Mother’s Day and the Right to Choose

This was going to be a letter about Mother’s Day and what we can do to nourish ourselves on this holiday, which can make us feel ecstatic, ambivalent or bereft, depending upon how we feel about our mothers, our roles as mothers, or our decision not to pursue motherhood in the first place. We were going to write about how important it is to celebrate the people who have nurtured us—mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, yoga instructors, high school French teachers, husbands, wives, significant others, friends.

Instead, we’re thinking about Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two landmark rulings that protect our Constitutional right to choose abortion, which the Supreme Court seems poised to overturn in June.

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In the winter of my senior year at Wellesley, my then-boyfriend’s condom broke. I didn’t think too much about it but my body did. Six weeks later, a pregnancy test at the college clinic revealed that I was pregnant. By that point, my boyfriend and I had broken up. I had received job offers to work at two different investment banks, one in Chicago and one in New York. I did not want to have a baby and had no intention of remaining in Boston so that my boyfriend and I could raise a child together. He was 22 and in graduate school; I was 21.

The college arranged for me to have an abortion, a few weeks before graduation. My boyfriend and I got back together. My friend brought a picnic lunch and she and my boyfriend nibbled at it in the waiting room. A lovely older woman with short grey hair held my hand while a gynecologist terminated my pregnancy. I went home afterwards and slept in my boyfriend’s bed. A few weeks later, I put on a loose-fitting yellow sundress, and listened while Diane Sawyer gave our commencement address. My boyfriend attended the ceremony. I moved to New York; we attempted a commuter relationship. A few months later, we broke up again.

There was no trauma associated with the abortion. It was a safe, clean procedure that was easy to access and schedule. The only mistake we made was in trusting in the strength of a condom one cold winter night. It’s hard to imagine how difficult our lives would have been had we been forced to have that baby in December 1986, or the trouble we would have run into trying to terminate that pregnancy if abortion hadn’t been legal in Massachusetts at the time.

A little more than ten years after the abortion, my husband and I had our first baby. By then, I was ready. My ex-boyfriend went on to marry and have children with other women. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had given birth ten years earlier, what would have happened to a child born to parents who didn’t (yet) want to be parents and didn’t want to spend their lives together.

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In a May 3 episode of the NYT podcast, The Argument, Michelle Goldberg said,

“I’ve traveled to a lot of countries where abortion is illegal and what you end up seeing is that the best argument against abortion prohibitions is what they look like in practice, right? Because you always end up seeing women being prosecuted, women being hospitalized. Once people see what this does, it ends up creating momentum for repeal. It’s why there have been very few countries that have rolled back abortion rights in recent years, and far more countries that have liberalized them. But it takes a while. I think that eventually with the real-world ramifications of the end of Roe v. Wade, and the passage of total abortion bans in many states, people are going to see what that looks like, and there’s going to be a backlash. But so many people’s lives are going to be ruined before that happens.”

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Let us not allow people’s lives to be ruined. Several states have ballot initiatives on reproductive rights in the upcoming election. They are states that may soon need resources to help keep abortions safe and legal. They are: Kansans for Constitutional Freedom; Protect Kentucky Access; Reproductive Freedom for All (Michigan). On this Mother’s Day, let’s contribute to the urgent effort to keep abortion safe and legal. And let’s read Lucia Berlin’s Tiger Bites, a beautiful, nerve-racking story about illegal abortion in Mexico.