Opening our ears to women's abortion stories

From Fairfield County Weekly:

A new wave of abortion rights activism is spreading across the country -- from zines to documentaries-- that focuses on telling women's stories rather than spouting stale feminist aphorisms (by Jennifer Baumgardner)

Aspen Baker was born in a trailer on the beach in San Diego on the third anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Her parents were "surfers, but surfing Christians," said Baker, now 29, who was home-schooled. Her mother was a former Catholic, and Baker was raised in a non-denominational Christian church. Baker was pro-choice, but she also knew that she could never have an abortion herself. Just after she graduated from Berkeley, she learned she was pregnant.

"Initially, I believed I was going to be a mother and have the baby," she said. She was living with roommates, working as a bartender--"Imagine the eight-months-pregnant bartender," she laughed--and she sensed that the relationship she was in was not going to last. She would be a single mom. Two co-workers at the bar told her that they had had abortions and felt it was the right choice. While Baker gradually realized that she didn't want to have the baby, the decision to have an abortion was hard.

"When I finally went, it was in a hospital, and I had a nice doctor who explained the procedure to me, and plenty of counseling beforehand," she said. "I was so grateful for the positive medical experience, despite my ambivalence."

She assumed that at some point, though, someone at the clinic was going to tell her how to get follow-up counseling. But no one did. "I didn't bring it up myself because if it's not something that they do, then I figured that my feelings were abnormal and would go away," she said.

They didn't. In fact, her confusion and sadness only increased. "I thought I'd never have an abortion--and now I had," Baker said. "I questioned my moral beliefs as a human rights activist. I didn't believe in the death penalty. I felt bad about the boyfriend, who had gotten back with his ex."

When she told her parents, who were divorced, her mother refused to talk about the abortion. "When I told my dad, he cried all night and told me that this was something I would have to reveal' to my husband someday," said Baker, who admitted to feeling very alone. "I cried all of the time, but I didn't want to burden my friends."

Her father called her the next day to say he wanted to support her any way he could, he just hadn't known what to do in the moment. Baker began looking for resources. All she could find were thinly disguised anti-abortion messages. As a feminist, she said, "I didn't see anything that reflected my experience."

Seeking resolution, she interned at CARAL -- the California arm of NARAL, one of the country's oldest abortion rights organizations. But when she raised the issue of the lack of emotional resources for women, she confronted blank faces. It was as if admitting that she was struggling with her feelings meant that she wasn't really pro-choice, she said.

Eventually, Baker discovered several like-minded women and they founded Exhale, a non-judgmental post-abortion talk-line for the Bay Area, in 2000. The group tried to eliminate anything in their materials that might stop a woman from calling, including words like "feminist" or even "pro-choice," even though Exhale is both.

"We didn't know if we'd ever get a call," recalled Baker. "But we got our first call the second night. It was from a father who wanted to know how to support his daughter." Exhale now gets about 60 calls a month--around 10 percent are from men, often wanting to know what they can do to help a daughter or partner going through an abortion. In June, Exhale's talk-line is going national.

Exhale's approach to abortion focuses on the experience of women, in addition to--or rather than--legal rights or lobbying. Ditto Haven is a hosting network in New York City that provides places for women to stay who travel long distances to have later-term abortions (and thus two- and three-day procedures). Hosts are vetted to weed out pro-life proselytizers, as well as pro-choice ones. Both Exhale and Ditto Haven are part of an increasingly high-profile conversation that is changing the way supporters discuss and approach abortion. In particular, this strand of the conversation is gaining prominence--and meeting resistance.

When Sen. Hilary Clinton addressed 1,000 abortion rights supporters on the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade this past January, she both asserted her belief in Roe and said that abortion can be "tragic" for some women. Her words sent shock-waves through the major pro-choice organizations and spurred The New York Times to surmise that the senator is "recalibrating" her pro-choice position in preparation for a 2008 bid for the White House. In other words, she and politicians like Sen. John Kerry are back-pedaling. But is she?

This seeming shift in focus in the national conversation from "Keep your laws off my body!" to "Let's talk about feelings and sadness and (gasp!) whether fetal life has value" actually has a long history. It is likely that it goes back further than this, but one way of telling the story begins in 1980 with a 30-year-old counselor named Charlotte Taft. Ms. Taft was two years into her tenure directing the Routh Street abortion clinic in Dallas when, feeling enthusiastic, she decided to draw up a questionnaire for patients coming in for their two-week checkups.

"I wanted to know if patients were afraid to be intimate sexually and emotionally after a procedure and [if] they felt adequately protected from another intended pregnancy. So, I asked a lot of open-ended questions," recalled Taft, now 54 and a counselor in private practice in Glorieta, N.M. "I was shocked by how many who seemed fine during the procedure were now having thoughts and feelings that no one had anticipated." The biggest thing she noted was that women felt sadder than they had anticipated. "They wondered, How can I feel sad about something I chose?'"

Often they felt like they couldn't talk to their partners about the feelings, even if their partners was supportive of the choice. It ran counter to everything she knew: Women came in to a clinic in crisis, she had assumed, and they left relieved. While it was just 7 to 10 percent of the patients who needed follow-up care, "that's a lot of people," she noted. Abortion patients get more counseling than those undergoing any other medical procedure--and still, Taft found, it was not safe for women to talk about abortion in their lives.

"No. 1, it was supposed to be a secret," said Taft. "So these women had no idea who else in their lives had gone through this experience. No. 2, we don't have good language even today for making a good but complex decision. No. 3, some women felt that if they said anything, it was ammunition to remove the right to choose. You either said you were fine or admitted you were a murderer."

Around that same time, in 1981, Peg Johnston was opening Southern Tier Women's Services, an independent abortion clinic, in Binghamton, N. Y.

"I came out of a rape crisis background," said Johnston, now 56. "Back then, rape was really controversial. People didn't believe that it was a problem."

A red diaper baby and the grand-niece of suffragist Elizabeth Freeman, Johnston had grown up with radical ideas and had a reputation as someone who could handle controversy. And she got it: Five years after Southern Tier clinic opened, fellow Binghamton resident Randall Terry founded what would become the nation's most high-profile anti-abortion organization, Operation Rescue, and began his strategy of blocking clinic entrances at Johnston's clinic. Johnston kept her sense of humor, counter-picketing Operation Rescue, and posting a sign outside the clinic that read, "Please Don't Feed the Protesters."

After a while, though, Johnston turned her attention from the protesters to her patients. "I don't know if I just started getting bored with Operation Rescue, but I definitely started to get interested in what women were saying instead," recalled Johnston. She'd hear the protesters say, "You're killing your baby!" And then she'd sit in on a counseling session with a woman who'd say, "I feel like I'm killing my baby." At first, she said, she assumed that the patients were simply repeating what they'd heard outside, having internalized right-wing disinformation that Johnston needed to "correct." But "once I began listening more intently to her, I learned that she wasn't saying what the picketer was saying--although she used the same words."

Johnston believed that women were struggling with the value of life and how to do the right thing and be a good person. "Frequently they were already mothers and they knew a time when, at that same stage of pregnancy, they had welcomed the life and felt like it was their baby," said Johnston. "They weren't mouthing an anti-choice message--they were acknowledging that this was serious stuff. How can I want one kid and not the other?"

During the course of counseling, Johnston would draw the disparate threads together. "I felt like they needed a place to say the worst and then work their way to the rightness of their decision. Some were on a journey to realize the power and responsibility of being a mother," said Johnston. "Which is that sometimes it's the power of saying no to a life."

Listening to patients--and letting them use words like "baby" and "killing"--is one of a number of innovations that abortion activists are instituting to break away from the calcified approach to abortions and abortion rights post Roe . At a clinic in Fargo, N. D. (the only clinic in the state), I was surprised by the journals the staff leaves in the waiting and recovery rooms for patients to jot down thoughts. Many women wrote some version of "Don't think of it as losing a baby, but as gaining a guardian angel." These were women who clearly viewed a pregnancy as a child, not a mass of cells. It is a critical moment to acknowledge this, since supporters of abortion rights have been losing ground, while President Bush been commending the pro-life supporters on their respect for life. The threat that legal abortion could be overturned has animated most strategic discussions of choice for the past three decades.

In the face of that defensiveness, there is a loose cadre of abortion providers that call themselves the November Gang--a combination think-tank and support group named after the month in 1989 when they first met in response to the Supreme Court's Webster decision. Webster upheld a Missouri statute banning the use of public facilities for abortions and codified that most restrictions were fine as long as they weren't too onerous for a woman. In other words, she might have to jump through many hoops on the way to the abortion--from mandatory delays to having to sell her car in order to pay for the procedure--but if she could jump, then the hoops didn't conflict with Roe v. Wade .

The group's mission was and is to "explore the work abortion providers are doing" simply by providing a space for women to talk openly about their fears and their un-PC observations. Taft and Johnston are founding members. At first they focused on defense outside of the clinic: Would Roe stand? How much were they spending on security? But after a while, they began to discuss what happened within the clinic. Once they did, they began asking questions that shocked some of their colleagues. What if we showed fetal tissue to patients if they wanted to see it? Why are we protecting ourselves from what the patients are really saying?

Many of the clinicians do indeed offer to show fetal tissue to patients, and viewing it is often a relief to the patient. For her part, Johnston began developing the all-options element of counseling, saying to patients, "OK, you have a complex decision to make and there are only three options. I focused on pregnancy, not abortion." She eventually created the Pregnancy Options Workbook (which is available online at www.pregnancyoptions.info) that is used at hundreds of clinics for counseling. Charlotte Taft wrote the abortion section of the workbook. "We worked so hard to have abortion rights," said Taft, "not so that every woman could have an abortion, [but] so that women could have fuller experiences of their lives."

Emily Barklow is a 27-year-old from Seattle, Wash., who, like Aspen Baker, never knew a time when abortion wasn't legal. She had an abortion when she was 19 and a student at Evergreen State College in Tacoma.

"It was not an easy decision," she recalled. "I struggled with feelings of deviance, selfishness and loss afterwards."

Four years, lots of counseling, and an "amazing ritual process" helped her feel resolved. But at a NARAL speak-out on the University of Washington campus in 2001, Barklow spent hours preparing a presentation about her experience and closure ritual.

"I arrived at the speak-out and was disappointed with the lack of depth in the other presentations--all recycled coat hangers and We'll never go back' signs," she recalled. "I would cite this experience as my first real disconnect from the mainstream abortion rights movement."

Barklow recently decided to create an abortion zine, Our Truths/Nuestras Verdades , to reflect women's experiences, which will launch in print and on the web this month. Her first steps were to reach out to the November Gang and to Aspen Baker.

Projects like Barklow's, which focus on telling women's stories rather than repeating what their mostly young authors consider stale aphorisms, are popping up around the country. I've been working on one such project, which includes a documentary called Speak Out: I Had an Abortion , a photo exhibit (by Tara Todras-Whitehill) and T-shirts that read "I had an abortion."

Sarah Varney, a 32-year-old reporter for NPR, created radio documentaries in which older women tell their pre- Roe abortion stories. Varney also produced a series of events called the Beta Project to use the stories to help people talk about and understand abortion. Two other filmmakers, Faith Pennick and Penny Lane, are also completing documentaries. While Lane's focuses on younger feminists--often referred to as Third Wavers--Pennick's is called Silent Choices and explores the experiences of black women.

The experiences of women of color are particularly submerged in the terms of the mainstream debate. This fact is not lost on Loretta Ross, 52, who has long worked to bridge the divide between women who get abortions, who are often lower-income and disproportionately black, and abortion-rights advocates, who are often middle-class and white.

"If you're in the field, you know that black women are 12 percent of the female population, but get 25 percent of the abortions in the country," noted Ross, the co-author of Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (SouthEnd Press, 2005). "Yet black women are saying this is not their issue. I have to ask, Why not?'" An organization Ross works with, Sister Song, was instrumental in changing the name of last year's pro-abortion rights demonstration in Washington from "March for Freedom of Choice" to "March for Women's Lives."

"We couldn't endorse the march unless they recognized the entire complex issues that women face," said Ross. "Every woman who is pregnant wonders if she has a bedroom for that child; can she afford to take off the time to raise that child? Why flatten the decisions around abortion to just abortion? When women don't have jobs or health care, where is the choice? There is nothing worse than a woman aborting a baby she wanted because she couldn't support it."

Ross notes that black women were the first to resist the pro-choice/anti-choice dichotomy. "A very large percentage of [black] women are personally opposed to abortion but are pro-choice," said Ross. "Women of color agree with not giving unborn children more rights than grown women, but even when they're terminating a pregnancy, they call it a baby. This has been going on as long as we have had the debate. What women of color mostly say is that we have the right to do decide what children are born or not--that is part of women's power."

Charlotte Taft identifies a 1995 Naomi Wolf essay called "Our Bodies, Our Souls" as the first time she saw these ideas spoken in the feminist mainstream. Wolf's essay called for the pro-choice movement to embrace guilt, and acknowledge that some women mourned the loss of their fetuses. At the time, I was an editor at Ms. magazine and Wolf's essay was controversial at the office, to say the least. I felt she was handing ammunition to the right wing and condescending to abortion rights activists. Did she think we didn't contemplate moral issues? Besides, the piece ran in The New Republic under Andrew Sullivan, I harrumphed, and neither were known as pro-feminist. After having spent the last two years talking to women about their abortion stories, I have revised my knee-jerk response. I still believe Wolf's take was insulting to women--she wrote of glib "Chardonnay abortions"--but talking honestly about abortion is a sign of the movement's strength.

And it's a feminist act. Nearly 10 years later, a similar firestorm has erupted around an essay by Frances Kissling, the founder of Catholics for a Free Choice. Kissling's suggestion that a good society values life, including fetal life, is divisive among advocates, just as some groused that the name change for the Washington march "weakened" the message of abortion rights.

Loretta Ross takes the long view. "The defensiveness that the pro-choice movement has is well earned," said Ross. "We've been shot at, picketed, fought every step. But I'm very glad that the conversation is changing."

November Gang members liken these critical conversations to a picnic--and a picnic has crumbs that the "ants," or political opponents, will pick up. Their belief is that feminists must not sacrifice even a few women because of fears about the crumbs.

"Rape crisis, birthing experiences, divorce law all got changed because women dared to speak the truth of their lives," said Peg Johnston. "If we can't hear women, then where are we?"

FEMINISM is sometimes so fixated on its dogma, and so committed to its struggle -- a true and righteous one -- that it glosses over doubt, reality, events, women's feelings. Good to see stuff like this happening.