Aspen Baker was born in a trailer on the beach in San Diego on January 22, 1976, the third anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Her parents were “surfers, but surfing Christians,” says Baker, who was homeschooled. Her mother was a former Catholic, and Baker was raised in a nondenominational Christian church. Baker was pro-choice, sort of, but she also knew that she could never have an abortion herself. “I didn’t imagine that I would ever get pregnant and not want to be,” says Baker. “And certainly the idea of taking off my clothes, getting up on a table, and having someone go into my vagina and take out something growing in my uterus did not sound good to me.” She considered herself a responsible person and, at the time, “my thought was that the responsible decision would be to have a baby if I became pregnant.”
In 1999, just after she graduated from Berkeley, though, she learned she was pregnant. “Initially, I believed I was going to be a mother and have the baby,” she says, but her situation was precarious. She was living with roommates, working as a bartender—“Imagine the eight-months-pregnant bartender,” she laughs—and she sensed that the relationship she was in was short term; she would be a single mom. Two coworkers at the bar told her that they’d had abortions and felt it was the right choice. While Baker gradually realized that she didn’t want to have the baby, the decision to actually have an abortion was very hard on her. “If I think that having the baby is the responsible choice, then what does this abortion say about me?” she wondered.
“When I finally went, it was in a hospital, and I had a nice doctor who explained the procedure to me and plenty of counseling beforehand,” she recounts. “I was so grateful for the positive medical experience, despite my ambivalence.” She assumed that at some point, however, someone at the clinic was going to tell her about follow-up counseling. But no one did. “I didn’t bring it up myself because if it’s not something that they do, then I figured that my feelings were abnormal and would go away,” she says.
They didn’t. In fact, her confusion and sadness only increased. “I thought I’d never have an abortion—and now I had. I questioned my moral beliefs as a human rights activist. I didn’t believe in the death penalty. I felt bad about the boyfriend, who had gotten back with his ex.” When she told her parents, who were divorced, her mother quickly got off the phone. “I’m really close to my father, and when I told him, he cried all night and told me that this was something I would have to ‘reveal’ to my husband someday … I cried all of the time, but I didn’t want to burden my friends.”
Fortunately, her father called her back the day after that initial phone call. He told her he loved her, that he wanted to support her any way he could, he just hadn’t known what to do in the moment. Baker realized that she and her father actually needed some help with the aftermath of what had turned out to be a profound experience. She began looking for after-abortion resources—and looking and looking. All she could find to offer support were thinly disguised antiabortion groups. As a feminist, she says, “I didn’t see anything that reflected my experience” of having sad feelings around her abortion, but not wanting to make abortion illegal. Seeking resolution, she interned at NARAL Pro-Choice California, an arm one of the country’s oldest abortion rights organizations. But when she would raise the issue of the lack of emotional resources for women, she was confronted with blank faces. It was, she says, as if admitting that she was struggling with her feelings meant that she wasn’t really pro-choice.
Eventually, Baker met several like-minded women (Carolina De Robertis, Anna Goldstein, Susan Criscione, and Laura Perez) and in 2000, sitting on the floor in one of their apartments, they created Exhale, a nonjudgmental post-abortion talkline. The group tried to eliminate anything in their outreach materials that might stop a woman from calling, including words like “feminist” and “pro-choice,” even though Exhale is both. “We didn’t know if we’d ever get a call,” Baker remembers. “But we got our first call the second night. It was from a father who wanted to know how to support his daughter.” In 2007, Exhale created a series of Hallmark-like e-cards that people could send to loved ones who’d had abortions—not to celebrate the abortion, but to acknowledge it and offer comfort. By 2008, Exhale was available nationwide, seven days a week, in multiple languages, with an annual budget of $300,000. Of the five hundred calls they receive each month, around ten percent are from men, often wanting to know what they can do to help a daughter or partner going through an abortion.
Exhale’s founders are part of a growing group of primarily young abortion supporters who believe that the way we practice and talk about unplanned pregnancy and termination has to evolve, or else we risk alienating more women, including those who’ve had abortion experiences. They aren’t traditionally political—Exhale’s work doesn’t address legal rights or host lobbying days—but they are radically feminist in ideology.
The same is true for the Haven Coalition, a hosting network in New York City founded in 2001 by Catherine Megill. Haven provides places to stay for women who travel long distances to have later-term abortions (and thus two- and three-day procedures) in the city. Hosts are vetted to weed out both pro-life and pro-choice proselytizers.
This shift in focus in the national conversation from “Keep your laws off my body!” to “Let’s talk about feelings and whether fetal life has value” has been tough for the pro-choice movement to acknowledge, given the nonstop hostility from protesters and antiabortion politicians, and the experience of a pioneering clinic director named Charlotte Taft is illuminating in this regard.
In 1980, two years into her tenure directing the Routh Street abortion clinic in Dallas, Taft decided to draw up a questionnaire for patients coming in for their two-week checkups. “I wanted to know if patients were afraid to be intimate sexually and emotionally after a procedure and did they feel adequately protected from another unintended pregnancy—so I asked a lot of open-ended questions,” recalls Taft, now fifty-eight and a counselor in private practice in Glorieta, New Mexico. “I was shocked by how many who seemed fine during the procedure were now having thoughts and feelings that no one had anticipated. They wondered, How can I feel sad about something I chose?”
Often they felt like they couldn’t talk to their partners about the feelings, even if their partners were supportive of the choice. It ran counter to everything Taft knew: Women came to a clinic in crisis, she had assumed, and they left relieved—pure and simple. While it was, in her estimation, just seven to ten percent of her patients who needed the follow-up care, when you are talking about more than a million procedures in the U.S. each year, “that ends up being a lot of people,” she notes. Abortion patients get more precounseling than those undergoing any other medical procedure—and still, Taft found, it was not safe for women to talk about abortion in their lives. “Number one, it was supposed to be a secret,” says Taft. “So these women had no idea who else in their lives had gone through this experience. Two, we don’t have good language even today for making a good but complex decision. Third, some women felt that if they said anything, it was ammunition to remove the right to choose. You either said you were fine or admitted you were a murderer.”
Around that same time, in 1981, Peg Johnston was opening Southern Tier Women’s Services, an independent abortion clinic near Binghamton, New York. “I came out of a rape crisis background,” says Johnston, now sixty. “Back then, rape was really controversial. People didn’t believe that it was a problem.” A red diaper baby and the grand-niece of a suffragist, Elizabeth Freeman, Johnston had grown up with radical ideas and developed a reputation as someone who could handle controversy. And she got it: Five years after the Southern Tier clinic opened, fellow Binghamton resident Randall Terry founded what would become the nation’s most notorious antiabortion organization, Operation Rescue, and pioneered his strategy of blocking clinic entrances at Johnston’s practice. Johnston kept her sense of humor, counterpicketing Operation Rescue and posting a sign outside the clinic that read, Please Don’t Feed the Protesters.
After a while, though, Johnston began turning her attention from the protesters. “I don’t know if I just started getting bored with Operation Rescue, but I definitely started to get interested in what women were saying instead,” she recalls. She’d hear a protester chant, “You’re killing your baby!” and then she’d sit in a counseling session with a woman who’d say, “I feel like I’m killing my baby.” At first, she assumed that the patients were simply repeating what they’d heard outside, having internalized right-wing disinformation that Johnston needed to “correct.” “Once I began listening more intently to her,” she now admits, “I learned that she wasn’t saying what the picketer was saying—although she used the same words.” Johnston believes that women were genuinely struggling with the value of life and how to do the right thing and be a good person, just as Aspen Baker reported feeling. “Frequently they were already mothers and they knew a time when, at that same stage of pregnancy, they had welcomed the life and felt like it was their baby. They weren’t mouthing an antichoice message, they were acknowledging that this was serious stuff—How can I want one kid and not the other? I felt like they needed a place to say the worst and then work their way to the rightness of their decision. Some were on a journey to realize the power and responsibility of being a mother,” says Johnston. “Which is that sometimes it’s the power of saying no to a life.”
Truly listening to everything a patient has to say—and letting them use words like “loss” and “baby” and “killing”—is one of a number of relatively recent innovations among cutting-edge abortion activists, mainly those operating within geographic locales where abortion is not acceptable. (My critique, it must be noted, is coming from a woman living in a nation that has known nearly four decades of meaningful abortion rights. Some of what I’m suggesting would be less relevant in countries with emerging abortion rights movement. The U.S. can’t remain in the same rhetorical place it was in the ’70s, or even the ’80s—we are in a position where we must evolve.)
Some of the philosophical foremothers of this group—including Charlotte Taft, Peg Johnston, and others—call themselves the November Gang. They are a combination think tank and support group named after the month in 1989 when they first met in response to the Supreme Court’s Webster v. Reproductive Health Services decision. Webster upheld a Missouri statute banning the use of public facilities and other state resources for abortions and codified that most restrictions were fine as long as they weren’t too onerous for a woman. In other words, she might have to jump through many hoops on the way to the abortion—from mandatory delays to having to sell her car in order to pay for the procedure—but as long as she could jump, the hoops weren’t in conflict with Roe v. Wade. According to Johnston, the group’s mission is to “explore the work abortion providers are doing” simply by providing a space for the clinic directors to talk openly about their fears and observations. At first Taft and Johnston focused on defense outside of clinics: Will Roe stand? How much are we spending on security? But after a while, they began to discuss what happened within the clinic. And they started asking questions that shocked some of their colleagues. What if we show fetal tissue to patients when they want to see it? Why are we protecting ourselves from what the patients are really saying? What do you do if a patient wants to baptize the remains?
Many of the clinicians do indeed offer to show fetal tissue to patients, and viewing it is often a relief to the woman. My sister accompanied me to the clinic in Fargo where she’d had her abortion some twenty years earlier, and was surprised to see how undeveloped an eleven-week fetus is. “I had pictured something else all of these years,” she told me. I, however, was taken aback upon discovering that a fetus at younger than ten weeks has perfectly formed hands and feet, just like the pro-life poster with the tiny hand on the dime leads you to believe. At the clinic, I was intrigued by the journals that the staff left in the waiting and recovery rooms in which patients could jot down thoughts. Many women wrote some version of, Don’t think of it as losinga baby, but as gaining a guardian angel. These were women who clearly felt relationships to their pregnancies as children, not as masses of cells. They were choosing not to have that baby right now, but in many cases, there was ambivalence and loss in the decision.
Charlotte Taft identifies a 1995 Naomi Wolf essay from the New Republic called “Our Bodies, Our Souls” as the first time she saw these ideas spoken in the feminist mainstream. Wolf’s essay called for the pro-choice movement to embrace guilt and acknowledge that some women mourn the loss of their fetuses. Wolf also wrote movingly of the conversion from pro-choice to pro-life of one Norma McCorvey—Jane Roe. At the time of that essay’s publication, I was an editor at Ms. and Wolf’s take was very controversial in the office, to say the least. I felt she was handing ammunition to the right wing and condescending to abortion rights activists—did she think we didn’t contemplate moral issues? I didn’t know what to make of McCorvey.
After having spent the last several years talking to women about their abortion stories, I am embarrassed by the knee-jerk naïvete I had back then. Today, I’d say that talking honestly about abortion is a sign of the movement’s strength—and it’s a feminist act. On the one hand, it’s true that some women experience their abortions as empowering—such as my friend whose procedure nearly forty years ago meant that she could accept a Fulbright scholarship—and that you rarely, if ever, hear those stories in the media. But for people with no money, chaotic relationships, tense marriages, too many kids already, drug and alcohol issues, or abusive partners, an abortion might be the right thing to do “yet certainly also evidence of a life they wish they weren’t leading,” as a friend trenchantly put it. Abortion might be a way of taking charge of your life, but for younger women, who often know plenty about birth control, needing one can make you feel that you wouldn’t be in this predicament if you really did have control of your life.
Merle Hoffman responded in On the Issues to Naomi Wolf’s article, writing that “McCorvey reflects the ambivalence, the struggles, and the daily untidiness of existence … She has all the debris and baggage of a difficult and hardlived life. Her class separates her from the leadership of the movement just as her outlaw nature does … In the end she is still alone, and that is the greatest failing of the pro-choice movement’s behavior towards her. It’s not that it did not offer her salvation or absolution. It did not even offer her sisterhood.”
Hoffman found Wolf’s analysis too simplistic, but as a woman who has witnessed thousands of abortions in her three-plus decades running the Choices Women’s Medical Center in Queens, she knows that many of the millions of women who have actually had abortions since legalization “share much of the baggage McCorvey carried. Some are ambivalent and embarrassed. Others search for comfort and validation. The leadership’s failure to embrace [patients’] reality and the movement’s other core constituency, the providers who actually make abortion possible, leave both vulnerable to attack and harassment.” Nearly ten years after Naomi Wolf’s controversial essay, a firestorm erupted around an article by Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for a Free Choice. Kissling’s suggestion that a healthy society values life, including fetal life, remains divisive among advocates.
Some might argue that it is a sensitive (or wrong-headed) moment to acknowledge the emotions around abortion and the fetus, since supporters of abortion rights have been losing legislative ground while the pro-life world has seen many years of unparalleled mainstream political support, including being commended by President Bush for their work each year on the Roe anniversary. Meanwhile, the threat that legal abortion could be overturned has animated most strategic discussions of choice for the past three decades and accounts for the brittle and defensive posture of the abortion rights side. Abortion clinics have had an undeniably positive impact on medical care in this country. The concepts of outpatient surgery in general and free-standing surgery centers have grown out of the marginalized world of abortion; the idea that a health professional should talk to patients and provide counseling was based on abortion provision. But “everything conspires to make it so that the clinics must provide services in a war zone,” as Hoffman puts it. “There is constant harassment, vendors refusing to work with the clinic, constant threats of eviction, roadblocks to getting insurance, the unending nuisance of malpractice litigation.” This has all taken a toll on providers. Within that challenging environment, some continue to function well, and others pass the stress of antagonism onto the client. Because of some state-level bills mandating that clinics read warnings about the “risks” of abortion or show patients their ultrasounds, counseling and medical care are often forced into a script.
Of course, all clinics have women’s emotional health in mind even as their priority is offering safe medical care. The problem is, for many clinics, the gap between their stated values and the clinic experience they have created. Because of violence at some clinics and the constant threats that staff members face as they attempt to do their jobs, many clinic workers have been programmed, in a sense, by the “antis” to respond reflexively to women’s emotions. These workers have at times become barriers to patients being able to get information or emotional support—almost viewing the need for after-abortion care as caving into the antichoice forces alleging that women are permanently damaged by abortion. For instance, I have been in several clinics where the state mandates that patients be read a list of potential hazards of abortion. Because there is controversy as to whether these “warnings” have any validity, I have seen clinic workers express their frustration by reading the statement really quickly and all but rolling their eyes. It’s not a scenario that invites the patient to ask any questions or express any fears. What should be an entry point for communication with the patient is diverted into a complaint about imposed restrictions. In order to make sure that women who need care get it, pro-voice initiatives spearheaded by Exhale and the November Gang (and others) state that 1) everyone deserves access to the information, and 2) offering emotional resources and information doesn’t imply that everyone is (or should be) having problems.
Emily Barcklow is a young woman who, like Aspen Baker, never knew a time when abortion wasn’t legal. She had an abortion when she was nineteen and attending Evergreen State College. “It was not an easy decision,” she recalls. “I struggled with feelings of deviance, selfishness, and loss afterwards.” Four years, lots of counseling, and an “amazing ritual process” helped her feel resolved. But at a NARAL event on the University of Washington campus in 2001, Barcklow spent hours preparing a presentation about her experience and closure ritual. “I arrived at the speak-out and was disappointed with the lack of depth in the other presentations—all recycled coat hangers and We’ll never go back signs. I would cite this experience as my first real disconnect from the mainstream abortion rights movement.” Barcklow eventually decided to create an abortion zine, Our Truths/Nuestras Verdades, to reflect women’s experiences; the publication launched in print and on the web in July 2005, and is currently a project of Exhale. (I’m on the advisory council of Exhale and on the editorial board of Our Truths/Nuestras Verdades.)
Projects like Barcklow’s, which focus on mining women’s experience rather than repeating stale aphorisms, are popping up all around the country. Sarah Varney, a young reporter for NPR, created radio documentaries in which older women tell their pre-Roe abortion stories. Varney also produced a series of events called the Beta Project to use the stories to help people talk about and better understand abortion. Two other filmmakers, Faith Pennick and Penny Lane, have completed related documentaries. While Lane’s Abortion Diaries focuses on a diverse spectrum of women aged nineteen to fifty-four, Pennick’s is called Silent Choices and specifically explores the experiences of black women.
These women are trying to create the kind of activism needed for a legal right that, while constantly under attack, has so transformed society that it is now disingenuous to speculate that women would “go back” if Roe were overturned. “Even illegal abortion would look very different today than it did four decades ago,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote in a 2007 Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Sanguine Sex.” “However bad the toll on women’s health would be (and it would be very bad), it would be nothing like the carnage of the past. The age of ignorance is gone, and abortion is a simple procedure.”
Flanagan is in her fifties and unafraid of offending people—something often attributed not just to her wit, but to her privilege as a wealthy and educated woman. Perhaps younger women, in their own entitlement, will begin to make blasphemous statements even more loudly. The most profane is this:Why are feminists so obsessed with abortion? Some of the lingering fascination is due to what the Gloria Steinems of the world might argue—we focus on this right because it is fundamental; having the right to control our bodies is directly associated with the right to control our lives. But I think feminists return to this issue, too, because it was once such a litmus test: Are you with us or against us? The abortion decision once appeared to be black-and-white—if you cared about women, then abortion was beyond ethical. Women were right to claim that their lives didn’t have to be sacrificed to a mistake made one night in the back of a car. Discussing the value of the fetus or entertaining grief was not the most urgent issue when women were still struggling for basic rights.
Society has changed so much since January 22, 1973, much of it a function of women’s liberation movements. Naturally, this also changes the scope of reproductive rights. Many veterans in the pro-choice world have a list of critical issues that the pro-choice movement as a whole tends to avoid. Charlotte Taft likens the terrain in which we now live to a picnic—and a picnic has crumbs that the “ants,” or “antis” (political opponents), will pick up. “Part of my definition of a crumb is that it is an issue or question that unavoidably accompanies abortion—that any reasonable person knows is important,” Taft wrote in a 2005 essay distributed to abortion providers, “but that we largely greet with silence as a movement … When I say these are crumbs I mean that they are issues to which our primary reaction (notice I didn’t say response) has been political wrangling, defensiveness, and litigation.” Taft lists several of these crumbs: teens and pregnancy, men’s involvement in pregnancy and abortion, fetal pain, multiple abortions, poor-quality abortion providers, women who regret having an abortion, late-term abortion, selective abortion for multiple pregnancies, and religion and abortion.
Along these lines, I had my own moment of truth during my fifth month of pregnancy in May 2004. A small moment, but it changed me. I was speaking to a group from Barnard College’s Students for Choice when I referred to that object in one’s uterus when one is pregnant as a “baby.”
A nurse practitioner who was speaking after me interrupted: “Fetus, you mean. You said baby, but it’s a fetus.”
“Oh, right,” I stammered, blushing. “Oops.” I felt foolish, caught in an ignorant mistake. Later, though, I realized that I had always thought of my pregnancy as carrying a baby—that was the word I wanted to use—and I was forcing myself to say “fetus” out of fear. If I said “baby,” that meant I wasn’t pro-choice, or with the program, or knowledgeable. I thought of other phrases that I forced myself to use too, like “so-called partial-birth abortion” and “antichoice.” These phrases suddenly struck me as legal jargon, words in the service of arguments that weren’t themselves always meaningful.
Suppressing language, policing ourselves so we don’t slip up and say “baby,” contributes to a split between our politics and our lives. The personal is political, and any feminist worth her speculum knows that divisions between the two will drain her of strength and dignity.
Is the pro-choice movement ready to change? There is ample evidence that Exhale’s once perplexing mission has paid off. To wit, when Senator Hillary Clinton addressed 1,000 abortion rights supporters on the thirtysecond anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 2005, she asserted her belief in the Supreme Court decision but also admitted that abortion can be “tragic” for some women. Her words sent shock waves through the major pro-choice organizations and spurred the New York Times to surmise that the senator was “recalibrating” her position on abortion in preparation for her 2008 bid for the White House. But a mere three years later, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of Roe, NARAL President Nancy Keenan confessed that “our community tends to run away every time somebody talks about the many emotions that come with this choice” and “we have not done enough to make people who are ‘pro-choice but struggling’ feel like they are part of this community.”
Exhale has now surpassed the call volume of the Bay Area rape crisis and domestic violence hotlines and their materials are available at hundreds of clinics around the country. They have more providers turning to them to be trained in after-abortion emotional resources than they can service. The desire to help women and do the right thing has always guided the clinic environment, but now there are more ways to provide help—and consciousness has been raised to redirect the focus of clinic workers from countering protesters back to listening to women.
In March of 2007, Aspen Baker was invited onto Fox News, the nation’s most conservative major network, to discuss her work at Exhale. People warned her not to do the interview, but Baker wanted to celebrate the fact that Exhale was sending out 2,500 e-cards every month. Martha MacCallum, the host of the show, began the segment by saying to the camera, “Most women probably know somebody who has been through this experience, but have you ever thought of sending them a card?” Without saying a word, Baker felt like her philosophy had already penetrated. If a representative of Fox News would blithely say that we all know someone who has had an abortion—no recrimination, acknowledging the common secret—then it was clear pro-voice activists were breaking through the stalemate around abortion.
“We’re modeling respect and listening around this issue,” says Baker, “and people are desperate for it.”
Is listening enough? Probably not, but it is a crucial move forward.