complex? Some abortion rights supporters say yes and praise those who go public for putting themselves on the line. But opponents and others say that celebrities who come out are, at best, doing nothing and at worst hurting their own cause: Instead of changing someone’s mind about abortion, they say, celebrity revelations may backfire and change that person’s mind about people they once liked or admired.

Coming out is not a choice made lightly, says New York author Angela Bonavoglia, who wrote “The Choices We Made.”

For the book, which was published this winter, Bonavoglia sought people--famous or not--who would talk about the ways abortion had affected their lives. Initially, she contacted women’s groups and other sources. Once word got around, she says, people came to her on their own.

“Some responded quickly with a ‘yes,’ ” Bonavoglia writes. “Some had to give the decision a great deal of thought. Some said ‘no’ because they feared that it would hurt their mothers, or that sharing their reasoning about having an abortion would threaten the very principle of choice--that the decision to have or not have a child should be a private one.”

“These decisions involve a lot of other people,” Bonavoglia said in an interview. “Even though these women are digging up stories from decades ago, it’s very emotional.”

In the book, the accounts generally are short, matter-of-fact explanations of why and how the women had abortions. With a few exceptions, they said they had them because they were young and unmarried. They said they also wanted to put names on stories that usually are anonymous. Many hope they can keep Roe vs. Wade from being overturned and keep others from going through what they did.

Bonavoglia calls her storytellers risk-takers.

In 1991, she says, “You can’t go out there and not take a risk, personally and professionally. For public people, there is that fear that they’ll lose the respect of those who know them and respect them.”

As abortion foes and supporters become increasingly polarized, Bonavoglia believes women who have had illegal abortions must go public. This way others can learn “what it is like for a human being to go through this, how a woman gets into that situation, the depth of anguish.”

Bonavoglia, who serves on the board of Catholics for Free Choice, adds, “You don’t have to love abortion to be in favor of keeping it safe and legal. . . . Abortion makes me uncomfortable. But I certainly don’t want it to be illegal.”

Critics--including some abortion-rights advocates--question the value of coming out.

Susan Carpenter McMillan, spokeswoman for the Right to Life League of Southern California, says celebrity revelations “hurt (the abortion-rights) movement terribly.” Instead, “they play very well for us.”

She says she cannot understand women who discuss their abortions positively. “How can you enter a clinic sobbing and crying, then walk out and say, ‘Well, that’s the best thing that ever happened to me’? . . . They talk about the pain they went through, the terrible decision, how awful abortion is . . . and then hear them turn around and say, ‘but of course it’s not a baby.’ ”

In a 1990 interview, McMillan acknowledged that she had an abortion while a college student in 1970. In her case, the admission, she now says, has freed her from her “deepest, darkest, most awful secret.”

Until then, she says, she had “just wanted to scream” when someone challenged her views on abortion and asked “How would you know?”

McMillan, who opposes abortion except to save the life of the mother, says, “There is this kind of sick sorority of women who have gone into clinics and had their children killed. . . . We have different stories, different lives, different circumstances when we walk in. But the thing we have in common is we are frightened and alone.

“We walk out the same door, but we go down different paths.”

Women who talk publicly about their abortions don’t offer “a persuasive argument for the most conservative opponents,” says Celeste Condit, who wrote the book, “Decoding Abortion Rhetoric: Communicating Social Change.”

But, “I think it might be effective for the pro-choice movement in consolidating the people who are leaning that way anyway,” says Condit, an associate professor of speech communication at the University of Georgia.

Some abortion stories may find sympathetic ears, she says. Others may not. “It’s much more difficult to be sympathetic if a woman is not following sexual mores, not using birth control,” or having repeat abortions. And, she says, there must be an argument more persuasive than simply “my rights, my rights, my rights. . . . There has to be some kind of statement of why this is better for the general good.”

Writer-performer Emily Levine is one feminist who is dismayed by this parade of tell-all celebrities.

She recalls going to “one of those benefits where Hollywood women stood up to tell their stories. To me, there was immediately an element of self-drama about it. I get nervous about dramaturgy on something which has so many complicated ramifications, one of which is privacy. There is, to me, some contradiction.”

She adds: “I don’t understand what women standing up and telling their stories accomplishes. To me, the issue has never been middle-class and upper middle-class women. To me, the issue has always been poor women.

“The fact that we were not out on the streets when the decision was made not to allow abortions to be paid by government funds . . . that was our first huge mistake.”

Today, more women seem willing to discuss their abortions publicly. In the late 1980s, when Kathryn E. May and Ellen Messer conducted interviews for their book, “Back Rooms: An Oral History of the Illegal Abortion Era,” most of their subjects, none of them celebrities, chose to use pseudonyms.

But now, says May, a psychologist practicing in New York, “women are standing up and saying, ‘I was wronged.’ Women who were ashamed before just by the idea that they were involved in something so sinister are now standing up and saying, ‘Wait a minute. This wasn’t my fault.’ ”

Is coming out therapeutic? “It really depends on the woman,” says Teri Reisser, director of social services for the Right to Life League of Southern California. “For some women, going public is a form of expiation that is very unhealthy, if they haven’t gone through the healing process. If they have, and if they are activist-minded and want to use their experience--’Don’t tell me what it feels like, I’ve been through it’--that can be healthy.”

Reisser, who conducts support groups for women who’ve had abortions, sees coming out as one way of dealing with post-abortion syndrome, an affliction she believes has symptoms ranging from panic attacks to the inability to form close relationships.

Reisser is fascinated, she says, by what motivates some women to tell all about their abortions, while other women will deny having had one, even to a new doctor.

“I think they go public for one of two reasons. Either they’re so guilt-ridden, or they’re so fearfully needing to rationalize the abortion by standing up and saying, ‘I did this. I’m not ashamed of it. So there.’ ”

Debra Borys, a Westwood psychologist who also teaches at the California School of Professional Psychology, sees a parallel between high-profile women who forfeit their privacy because they are passionate about protecting abortion rights and celebrities who come out about having AIDS or being gay.

“They realize people may pay attention. If the public has a certain negative view of a controversial issue, but a positive view pre-existing of the celebrity, then it may shatter some of the stigma . . . it can become a forum for educating people.”