As I put this journey behind me, I’m struck by my feelings of nostalgia. I’ll miss the conversations. I’ll miss hearing the stories.
For it’s clear that’s what I’ve been doing all along. Collecting stories. The stories people told me about how they thought about abortion and abortion laws felt surprisingly private. They were personal, like secrets.
Our abortion battle is so constrained by slogans that we almost never get to talk about the ideas that underlie our positions, the things that lead us to care about the abortion issue in the first place. By this, I mean the big questions: what we make of sex, motherhood, love, the purpose and meaning of life.
I will miss the way, time and again, strangers moved me to tears. How I sat in the gigantic gun store with Oklahoma senator Mike Reynolds and heard him speak of his faith that life begins at the moment of conception. How I cried when he described the guilt and the pain he felt about his wife’s use of contraception that prevented implantation, causing the fertilized eggs to pass, month after month. He didn’t persuade me to change, or even to reconsider, my position on legalized abortion. But he helped me see the world, for a time, through his eyes.
You see, before this journey, it’s not just that I didn’t understand how pro-life advocates thought about abortion laws. It’s also that I had come to view pro-lifers in broad generalities, as if they were two-dimensional objects, not subjects.
And unlike subjects, it’s easy to dismiss objects with contempt.
I’m reminded of a favorite passage from George Orwell’s Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, in which he recalls catching sight of a Fascist soldier on a dawn reconnaissance mission. The man was holding up his pants as he ran, and Orwell couldn’t bring himself to shoot him. “I had come to Spain to shoot Fascists,” he said, “but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow creature.”1
The most painful moment in my journey still stings, years later: it was when I learned how Tony Lauinger had characterized me. “She is pro-abortion,” he’d said. “Long experience has taught me that there’s nothing to be gained by helping gather intelligence from behind enemy lines from seemingly well-meaning academics.”
Everything Lauinger said about me is pretty much true, although I bristle at the label “pro-abortion.” I’m an academic, I’m pro-choice, and I suppose that this project, like all of my work, might therefore be seen as coming from behind enemy lines.
So it is puzzling, at first, to understand why his words made me feel as if he’d kicked the breath out of me. It’s because he’d rendered me two-dimensional. I can’t recognize myself in his description of me. He’d reduced me to a set of categories, to an object that he could regard with distrust and contempt.
We pay a moral price for dehumanizing other human beings. Contempt and distrust corrode our ability to connect. They prevent us from recognizing ourselves in one another. They keep us apart.
We pay a practical price, too. Our mutual contempt leaves us locked in debate over the question of whether abortion should be legal. And as we’ve seen, that question is not serving us well. It’s distracting us from the better question of how we think things will change if abortion is illegal.
That’s the question I would have liked to ask Lauinger.
To be sure, abortion laws have symbolic importance. Both sides in the abortion war care deeply about the messages sent by laws governing abortion. The pro-life world’s outrage that abortion legalizes killing is matched by the pro-choice world’s insistence upon the full legal autonomy of women. Honestly, I don’t see how we’ll ever resolve our ideological differences.
In the meantime, though, our blinkered focus on whether abortion should be legal distracts us from the plight of the women and children most affected by our abortion laws. You met them in chapter 4 during journeys through Oklahoma and California: they are the most marginalized women in the country. Another child will thrust them deeper into poverty, but an abortion does little to lift them out of it. The war over abortion law draws our gaze away from them, relieving us of the obligation to notice, if not to reset, the odds against them.
I think back on former Oklahoma House speaker Steele’s comment that “the best way to lower abortion rates is to deal with what causes women to want to abort in the first place.” It was a wistful observation, an afterthought to our conversation, yet it was also a point of complete agreement between us—a blue-state, pro-choice feminist and a red-state, pro-life minister.
What would it look like to design a policy around the idea that no one should have to choose abortion because she is too poor to have a child? It would cost billions of dollars. Yet, we routinely spend such sums on the war over abortion’s legality. Might it be worth it to try something different?
I dedicated this book to the women at Birth Choice of Oklahoma, and to those at Access Women’s Health Justice because they share core values that transcend our endless war over abortion. Both organizations understand how the deck is stacked against poor women and their children.
I have a fantasy that, if I could just get them in the same room, talking about their clients, they’d see one another as kindred spirits. Maybe they’d forge an alliance. The battle over abortion law would rage in the distance, but in the living room, plans would be made to launch a new way of harnessing our power for the good.
The hardest thing would be learning to listen to one another, for deep listening is the prerequisite to any meaningful conversation. It will take extraordinary patience to look past the trappings of our abortion team allegiances. But we don’t need to abandon our respective teams to sit together and recognize our shared goals.
And in that hard-won conversation, we would not take long to realize that this fight over abortion laws is not the only battle women face. It’s not even the most important one.