24

Joe and Donald sat in the chairs that lined the wall in the darkened room, their eyes on the swirl of blacks and grays that washed around on the screen above our heads. The colors came together in the form of a baby.

After another swirl of monochrome, the ultrasound tech announced, “It’s a girl!”

I rolled my head over and looked at Joe, and we grinned at one another. A daughter. I couldn’t wait to go shopping with my mom and pick out ridiculously frilly dresses and pink patent leather shoes that could fit into the palm of my hand. I studied her profile on the screen, remembering that I had recognized Donald’s profile from his twenty-week ultrasound when he was born. Joe laughed as he reminded me that at that ultrasound we’d seen Donald pee in utero.

I thought back to that appointment and remembered that I had had an uncomfortable feeling back then that I never did identify. It was here now, too, and it didn’t take much analysis to identify what it was: the specter of abortion.

In the first two trimesters of my pregnancy with Donald, I felt a pang of guilt when I used the term “baby” to describe the new pregnancy; I worried that I was buying in to sentimental anti-abortion propaganda. If I were carrying a “baby” when I was nine weeks pregnant, then an abortion at that same stage of pregnancy would be murder. It’s never okay to kill a baby, but I saw nothing wrong with ending the growth process of a fetus, which was not fully human until it was old enough to live outside the womb. And so I always wondered if I should speak of “the pregnancy” instead, saving the humanizing term “baby” for the third trimester.

Joe was staring at me, and the ultrasound tech might have been asking me a question, but I couldn’t pretend that I was basking in the glow of the great news. I was consumed by a thought that I recognized both as true and horrific: that, by my own worldview, I did not believe that the little girl on the screen was fully human.

* * *

The car ride back to my mom’s house started in silence. Joe drove, Donald slept in the back seat, and I looked at the glossy series of ultrasound printouts in my hands.

Joe must have read my mind. “I don’t know if I consider myself pro-choice anymore, even aside from what the Catholic Church thinks,” he said when we stopped at a light.

Last time he said anything against pro-choice beliefs I had exploded in anger; this time, I remained silent. He didn’t seem surprised.

“I read something the other day, and it almost made me sick. I mean literally—I almost puked on my desk,” he said. He’d been doing some legal research and happened upon the documents for a Supreme Court case called Stenberg v. Carhart. There was a Nebraska law that made the so-called partial-birth abortion procedure illegal, and it ended up getting appealed all the way to the top.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. He got quiet and looked straight ahead, shaking his head slightly.

He started to elaborate on how it had influenced him, but I held up my hand. I’d just felt the baby kick and wasn’t in the mood for a conversation about partial-birth abortion. “Let’s talk about something else,” I said and looked out the window.

* * *

When I woke up, I knew something was different. I reached for Joe behind me, but felt only a wrinkled mound of covers. I looked at the clock. 11:43 P.M.

Something told me that he wasn’t just in the bathroom. I got out of bed and waited for the pain in my leg to hit. It was always worst when I first stood. When it subsided, I shuffled into the living room to see Joe reading under my mom’s old brass lamp.

“Hey, what are you doing?” I croaked in a sleepy voice.

He hesitated. “Reading.”

“Reading what?”

“I don’t think you want to see it.”

I settled into the couch next to him and saw the title of the page: Report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion. “I don’t. But I feel like I have to.”

“Okay. But it’s troubling.”

He handed me the report. I flipped through it, stopping to read where I saw his brackets or underlines. There were 819 abortions in South Dakota in 2003, the report said, and 814 of the women undergoing the procedure were given no information about the fetus other than its developmental age. By the abortion facility’s own admission, women were asked to sign a form consenting to the procedure before speaking to a doctor. In 813 of the cases, women got their information about what was about to happen from a prerecorded video.

The task force watched the video and noted that not once did it mention that a fetus or embryo was even present in the womb. The language implied that something was there, but referred to it only in the vaguest terms.

“The uterus is then emptied by a gentle suction,” the voice on the video told the woman considering ending her pregnancy. “Occasionally, the contents of the uterus may not be completely emptied,” it said at another point. “To remove the tissue it may be necessary to repeat the vacuum aspiration” because, occasionally, “the early abortion procedure will not end the pregnancy.”

An angry heat pulsed within me. I flipped faster until I reached the end, then started back at the beginning, this time reading more than just Joe’s highlights. By the time I finished the last page of the report, my face had broken out into hot red splotches.

“ ‘Tissue?’ The ‘contents of the uterus’? What is this, Victorian England?” This kind of thing would have driven me crazy even at the height of my days as a pro-choice atheist. These abortion clinics’ practices smacked of the view that we women must be sheltered from hard data lest we get all flustered and make the wrong decision. “Don’t upset the little lady by telling her that the eleven-week-old fetus has a heartbeat and can make a fist,” I imagined the producer of the video saying. “She might get all emotional about it—you know how flighty women can be!”

“I know,” Joe said. He glanced at another, larger stack of papers on the coffee table, then turned his attention back to me. “It’s really troubling.”

“What’s that?” I asked, motioning to the papers.

“Just more of this stuff. Trust me. You don’t want to get into this.”

“I want to see it.”

I reached for it on the table, but before I could pick it up he pressed his hand on it to hold it down. “I know. You should read it. I just don’t think now is the right time.”

“What’s the big—”

“It’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read.” He released his hand and assumed an uneasy posture.

I flipped it over to see the cover page: Stenberg v. Carhart.

Dr. Leroy Carhart, a doctor who specialized in late-term abortions, was willing to end pregnancies up until the day before a woman’s due date. He brought a suit against Nebraska Attorney General Don Stenberg in the hopes of showing that a state law banning certain types of late abortions would be ruled unconstitutional. The case went to the Supreme Court, and what I held were Joe’s printouts of the court’s opinion.

I began reading.

Dr. Leroy Carhart analogized the type of abortion procedures he performed to “pulling the cat’s tail”, where he’d grab on to an arm or leg with one of his tools and drag the fetus around. The cause of death would be blood loss, just like for any other person who was dismembered.

I turned away, hoping the sights of my mother’s quiet living room would erase the picture that had just taken over my mind. My lungs couldn’t seem to get enough air, like the day in the Jaworski deposition room.

“See? Let’s go to bed,” Joe said.

“No.” I wanted to finish this. I didn’t want to hide from the truth, whatever it was. Also, that must have been the worst of it. I’d come across the disturbing part that Joe had warned me about, and now surely it wouldn’t be so bad.

I returned to the case. After a few more minutes of reading, I realized that it had just been getting started. My stomach bubbled; a deep, sickly feeling crept closer and closer to my throat.

Dr. Carhart regularly aborted babies older than my daughter, weeks older than Donald’s age when I’d seen him urinate on the ultrasound screen. And when describing the procedure—for which he was paid handsomely—he testified that he sometimes saw on the ultrasound that the child’s heart was still beating, even after “extensive parts of the fetus had been removed”. He said he knew of one physician who tore off the arm of a fetus during in abortion, but the fetus didn’t die; it was just, in his own words, “a living child with one arm”.

Air suddenly seemed scarce and my heart raced, but I kept reading. When I got to the part where a nurse named Brenda Pratt Shafer described watching the death of a twenty-six-week-old baby, I couldn’t read anymore. I tossed the papers down so hastily that they fanned out across the tabletop.

“Either I have gone insane, or everyone else has,” I said. Was I crazy for thinking that this was an atrocity? It seemed so clear, yet respected leaders of our country were totally cool with it.

“I know,” Joe said, his voice almost a whisper.

“I saw a twenty-five-week-old baby once,” I said, as much to myself as to Joe. “My college roommate went into labor just a few weeks after she announced her pregnancy. I visited her son in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.” I remembered walking through the hospital room full of glass cribs. As she led me through the NICU, I saw the tiniest little bodies in incubators, hooked up to tubes and monitors. The babies looked so peaceful as they slept, their eyes closed, their chests moving rhythmically. Taped to the Plexiglas walls of their cribs were tender proclamations like Mommy’s Little Man or Our Super Girl! When I reached my friend’s son’s bed and saw his perfect body, I was caught off guard by an overwhelming urge to protect this child.

When I considered that he was the same age as the babies that Dr. Carhart talked about, I thought I might vomit. “So I guess the law needs to say that moms of those NICU babies can kill them, as long as they haven’t reached their due date yet,” I sneered. “That’s only fair, right? Why should a woman have to raise a baby just because she went into pre-term labor? What’s the difference between where you kill them? Inside or outside of the womb, it doesn’t matter.”

Joe finally spoke. “What I can’t get my head around is that the debate in this case is not about whether killing these kids is wrong; it’s just about how to do it.” He said that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) wrote an amicus brief opposing the partial-birth abortion ban—not because they had any problem with killing these babies, but because “sharp fetal bone fragments can injure the uterus and cervix.” It was preferable to kill NICU-aged children after they’d been delivered, the organization said, because that procedure “reduces the incidence of a free-floating fetal head” that can be hard for the doctor to grasp.

“Wait. Doesn’t the ACOG oppose homebirth because it’s supposedly too risky for babies’ health?” I asked.

“Yeah. I think that’s what the midwife who delivered Donald told us.”

“But being decapitated isn’t?” Now I was shouting. “Are we really having a national debate about the inconvenience of free-floating baby heads?”

“Keep in mind that these procedures are rare,” Joe said. His voice was without conviction, as if he were saying it to help me.

I scoffed. “Chainsaw massacres are rare. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to support them.”

I could hardly believe that intelligent, otherwise respectable people were fine with this. Even if it were never done and they were speaking only of theoretical situations, there would still be a big problem with Supreme Court justices and leaders of the ACOG saying that there’s nothing wrong with infanticide in its most grisly form. They couldn’t even justify themselves by pleading the health of the mother, since they were discussing babies who were old enough to live outside the womb if the pregnancy needed to end.

I wanted to hit something. I eyed a stuffed pig in Donald’s toy pile that always did seem to have a smug look on its face, and I thought of how cathartic it would be to grab it and punch it a few times.

I was officially disgusted with the pro-choice movement. The average pro-choice people on the street would probably oppose the procedures described in Stenberg, yet they’d never do anything to stop it. In all my years of running in social circles where everyone supported abortion rights, I never once heard anyone draw the line and say, “Okay, that’s murder, and we need to protect those babies.” I certainly never said anything like that. Protecting any unborn life under any circumstances was just not part of the culture. Meanwhile, the movement’s leaders vocally supported killing children old enough to live outside of the womb in procedures that were like something out of a horror-movie director’s imagination.

I leaned my head into Joe’s chest. It felt like this should be the moment that, like Joe, I decide that I was no longer pro-choice. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready to jump on the anti-abortion side with the Catholics—not even close. As much as what I just read called into question the moral footing of the pro-choice position, there remained within me an unmovable resentment toward Catholicism for opposing abortion and therefore making women slaves to their bodies.

My mind was split in two by the increasing disconnect between my intellect, which said that something terrible was happening to women and their children, and my emotions, which said that I’d still fight and die to defend it. Within me there was a conviction with roots a mile deep that said that to oppose abortion would be unfair to women in the direst sense of the word.

Normally, I would have stepped through the problem until I could be confident that I was being intellectually honest. But not here. I was fully aware that I was more determined to remain pro-choice than I was to take an honest look at who was and wasn’t human. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t know what to do about it.