Abortion as an “Addiction That Only Motherhood Could Cure”?
Part Two of Two

By Dave Andrusko

“Mami scoops up both daughters. They tumble into the soft embrace of the couch, all squeals and nuzzles and squirmy delight. The girls start wriggling loose, and Mami pulls them back. One more hug. For an instant, it's as if releasing them would somehow make them disappear, would confirm their utter impossibility.”
     -- Washington Post, October 30.

The headline to the October 30 profile in the Washington Post was a perfect indicator of the amazing journey on which the reader was about to embark—“An addiction that only motherhood could cure:
Irene Vilar tries to explain the pathology that led her to abort 15 pregnancies.”

I first wrote about Vilar in this space back in September.[www.nrlc.org/News_and_Views/Sept09/nv092209.html]. Her book/memoir was not available, and I still didn’t have a copy when I read Manuel Roig-Franzia’s fascinating profile in the Post. (I have since ordered a copy of “Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.”)

The question before the house is are there any lessons we can take away from a woman who once wrote “that an 11-year period in which she had 12 abortions was ‘the happiest’ time of her life’ but who, “looking backing,” now “diagnoses the person she was as ‘a deluded creature in suspended animation’”?

I think we can draw a couple of conclusions, based on Vilar’s interviews with Roig-Franzia. Vilar set herself up for a fall when as a precocious 16-year-old student she brazenly seduced a university professor who was 34 years her elder. According to the memoir, the power imbalance inherent in such a situation played itself out over ll years of marriage (they are married five years later and divorced in 1998) and 12 abortions.

“She dreads being labeled a coward, and somehow he persuades her, by her account, that becoming a mother would be a cowardly act that would compromise her artistic bona fides,” Roig-Franzia writes. “In the memoir, the professor/paramour calls Vilar his ‘alma gemela,’ his soul mate, but he insists, ‘if you are with me, you have to endure the burden of freedom, and that requires, in part, remaining childless.’ Vilar is constantly afraid of losing him, entranced by ‘his freedom, intellect and guts,’ and immersed in his world of famed authors and artists.”

But as her husband grows older (and weaker), Vilar grows stronger. She eventually leaves and has three more abortions by a guy (I am not making this up) she meets in the frozen food section of the grocery store.

“Her addiction is at its most twisted and perverse,” Roig-Franzia writes. “The man actually wants a child; he calls her ‘selfish and insensitive.’ She has ‘maternal desires,’ but she can't break out of the pathological quest for a high that comes with starting and ending pregnancies.”

Vilar concludes that abortion was “an addiction, a warped and tragic vehicle to assert control over her life.” Put another way, “When one is looking for a strategy of survival one uses what makes sense, with whatever limited tools one has, in a sick way," as she told Roig-Franzia. "Abortion happens to be the target of my addiction, or to be more precise the target of my pathological adolescent rebellious strategy."

The damage mounts and mounts. “She returns time and again to abortion clinics despite the pleadings of doctors and friends. In a convoluted way, she feels a sense of control because she can start a pregnancy and she can end it.” And we learn that “She spends time briefly in a mental institution, and in one particularly furtive phase from January to August 1995, she has an affair, three car accidents, two boat collisions, two abortions and a suicide attempt.”

Although it is never said explicitly, it is nothing short of a miracle that Vilar is alive.

A book that chronicles 15 abortions would be stunning enough. But that this same woman is now a happily married mother (her life of chaos came to an end in 2003 when she met the man who would become her second husband), who dotes on her two children (“the great joys of her life now”), is “working on a book about motherhood,” and “would like to have one more child” (she “feels the tug”) is almost enough to leave you speechless.

The incongruities and the disconnects just keep on coming. “She's unabashedly supportive of abortion rights, but says her addiction to the cycle of pregnancy and abortion meant that she wasn't really choosing to end her pregnancies,” Roig-Franzia writes. “’In a pathology, you don't have choice,’ she says.”

Which is only one reason the organized pro-abortion community is not about to “heartily embrace her.” Robin Morgan, the veteran pro-abortionist who wrote the introduction, says, “I can understand the nervousness of some feminists because they think it will be used against the pro-choice movement." But, like Vilar, Morgan believes the book is “a ‘crucial’ work for vulnerable young women.”

You read the profile and you come away with a blizzard of conflicting emotions. If, like me, you are the father of daughters, you read it as a cautionary tale of young women getting themselves in way over their heads.

As a pro-lifer you grieve for the children whose lives were the price of Vilar’s “addiction.” You almost gasp when you read of her ability to distance herself from what she did.

Roig-Franzia observes, “As reflective as she is, Vilar says she doesn't dwell on what might have become of the fetuses she aborted or the lives each could have led. Only twice, she says, did the little possibilities inside her seem more tangible to her; those abortions took place 16 and 17 weeks after conception. ‘With one, I felt movement’ inside her, she says matter-of-factly. ‘With the other, I almost died.’”

As a human being, you are flabbergasted that she laments her “addiction”—as opposed to the babies whose lives were taken as a result—as if they are not two sides of the same coin.

Vilar’s paradoxes and inconsistencies and rationalizations continue to the very end. She persuades herself she would have died had abortion been illegal (“because she would have resorted to unsafe, unsanctioned abortionists or perished after a self-induced puncture”).

Yet in response to the question, “Did she consider finding adoptive parents as a way out?” she replies, "Many times.”

Up until 2003 everything about her life pointed in the same direction: a flameout and an ugly death. It was not until she surrendered her need to “control” (which she thought she had when she got pregnant and then aborted) that she gained control over her life.

There is a reason she lives a protected life in Colorado with two children and a loving husband. We can only hope that during her book tour, she realizes what it is.

Send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Part One