Stop crying, act like a woman.” I was angry, but I was so sleepy and tired of fighting. I was hysterical, and he said, “Okay, you don’t have to go back.” I was so happy. We went to get $1,000 from a gas-station ATM. When I told him the credit-card scanner at the clinic wasn’t working, he asked if I was making it up. I don’t think abortion is killing, but I’d always been against it. At two in the morning, he called and said, “Get dressed.” I said, “I don’t want to go.” We both cried the whole way there.
When I was thirteen weeks, we made an appointment at the closest clinic in Kentucky, four hours away, but the night before, we decided not to go. But he said, “No way.” I wanted to show him that I loved him enough to do it for him. If he’d gone, he would’ve felt differently. My boyfriend always had football practice, so he couldn’t go to the doctor appointments with me. The due date’s coming up-I’m dreading it. “There’s no room,” one woman told us, “to talk about being unsure.”
The same woman can wake up one morning with regret, the next with relief-most have feelings too knotty for a picket sign. Some feel so shamed that they will never tell their friends or family others feel stronger for having gotten through the experience. It varies not just by state but also by culture, race, income, age, family by whether a boyfriend offered a ride to the clinic or begged her not to go by the compassion or callousness of the medical staff by whether she took the pill alone at home or navigated protesters outside a clinic. Even now, four decades after Roe, some of the women we spoke with would talk only if we didn’t print their real names.Īs their stories show, the experience of abortion in the United States in 2013 is vastly uneven. Which is perhaps why, even in doggedly liberal parts of the country, very few people talk openly about the experience, leaving the reality of abortion, and the emotions that accompany it, a silent witness in our political discourse. Nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended about half of those-1.2 million-will end in abortion each year.Īnd yet abortion is something we tend to be more comfortable discussing as an abstraction the feelings it provokes are too complicated to face in all their particularities. This month, a federal appeals court upheld a similar law in Texas, closing all but a handful of clinics.īut for all the regulations and protests, despite “safe, legal, and rare” and “abortion is murder,” abortion is part of our everyday experience. In California, a trained nurse practitioner can now perform an abortion, but in Mississippi, a provider must be an obstetrician with admitting privileges at a local hospital, a rule that could shut down the state’s last remaining clinic. Successive court rulings have granted even more latitude in writing abortion laws, and legislators have responded by creating a patchwork of regulations: Arkansas has banned abortion after twelve weeks, while in Louisiana, a woman is shown her ultrasound before having an abortion.
Wade, the Supreme Court was qualified in its judgment: An abortion was a personal decision only in the first trimester in the second, states could intervene on behalf of the woman’s health once the fetus was considered “viable,” a state could set whatever limitations it saw fit. Lawsuits have been waged and courts have adjudicated, and still we seem no closer to consensus on when, where, how, and if a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy. In Texas, the state where the single, pregnant woman who became Jane Roe sued for access to an abortion 41 years ago, Wendy Davis became a national hero for filibustering abortion legislation, as did her governor for signing it into law. It’s a fight now in its fifth decade, yet in the past two years, 26 states have passed over 111 provisions restricting abortion. Of all the battles in our half-century culture war, perhaps none seems further from being resolved, in our laws and in our consciences, than abortion.
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