Rivers of Tears

"It was Blackmun's defensiveness about Roe that led to his metamorphosis as a liberal. Faced with a barrage of criticism, Blackmun tried to validate Roe by vehement reiteration. If the constitutionalization of abortion could be repeated, confirmed, and indeed expanded, it might be made invulnerable. Far from qualifying the right announced in Roe, Blackmun wanted to extend that ruling to ever more doubtful territory."

From Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., by John C. Jeffries, Jr.

"Children are vitally concerned with distinguishing good from evil and truth from falsehood. This need to make moral distinctions is a gift, a grace that human beings are given at the start of their lives."

Tending the Heart of Virtue, by Vigen Guroian

"There is a horrible, unspeakable moment when she feels her whole body crying out, " 'Stop! Wait! Put it back! I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! Don't leave me, please! I didn't abandon you. I don't hate you. I don't cast you out of my family!' And she thinks she will go mad then."

"The Procedure," Washington Post Magazine, April 5, 1998

What remarkably good news from the Centers for Disease Control. For the years 1992-95, the CDC reports an almost universal decline both in abortion and pregnancy rates for girls 15-19. (See story, page 12.)

Five years ago, who would have predicted a drop in the rate of teen abortions in 40 of the 43 reporting states? Or a reduction in teen pregnancy rates in every state for which data was available, and in the District of Columbia? Informed consent/parental involvement laws, anyone? Unquestionably, they've molded and shaped behavior just as pro-lifers said they would. (Please clip this out for the next time some naysayer insists that passing legislation hardly makes a difference.)

Be confident; the full flowering of all your efforts is yet to come. For now, resistance from various state and federal courts and entrenched pro-abortion interest groups has succeeded in limiting the number of genuine, operational women's right to know laws to 12 states. In addition, 22 states have functioning parental involvement statutes (notice or consent), overcoming relentless judicial hostility and rock-like pro-abortion committee chairman. Were the public's sentiments to prevail, almost every state would have both parental involvement and women's right to know laws.

Invigorated by these wonderful results, we will go forth to continue to enact these essential bulwarks. It'd be nice to think the kind of agreeable outcomes reported by the CDC June 26 would take the starch out of the Planned Parenthood types; the more likely response is even stiffer resistance from the there's-never-enough-abortion crowd.

Why do we celebrate? Because many babies are alive who otherwise wouldn't be, but no less so because untold numbers of mothers have been spared the spiritual desolation that so often accompanies a woman (or girl's) decision to exterminate her own flesh and blood.

Just how bulging is abortion's treasury of hurt is painfully illustrated in an unforgettably sad, heartbreaking essay, "The Procedure," the story of her own abortion, written by R.C. Barajas for the Washington Post Magazine. While in the end she defends her decision as the right one, what we really learn is that a loving woman can make a terribly wrong decision for motives that to her seem unassailable. Clinging to that reassurance, it is no exaggeration to say, enables Barajas to go on.

Barajas's abortion is "unrepresentative," in the statistical sense - - she is married with children - - and in the real-life sense - - there is no evidence of coercion, suble or overt. But the waves of searing pain and almost unbearable regret, the rivers of tears that seem as if they will never end, and the onrushing thought that she might go mad are utterly representative.

Barajas writes her story in the third person ("she") as a literary technique and, I suspect, because it allows her to reveal emotions that might be impossible to commit to paper written in the first person. Often Barajas tells us "she" cried. The reader will cry often as well - - out of frustration and empathy for a woman, and a baby, who deserved a better fate.

If an avowed pro-lifer had written the first 95% of "The Procedure," she would be attacked for stereotyping, for painting the worst possible picture of an abortion clinic, and for exaggerating the agony of a woman as she prepares for and actually endures the abortion. The abortion clinic is a sleazy dump whose "assembly line method" (Barajas's words, not mine) makes for minimum "downtime." Women come in all morning, fill out the requisite forms, are "counseled," and then wait until the abortionist arrives in the afternoon. Moving back and forth from room to room, he will suction out dehumanized unborn children from their depersonalized mothers.

(An image impossible to shake leaps to mind. These women are like cars at a car wash waiting in line to be vacuumed out.)

Barajas is the mother of three young children, two of them twin boys. Indeed, we are told that her three boys "complete her." Everything in the essay suggests she is a decent, loving, caring mother. So why is she aborting this child? She fears a fourth child would "absorb" her, "deplete the precious reservoir of time she has so carefully garnered to spend with each child." Barajas "fears this with such conviction that it has brought her to this place." There is absolutely no reason to doubt this is what she sincerely believes.

Yet the portrait Barajas paints so memorably is of a woman whose every fiber, every instinct, every thought screams out, "Don't!" (The most powerful example is the quote at the top of this column.) The nurse/counselor knows it. It's her job to get around a woman's innate need to protect her child.

To numb Barajas (and every other woman), the nurse/counselor labels the abortion "the Procedure." "It's a better word than some, and right now words have become terribly important to her," Barajas writes. "She finds herself searching almost obsessively for the right words to say and think." Why? "Doesn't want things to come back and haunt her."

Just how much she knows she shouldn't be there comes through in passage after revealing passage. When the nurse takes a drop of blood to test for anemia, Barajas's heart is pounding so, "she is amazed the blood doesn't spurt across the room." With 45 minutes to kill before the abortion, Barajas and her husband go to a book store. As they're about to leave, she writes, her "heart [is] in her throat as she thinks on what they must return to in a few minutes." Later, when they call the woman just ahead of Barajas, "Her heart leaps out of her chest and she wants to run, but before she can, her name is called."

If this weren't awful enough, as she waits for the abortionist she hears the sound of the abortion machine through the thin walls. "It sounds exactly like an industrial vacuum cleaner. She thinks her heart is going to give out." How does she cope? "She tries to think about her kids."

Just about when you think your own heart is about to give out Barajas describes the abortion itself. You will never forget her account. Her body sends her yet another warning message. She jerks back when the second of two shots of anesthetic in her cervix proves unexpectedly painful. She apologizes to the abortionist who has sternly rebuked her for moving. Barajas begins "babbling" about the C-section she went through to deliver the twins; of how she had "bucked and squirmed and apologized, then, too"; of how the doctor had arrived just in time "to make a fast incision and get the loud, healthy twins into the world, two minutes apart"; of how "their first cries were so beautiful as she briefly held each of them before they were taken off for observation"; of how she was happy, stunned. She had been unable to sleep."

All this as her unborn baby is suctioned out, piece by piece. She knows why the abortionist and the nurse encourage her to continue her story; it is to "keep her distracted in order that she be more pliable during the Procedure." But she needs to recall these memories to get through what she has started; Barajas has persuaded herself it's either this baby or the babies about whose birth she is now rambling.

After the abortion is completed, "her heart has slowed, but she now fears it will slow too much and just stop." But she doesn't care. "Her emptiness and horror are so deep she cannot think. Silently she weeps. She cannot imagine ever stopping."

Barajas bleeds and bleeds and cries and cries. I don't know what the intended message was but when they go to pick up their son from preschool, Barajas tells us that through the glass of the rolled-up window her son shows her a picture of a monster he has drawn and tries to tell her about it. She can't, of course, hear him. When she rolls down the window, she hugs him. In a preview of how she will attempt to subdue the demons running around in her soul, she tells us that when she embraces him the smell of the day's damp sweat and the previous night's shampoo "fill her head, dulling for a moment the reek of disinfectant and latex."

She initially bleeds a great deal but that stops. Pangs of guilt are common Barajas recalls but does not elaborate on a chilling coincidence: she herself had been the unexpected fourth child in her own family. But two weeks later she is "steady and calm," so involved with her kids there's no time to reflect on what she had done. She knows that when the month arrives in which the baby would have been born, "it will be hard. But all she can do now is be grateful she is not pregnant." Having violated her conscience, she clings all the more to her living children. Indeed, she tells us, she feels "a closeness with the three boys, a love that is almost blinding at times." "Relief floods her," and she feels gratitude to the abortion clinic "that made it possible for her not to have another child."

Why did she endure this soul-crunching tragedy? Barajas's answer-to herself, first and foremost - - is that, as a result, "No one who counts on her need be shortchanged, none of the people in her care need settle for less." At this stage in dealing with her abortion, Barajas is still unable to admit that there had been one other person who needed her care.

There is no great punch line to my remarks. You just wonder what role the husband played. He is almost invisible. We know nothing about his relationship to his sons. Could he have said something that would have strengthened his wife in her hour of despair and uncertainty? Could he, perhaps, have uplifted his wife's flagging spirits by vowing to assume a greater share in the arduous task of raising four small children? We have no way of knowing.

What we do know is that when women tell their husbands (or boyfriends) they are pregnant, the first response can be decisive. So often the woman announces to the man she intends to abort, not as a settled decision but as a way of finding out whether he cares enough to say "No!"

When their car was approaching their son's preschool, Barajas, who had wept without ceasing since leaving the abortion clinic, says she became "conscious of an anger, a rage that she cannot express the sorrow and grief to anyone, that in this tragedy she is considered a villain rather than a victim." But pro-lifers don't consider her a villain. If she needed a shoulder to cry on, we would be there, patient and nonjudgmental, to listen sympathetically to her as she shares the gnawing pain in her heart and to wipe away her tears. We would tell Barajas, truthfully, that no, of course she didn't "hate" her child. Too many of us are on a first-name basis with abortion to think that's true.

We would tell her that we just wish one of us could have been there before the abortion to assure Barajas that she had radically underestimated herself. Whatever she thought at the time, a mother who cares that much about her family could and would find room in her life for another little one. If she doubts that, I hope she gives me a call.

dha