Abortion

This blog entry was meant to be the third in a triptych called “Home Team” in which I talk about what it means to root for a team in your home town—and in many cases the disappointments and betrayals this involves. In talking about my fandom for the New York Mets and Houston Texans, the theme has, in fact, been betrayal, including the betrayal of my own key values as sports and real life reveal themselves to be entangled.  The third entry—already mostly written— was to have been about my, on the whole, happier relation to the Houston Rockets, although it opens with a vignette about the TV broadcast of a Rockets playoff game being interrupted by images of the police chasing O.J. Simpson through Los Angeles in his infamous white Bronco. Real life has interrupted in a different way, in the form of the Supreme Court decision to repeal Roe v. Wade. For a week, I stopped writing, at least for public consumption. Then I realized I would have to write something about this undermining of reproductive rights. The few sentences I had in me had to go into a statement from the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality of which I am the director. This blog entry follows up on that statement in a more personal way. It has nothing directly to do with home or homing, although I hope in the next few weeks to write something about privacy that will. It will be a relief in some ways to write about sports for next week.

In 1973, when Roe v. Wade became law, I was 14 years old. Unlike many of my current friends and colleagues, I did not have to agitate or organize about abortion, or worry that a newfound sexuality would become entangled with fear of back alley procedures or legal retribution. Roe was a gift that arrived just in time for me to begin thinking through my sexuality without terror. By the accident of chronology, I have been protected by Roe for almost all my reproductive life; it has been the invisible net underneath my feet, the just-in-case of my reproductive decisions. While I knew, when I thought of it, to be grateful to the activists, mostly women, who had made this protection possible, and to a culture that seemed—at least occasionally—to be increasingly open to feminist ideas, I sometimes, looking back, took the gift of choice for granted. Coming of age after Roe and before AIDS, I lived through and in what now seems surely to be a golden age of bodily autonomy. The calendar of my lived experience is the calendar of choice in public life.

I thought of calendars a few days ago, during an informal gathering and sharing I organized as director of Rice’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. I listened as women younger than myself spoke of their newly precarious lives; as people only slightly older than myself spoke of their own struggles before abortion was legal; as one woman spoke of forced abortion in China; as several women described doctors too fearful to care for women experiencing miscarriage; as several speakers acknowledged the need for inclusion of trans and non-binary people in any discussion of abortion care. Each of these stories came with a different calendar and their own relation to time: I am 20 now and wondering where to go for help; I accompanied my roommate to a back-alley abortion in the late ‘sixties, my mother became pregnant with a second child when China’s one-child law was still in place; my daughter is 16 and beginning to realize this situation applies to her. A friend carried a dead baby inside of her for a week because she could not find someone to help her. Since the 2020 election, trans people have already been systematically and legally denied health care of all sorts.

Listening as dates, years, and moments coalesced into stories, I realized that in the past week since I first heard of the Supreme Court ruling, I have been experiencing, in condensed form, the fear and anger of a lifetime.

I say I was protected, but of course I was not entirely. I could have become pregnant at 13. If the priest who fondled me had gone further, or my father’s friend who trapped me in a closet had raped me, I might well have been pregnant before Roe. If Casey had not been resolved the way it was, if challenges to Roe had succeeded, my complacency would have been shattered.

And, of course, not all women were equally protected under the lifetime of Roe. The Hyde amendment cut deep into access to abortion for people without means. As clinics offering free or more affordable care became targets of right-wing violence, some closed down and some patients became afraid to cross picket lines. As the pro-choice movement became more defensive, leaders narrowed their vision, jettisoning their commitment to ending forced sterilization of poor women and women of color. Roe, and the tattered of remnants of Roe that survived repeated attacks across the country, came to protect only those women who needed it least, although that need was and continues to be real.

Although abortion and pregnancy take place in the intimate time of the body, we are all creatures of history, subject to calendars beyond the rhythm of trimesters, gestational weeks, and personal decisions. It matters that I came of age in the mid-seventies. It matters that my younger son was in high school when a very different supreme court instituted Obergefell v Hodges. It matters when the Texas Legislature, that meets only every other year, extends its sessions and its reach into the lives of trans people, immigrants, people of color. Laws shape our lives, even if they do not directly affect us, and even when we can afford, if only barely, to work around them. Chronology shapes our lives and our bodies and the stories we tell about them. Although many legal scholars believe that over time anti-abortion legislation will be rolled back to reflect the will of the 85% of the people who believe the procedure should be legal at least in some cases, that time will cost lives, health, and careers. It will cost the country in terms of unwanted children, unhappy parents, and withdrawal from the labor force and public life. It will cost us in terms of trust in public institutions, in our democracy, and in each other, as citizens are invited to spy on their neighbor and family members. This is not a good time to be a woman, a queer or trans person, a person of color. It is not a good time to be born.