In the days that followed Karen’s decision to postpone the abortion, she became increasingly aware of the unique position pregnancy afforded her. Her hatred for religion and the patriarchal culture it inspired in America was something she’d felt from a very early age. She’d never been able to understand why any woman would adhere to the constraints of Christianity, or any major religion for that matter. Most of them described an ethos of subjugation for women in their primary texts.
The event that stood out in her mind as the moment she became aware of her active hatred for religion was in junior high school. She was walking to algebra class, and she began to feel something making her underwear wet. It was her first period.
She looked up and down the halls for a female teacher, but the only adult she could find was the male physical education teacher, Mr. Forman. She explained what was happening and asked Mr. Forman for help. Mr. Forman explained to her that all women menstruate, and that this was their punishment for Eve eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. He further explained that she’d have to deal with this punishment every month of her life, forever, then turned and walked away down the hall, offering her no assistance. Embarrassed and ashamed, Karen tied a sweater around her waist and sat through her next class hoping no one would notice. At lunch she was able to get to the nurse’s office, where her mother was called and she was allowed to go home. She never told anyone about her encounter with Mr. Forman, and for a few years she assumed this was the way all men thought of women: as the reason humanity was cast out of paradise, as inconsiderate children who must be punished regularly, as the objects of men’s disappointment.
As she gained reason with age, she grew to understand that only the most devout Christians felt this way about women, and it was on this topic that she focused her academic mind. She was curious to find out why Christian men had such an innate disdain for women, beyond the simple explanation that it was written into the Bible, and she became anxious to end that mode of thinking if at all possible. She began to study every Christian and conservative sect and mode of thought she could find, believing they were all simply new ways to hate women. Pro-life activism, the drive to defund Planned Parenthood, to protect the supposed sanctity of heterosexual marriage, to enact stricter voter identification requirements, and several other movements were all simply ways for men to maintain control over women, in Karen’s mind.
As she sat at her computer, considering ways she could use her pregnancy to draw attention to the double standard that existed in Christianity, she began to think that what she was doing was much bigger than just a dissertation. For the first time in her life, she began to feel that she could do something that changed the way people thought, something that could have impact beyond the insulated world of academia.
Her initial idea, as she’d told Tanya, was to have the child and publicly give it to a gay couple who was seeking to adopt. This would very clearly outrage the religious right, and she was more than happy to be the cause of that outrage, but she realized that the idea wouldn’t uncover any new hypocrisy in the church. It was already widely known that Christians viewed homosexuality as an abomination, and although they sought to protect every unborn child, they condemned those same children if they grew into anything other than heterosexual Christians. Her first plan would shed no new light on this subject.
She searched the Internet for statistics about percentages of gay and straight couples who were actively trying to adopt a child as compared to percentages of couples who were granted the ability to adopt on a per capita basis. There was clearly a double standard, but again this felt like old news. Karen understood that one more log on that fire wouldn’t make it burn bright enough to draw much new attention.
Searching for other statistics, she found that of the 314 million citizens of the United States, 51 percent described themselves as pro-life. The number was shocking to Karen, who assumed it would have been much lower, but it began to give her an idea. If there were 157 million Americans who would honestly claim that saving a child’s life was a moral imperative for them, then there had to be some way she could force them to prove this claim or be revealed as hypocrites.
After teaching a class later that afternoon, an idea came to Karen as she was driving home. It might be the best idea she would ever have, the idea she would be known for academically for the rest of her life. If executed properly, she knew, it would garner attention far beyond her supervisor and the PhD board. It could make national news, maybe even global. After thinking through some possible outcomes of her plan, she realized that some of them frightened her. The outcome that frightened her most was the one she most hoped for. For that reason, she knew she had to carry it out—and that she would have to remain anonymous in her efforts.
So, without consulting Paul, the father of her unborn child, Karen turned her car around and drove back to campus. She entered one of the public computer labs there so that what she was about to do couldn’t be traced back to her personal computer. She sat down and began to craft a rudimentary website. The website was a single page of text that read:
I am a twenty-six-year-old female. The direction in which this country is headed, in terms of its treatment of women, is deplorable, and I feel is due in large part to the influence of the religious right in the guise of the pro-life movement. In an effort to expose the hypocrisy in that movement, I would like to extend the following public challenge to the 157 million Americans who identify as supporters of the pro-life ideology.
I’m currently eight weeks pregnant. I live in a state that allows me up until the end of the second trimester of my pregnancy to decide whether or not I want to have this baby. At the bottom of this page you’ll see a link for donations. If the donations reach 100 million dollars by the end of my second trimester, then I’ll have the baby, give it up for adoption, and every cent of that 100 million dollars will be put in a trust fund to be released to the child when he or she turns twenty-one. I’ll keep none of the money for myself, so if I am to be vilified in this process, it can’t be for that. If the 100 million dollar goal is not met by the end of my second trimester, any and all donations that were received will be refunded, and I will have an abortion. Mathematically this means that every pro-life American only needs to donate about 64 cents to save this child’s life.
What I aim to prove in doing this is that the conservative movement in America doesn’t actually care about the life of a child. They care about controlling the lives and decisions of women.
As Karen typed the last period, she looked over her shoulder to see if anyone near her might have been paying attention to what she was typing. She realized her paranoia was unwarranted, but the possible ramifications of what she was doing seemed so enormous to her that she could already feel their weight. She read over what she had written, and without publishing the page live onto the Internet, she saved it to a USB storage device, which she unplugged and dropped in her purse. Then she purged the computer workstation of any evidence of her project and left the computer lab. As she walked back across campus to her car, all she could think about was the storage device in her purse. She felt almost as though she were smuggling drugs across a border or carrying a loaded weapon in public. She told herself that she’d think about this for a few days before making it live. Once she put this out in the world, she knew, there was no taking it back, and once again she was scared.