Sometimes, life is hard and all you can do is bleed. My friend Ayelet Waldman has a new book out that fills me with awe, that a person can feel so free about showing her wounds to the world. The title of her book, Bad Mother, embraces a criticism and turns it on its head, so that all you can say when you finish the book is, if only all mothers were so bad.
I mention her book now because one of the chapters is about abortion. And being Ayelet, there is nothing theoretical or once-removed about what she writes. “Moving” doesn’t begin to describe it. Raw, powerful, terrifying, yes; I can’t imagine a person reading it without tears. (She’s posted a much-abridged version of her story here.)
Abortion is terrible. Ayelet would agree. Yet the unavoidable hard fact is that sometimes, life requires terrible choices. Sometimes babies die. And sometimes their life is so dreadful, death is a blessing.
No one wants an abortion. Any woman who has an abortion lives with that knowledge the rest of her life. No one should ever have to choose to kill their baby. All children should be healthy, and wanted, and the result of a loving relationship.
An ideal world, and we do not live there. Until we do, until all women have the ability to say that they don’t want an egg fertilized this month, thanks; that they don’t want to bring a hugely damaged, pain-ridden infant into the world; that if they do, there is a chance that damaged life will not utterly devastate the lives of the family it is born into—until that sweet and utopian day, we need doctors who are willing to help women out of impossible, agonizing situations.
I was lucky. I never faced that devastating choice. Lucky: not clever or cautious or virginal. (You do know that even The Pill only claims a 99 percent rate of contraception, don’t you?)
Like the bumper sticker says: If you can’t trust me to make a Choice, how can you trust me to be a mother? Sometimes, a mother’s choice is that the life she carries is not meant to be.
In memory of Dr. George Tiller, please send some money to one of the agencies struggling to help desperate women. These are dedicated and caring people whose jobs are hard enough without having to feel a lot of powerful and rage-filled individuals breathing down their backs, and wondering which of those maniacs has a gun.