As I lay awake after the very powerful (as ever) Breaking Silences: Speak Out on Abortion that inaugurated the From Abortion Rights to Social Justice conference at Hampshire College I was thinking that there are nearly as many ways to think and write about reproductive rights—and the act of telling our stories—as there are stories to tell.
I’ve written lots about stories, and here I go again. What is the point of telling stories? Can stories transform us personally? Can stories be used to create change politically? The context to our stories is deeply personal, yet politics serve as a forceful overlay. Somehow, we have to be vigilant to tease out the politics from the personal, despite the fact that we cannot pull this off successfully (more on that later).
Stories are rendered most powerful in the details. Friday night, one woman came up to the podium and said she’d had an abortion a week ago that very day. Her story was, in a way, a “typical” story/scenario; she’s a college student, no wish for a baby at this very moment, with plenty of support. She said, “The metal detector was surprising.” She said, “I didn’t realize there would be so much waiting, that it would take so long.” She said, “I was in a little room wearing a paper gown with four other women wearing paper gowns. We didn’t know each other’s names. We were united by this fact of the paper gowns and what we were doing there.” She said, “The nurses were really nice. Everyone treated me like what I was doing was fine.” She said, “After the sedatives wore off and I felt better, I treated myself to ice cream.”
Another woman, speaking about her 1974 abortion at a clinic that may have been technically legal (although my guess is it wasn’t): “No one asked for a medical history. No one gave me anything for pain. After the procedure, we could spend forty minutes on a mattress on the floor. No one asked how I was feeling or mentioned birth control or suggested follow up care.”
The difference between safe and legal abortion and dangerous and illegal abortion is in the details. When we talk about reproductive justice, we have to remember that we are talking about women’s bodies, women’s health and women’s safety. Quasi-legal is sketchy at best, and the stories that didn’t get told on this particular Friday night—no women who’d had abortions before the procedure was legalized in this country in 1973 spoke—really are critical to keep remembering.
Details: think about being that woman who’d had an abortion a week ago, but in another era. Imagine clutching a paper bag filled with paper bills, being blindfolded, even being raped, being told that even if you are bleeding you should not contact a doctor or go to a hospital. Imagine being in the emergency room unable to explain why you are hemorrhaging.
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I’ve told my own story it would seem a thousand times and a thousand ways. The particulars haven’t changed, and yet how I frame my experiences has changed and changed more. What seemed secretive at 17 no longer seems like something to feel protective of in that way; that was, I have said many times now, an experience that shaped my feminism and given that I became an abortion counselor, an activist and educator and writer about women’s issues, that experience really shaped my life. And I’m sure to write and speak about them again, more, differently and the same.
I will write and tell my story a thousand more times, I am sure.
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The world I long for and the one I work for allows every woman the chance to have children or not have children on her own terms. Every woman forced to make hard decisions because she cannot afford to raise a child or every woman who has been unable to get pregnant would quickly tell you this isn’t the world of the present. While women’s agency and safety and equality must what we defend and hold most dear, this becomes even more complicated as technology propels us into possibilities we couldn’t have envisioned and at the same time creates problems we could not have imagined. In a time that seems to promote increasing inequities and decreasing access to basic health care—even with the recent health care “reform” having passed—women’s agency and safety and equality are that much more compromised. Thus, the politics and personal remain so inextricably entwined.
I came away from Friday night’s Speak Out mulling two truths. One, babies change our lives. Two, our lives, as our stories demonstrate, are messy. Sex, love, family, medicine, technology, all these things are messy. Trying to make absolutes where humans are involved doesn’t quite work, because absolutes don’t allow for our frailties or our strengths. The only way to acknowledge this as truth is to listen—hard, and with attention to the details—to our stories. So, all we can do, really, is to keep telling.
