I chose life.
I chose my life.
When a strange man held a cold metal knife to my throat–that small spot between my collarbones that had always been so ticklish, where my grandfather would tease me with icy Minnesota winter fingers–I stopped screaming and ceased to struggle and lay still against the wall–except for my heart pounding as it might break out of my body and fly away.
(Oh why not oh take me away with you)
Maybe that is my crime. Does it not say in Deuteronomy 22:23-24:
If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbor's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
I did not scream.
I chose life.
I chose my life.
It would be reassuring, if, as in the cartoon tracts and testimonials, a faceless (yet distinctly male) figure sends me to hell, for my Jewish ancestry (despite all His promises to the tribe -- if that is the face of G-d's love, I think I would prefer His wrath) and my myriad doubts -- for my revulsion at the acts of rape and genocide in the holy texts of western civilization (was it Ghandi who, when asked what he thought of western civilization, replied "It would be a good idea,"?) -- for my reluctance to disappear into a history -- "This is what happens to women, on G-d's own watch -- have you forgotten Genesis 19:8, Numbers 31:17-18, Judges 19:22-30?
But if it is for my abortion that He casts me away, if this is the greatest sin He chooses to lay against me -- He, who reveled in miscarriages as a form of punishment (Hosea 9:14-16), that at the age of eighteen I had an abortion -- then, at least before I am cast into Hell, I will understand Him.
You do not know me, and may imagine me however you like. A woman who wants to see a child "good and dead" -- how must she look? We are over a million a year, we selfish sluts, we weak women. We hold our secrets to us well, many of us -- they are written so deeply into our bodies we need not open our eyes to see them. Nor need we show you, for everything you can say we have heard before, I can assure you.
It is supposedly relatively rare that a woman becomes pregnant as a result of rape.
I beat the odds.
I understood, when the women performing the rape kit asked the date of my last menstrual cycle, and I knew -- I had always had to keep such careful track -- I knew the meaning of her furrowed brow. It was the unluckiest time, if there is such a thing in such a circumstance. I was healthier than I had ever been -- I was likely at my most fertile (from that perspective, teen pregnancy makes sense) in years and in those days of the month. It has been proven that men are indeed most attracted to women during ovulation, and while I know by knifepoint that rape is violence, that sex was the weapon as much as the sleek slick silver knife, I sometimes wonder if that is why he chose me. If he chose. If he even saw me.
People are fond of chanting stories of women who, after an abortion, deeply fantasize and wonder about what their children might be doing upon that day. I do not wonder that often. I do wonder where that man is. Like so many rapists, he is free -- although I reported the crime, submitted to the rape kit and the police interview, looked at the mug shots -- I must accept that he will possibly, probably never be caught. Does he have a job? He wore cologne with a musky scent and he was dressed neatly. Does he have a wife or a girlfriend? Does he have children? Does he hurt them? Does he have friends who laugh at his jokes and go drinking with him? Is he, at this moment, holding a knife to some other woman's throat?
1% of abortions are sought because of sexual abuse, a favorite refrain of the pro-life advocates -- it is a strawman argument, it hardly ever happens. Unless you translate the percentage back to numbers -- 10,000 to 15,000. I was only one.
When I had to decide, it was not a list of pros and cons, a weighing of the odds, for these were intangible and immeasurable. Another favorite incantation -- the tiny embryo within me could grow up to cure cancer. Although this only beat more ironically in my head -- stem-cell research is more likely to cure my disease than this random, confusing lottery. Was that anyway to decide? A potential concert pianist or a potential rapist. This was not the answer. Nor was it, in that moment, as simple as weighing my life, my IQ score and potential against a baby likely to be crippled with birth defects. That was no answer, nor could it simply be summed up against future children I might bear when my health was under control, with a loving and supportive partner, when perhaps there would be a new treatment. If I tried to carry the baby to term, I could die in delivery -- women still do, not many, but far more than do by legal abortions. Or I could easily begin to bleed out and require a hysterectomy -- no baby without that imaginary husband, ever. My insulin could continue to rage out of control with stress and the beating on the body of early pregnancy, when the immune system tries to understand what is in many ways a parasite. I could go blind or lose a foot. Yet none of this told me anything, and all that was left was to look inside the shadows of my mind and say, "yes." Yes, I will terminate the pregnancy.
Later a nurse came into my room with a cup of broth. As a brittle diabetic, I cannot choose not to eat. She was pregnant, curved and glowing, and I said, lying against the pillow, too tired to move, "Do you hate me?"
She understood, touched my hand, shook her head.
"I do want to have a baby someday," I whispered. "I love babies."
It's true. I have always loved babies -- the tiny wrinkled hands and the soft cheeks and those first gummy smiles. I baby-sat for years, even when my friends had moved on to other jobs.
"I know," she said. "You'll love them even more, when it happens."
Like more than three-fourths of all women who have abortions in the country, mine was in the first trimester, although they did wait a few days while they tried to stabilize my blood sugar levels. I was given an IV sedation (did you know that redheads require more anesthetic than other people?) and a nurse held my hand; I remember her hand was warm and dry and large and I was cold. Unlike most women, I had my abortion in the hospital because of my diabetes. When I woke up in recovery my mother was there, looking as she had since she flew out the day after it had happened, looking as if she had aged twenty years, and I slowly (so slowly through the anesthetic haze) moved my hand, covered with IV bruises to rest over my stomach. And I felt neither the sting of regret or the serenity of peace; only that I had done what I could and, having chosen a life, must live it. I forced down food and went to counseling and went back to school, taking an extra class to make up for lost time, refusing to give any more of my life to the man with the knife. But I could not deny that he had. I put away the pretty tank tops and skirts I had only just started wearing to parties. Being pretty no longer appealed. I could not take long solitary walks; I could not be alone. I could only bear to be hugged by female friends; I couldn't let my brother even touch me. I have set myself to reclamation work, to find that which was lost and refine it, preserve it. Rather than a developing fetus, in my mind's eye I saw myself confined to hospital bed rest, draining my college fund as insurance refused to pay, thinner in the face as my stomach swelled, crumbling and shattering away from work, away from the world, only myself and my failing body and this rapist's baby inside me trapped in the sterile white hospital world. Fretting about how ill the baby would be, if I would keep him or her if no one chose to adopt a baby with massive birth defects and probably developmental delays, especially from the beating he or she took when I was in shock, if I was sick and I had a very sick baby and no partner no wedding ring on the street people still whisper shake their heads until I disappear.
Who or what would it have served? Surely not the choice of life?
Seven months later, a friend and I walked past an anti-abortion rally. We heard them chanting about the baby butchers and read their signs with about how G-d had turned his back on America because we allow abortion and homosexuality, and about how blood must pay for blood, saw the huge blown-up photos (although I saw no one there with information about adoption). I stopped and looked and did not flinch; no one noticed me. My friend put her hand on my arm and said "They wouldn't say those things about you, though. You're the poster child of possible exceptions."
And I realized it doesn't matter at all, to be part of the 1% of those who seek abortion due to sexual abuse or 6% who seek it for medical reasons, anymore than it matters how the person dying of AIDS contracted it. No one deserves that slow and painful death; if it a punishment, it is that of a sadist (although who but a sadist could create an eternal Hell?). In the last moments, the moments on the edge of a razor-sharp line, it does not matter to the meaning if the AIDS patient is gay or straight, that I was raped and sick rather than merely giddy on first love and unlucky with a condom. Or perhaps, it matters little for those who long to love. For those who want to judge, perhaps it is what matters most.
There is a bit of folklore that the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz put G-d on trial for abandoning the Jewish people in their time of need. He was found guilty and the trial concluded. Then the group joined together in evening prayer. There are no perfect answers.
The boy who might someday, if I can let him, become the boyfriend, is a Christian. He knows what happened to me and what I chose and does not judge. He once said to me that he has come to believe that it is true that Jesus Christ is the Light and the Way, that no one enters heaven except through him. I'm sure my face fell, and he touched with gently softly sweetly on the arm and said. "To live and die and be reborn, to be both shattered and intact, to have more love than anger when the day is done. To move away from childhood innocence through brutalizing comprehension into intelligent and realized compassion. G-d had to come to Earth for this; He did not know before. And now, anyone can. Not through a magic mantra replete with capital letters, not through abasing oneself or shaming others, but by continuing to grow."
And so I try.
I'll learn to love the fallow way
When winter draws the valley down
And stills the rivers in their storm
And freezes all the little brooks
Time when our steps slow to the song
Of falling flakes and crackling flames
When silver stars are high and still
Deep in the velvet of the sky
The crystal time the silent times
I'll learn to love their quietness
While deep beneath the glistening snow
The black earth dreams of violets
I'll learn to love the fallow time
The time between death and rebirth, the time of marking time, the time of living remote and untouched. I am marking fallow time. To reject it is to reject life.
I chose life.
I'll learn to love the fallow way
When all my colors fade to white
And flying birds fold back their wings
Upon my anxious wonderings
I have spent too many nights drowning in questions. . .and yet, in the fallow way, the land left unseeded, I must learn to wait until I trust again.
The sun has slanted all her rays
Across the vast and harvest plains
My memories mingle in the dawn
I dream of joyful vagabonds
I will never be carefree or careless again. My days of being a vagabond are past. And sometimes those dreams leave me in tears. My tears. And then I know that I am alive. I kept myself.
The crystal times the silent times
I'll learn to love their quietness
When deep beneath the glistening snow
The black earth dreams in of violets
I'll learn to love the fallow times
I will try, I do try, to learn to accept this time for what it is, that I am not being punished or rewarded, simply left to live, and to survive, and to prepare and grow.
No drummer comes across the plains
To tell of triumph or of pain
No word of far off battles cry
To draw me out or draw me nigh
I'll learn to love the fallow way
There are no new threats or insults worth hearing; what's done is done and what I feel is not regret, except of course for circumstance. I have walked around inside the walls of my heart while looking out at those empty plains, and I know.
I'll learn to love the fallow way
And gather in the patient fruits
And after autumns blaze and burn
I'll know the feel of still, deep roots
That nothing seem to know or need
That crack the ice in frozen ponds
And slumbering in winter's folds
Have dreams of green and blue and gold
I will someday perhaps return to some kind of peace, to hard-won joy, to love blessed in giving and receiving. I have, as in the Robert Frost poem, been on fire and been on ice, and I will yet live to grow again.
I'll learn to love the fallow way
And listen for blossoming
Of my own heart once more in spring
Not to need defenses, not to need barriers, not to need the walls around the secret gardens in my heart. To be. To live.
I chose life.
As sure as time, as sure as snow
As sure as moonlight, wind and stars
The fallow time will fall away
The sun will bring an April day
There is very little I am sure of anymore. Except. Except. Except that if I have a baby, I will cherish her with a fierceness indescribable, that I will know that I can, if need be, throw my body into flame and somehow be renewed, that I will raise my child to love first and judge last, to know that everyone harbors secrets, to know both that I would give anything to set her free in a world free of cruelty and callousness, whether it comes from the knife of the criminal or the lips of the righteous and that I can offer her no surety save love, but that love I can offer to infinity. For unconditional love is redundant; anything less is merely approval, easily lost and gained by those unthinking and unsympathetic, and thus unworthy of a child. Perhaps I hold my affections to a higher standard than G-d, or than those who count themselves His voice on earth.. So be it.
And I will yield to summer's way
HR
The Fallow Way
Words and Music by Judy Collins
Universal Music Corp. (ASCAP)/ The Wildflowers Company (ASCAP)
(Administered by Universal Music Corp.)
I can't make endnotes work properly -- hard numbers I cite are from the Alan Guttmacher Institute. They report 1.31 million abortions in the U.S. in 2000, the 1% (10,000-15,000) rape statistics, and find that about 6% of abortions are done for medical reasons. More information can be founf on their website or the abortion section of religioustolerance.org
Here are the verses reference (KJV):
Genesis 19:8 Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.
Numbers 31:17-18 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves
Judges 19:22-30 Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man, saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may know him. And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, and said unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly; seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly. Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing. But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to spring, they let her go. Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light. And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were upon the threshold. And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none answered. Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him unto his place. And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel. And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds.
Hosea 9:14-16 Give them, O LORD: what wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I will love them no more: all their princes are revolters. Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit: yea, though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved fruit of their womb.
A final note, if you read this far: I wrote this because I thought one of the abortion poems here was particularly cold-hearted in its implication that women want to kill babies as a punishment for inconveniencing their lives. Most of this "discussion" is occurring by people who may have literally no experience with this, and the idea that someone felt justified in such slander horrified even me, who has attained a certain amount of peace with her decision. I wrote a rather bitter review and meant to go away, and I came back, if only to say: you never know who is reading this. And not only about abortion -- but about rape, homosexuality, capital punishment, teen parents -- all these things that people with no immediate experience feel free to speculate on. I'd like to think that part of this could give people just a glimpse of what my experience was like, how I made my choices -- and to let anyone who is in a similar position know that you can survive, and you can be happy again, and you are not two words in someone's slogan. You are real and individual and quite possibly loved beyond comprehension. I can't imagine, exactly, what some authors think they will accomplish if someone who has had an abortion reads their pieces. I have to say it hurt. But it didn't change my mind.