In Edgar Allen Poe's classic horror tale, "The
Tell-Tale Heart," a murderer dismembers his victim and hides the pieces
under the floorboards. When the police call to investigate, he prides himself
on his cleverness - - but gradually becomes unhinged, at last screaming
out the location of the corpse. He was undone by the sound of his victim's
heartbeat drumming in his ears.
Why, after so many years of legalization, does the abortion debate continue
in America? Why haven't we accepted it as matter-of-factly as we do any
other "surgical procedure"? I believe that it has something to
do with a tell-tale heart. Deep inside we know: someone dies in every abortion,
a tiny growing child with hands and eyes and a face and a beating heart.
Four thousand times a day that beating heart is stopped - - but in our conscience
it seems to go on.
I didn't always feel this way. I was an abortion advocate in college, and
before the Roe v. Wade decision my car sported a bumper sticker that
read, "Don't Labor Under a Misconception - - Legalize Abortion."
But that was when I thought that abortion merely discarded a "glob
of tissue." I didn't know that that tissue was shaped remarkably like
a baby, and that it was alive. I didn't know that the crude process of abortion
sucks the child out, piece by piece, through a narrow tube and into a bloody
bag.
But once I learned, my stand against violence had to include abortion as
well. I simply could do no other. For the tell-tale hearts are our own as
well; we cannot deny the beat of compassion that wells from within, that
urges us that something is terribly wrong in our land.
The abortion business makes at least 500 million dollars a year in this
country, performing over a million and a half abortions. Only a tiny fraction
of these are done for reasons of health, rape, or incest. Nearly half of
all abortion customers are coming back for a second (or third or fourth...)
abortion.
Are these women callous, contemptuous of the lives they have begun? Yet
who would choose abortion if she had any other choice? The procedure itself
is ugly and degrading, a mechanical vacuuming of the womb's interior; she
must pay for this privilege several hundred dollars in cash, and knows,
at some level, that its only purpose is to destroy her child.
In the process she runs risks from puncture and infection to colostomy,
paralysis, or death; abortion is an unnatural invasion to reverse a healthy
process, so even legal abortion will always have its risks. Then there is
the psychological trauma, sometimes delayed for years, which accounts for
the number of grief-stricken post-abortive women flooding into the Pro-Life
Movement.
It seems clear that no woman would have an abortion if her alternatives
did not appear even more forbidding. Like an animal caught in a trap, trying
to gnaw off its own leg, the aborting woman can see no other escape except
this route of violence and despair.
In defending the path of abortion, Supreme Court Justice Blackmun wrote,
"Millions of women... have ordered their lives around [access to abortion],
and... this right has become vital to the full participation of women in...
American life." We recoil to think that something so hideous could
have become necessary to our lives. How can it be that we must sacrifice
our children to succeed? Is such a sacrifice laid on men? Is any other oppressed
or marginalized group required to have surgery in order to participate in
American life?
Abortion may not have helped women, but it has helped those who would be
inconvenienced by her pregnancy and her child. It is easier for a sexually
irresponsible man to pay for a woman's abortion than to marry her, or to
pay child support for 18 years. It is not out of concern for women's welfare
and dignity that Playboy so enthusiastically supports abortion on
demand.
The relentless demands of careerism also have little patience with parenting.
It is easier for an employee to abort her child than for management to worry
about providing maternity leave, health insurance, child care, and time
off for Mom to go to the school play. It's "easier" on everyone
if the woman has an abortion - - easier on everyone, that is, except her
and her child. No wonder our hearts are uneasy.
Abortion is cruel to children, and it is not much kinder to the women on
whom it feeds.
For these reasons, many pro-lifers have turned their time to practical aid
for women facing the abortion dilemma. There are approximately 2,000 crisis
pregnancy centers in America, places where a woman can receive help with
housing, medical care, food and clothing, and legal aid, as well as job
and budget planning for the years ahead. All these services are offered
free, donated by volunteers who are for the most part women just like her
- - mothers who care about other mothers in need. No matter how one feels
about abortion, we can all consider lending our aid to these woman-helping
agencies by volunteering time, or laundering donated baby clothes, or opening
a guest room to a woman whose family has rejected her. Sometimes all a woman
needs is the knowledge that someone cares, that they will stand by her as
she tackles a challenging and courageous path.
I have faced this path myself - - not as vast a crisis as some women must
endure, but still daunting to me. My husband had just lost his job when
we found out I was pregnant; we knew we would have to move crosscountry,
but had no idea where. We already had two children under five. Gary and
I walked around the block in the late afternoon, choked and fearful. I thought
about the tiny, trusting heart already growing beneath my own. Our lives
felt out of control; what could we offer this child?
But we did find a job, and we did move, and Stephen was born in our new
home, a joyous day among midwife and friends. Twelve years later he's the
portrait of boyhood, bold and busy, full of plans and projects. Yet Stephen
also has a tender streak that betrays him when he spots a stuffed animal
or sees a sentimental show. Of all the hearts that love me, his is the
one that loves me with the most unfettered, blind devotion; to him, Mom
is perfection on earth.
I think of all the thousands of women today whose children will be pulled
out of them bit by bit, children who are as much like them as any mother
and child can be. At some point, that tiny, new heart will beat its last.
Who can say whether that would have been the heart that, in all her lifetime,
would have loved her best?
Stephen comes in, flushed and grimy from running in the afternoon sun. He
interrupts me as I sit at my desk, impulsively flinging his arms around
me in a baby-bear hug. My head rests against his slender chest. I can hear
in there his tender heart, beating faster now than the wings of a bird.
This article first appeared in the January 1992 issue of Parenting
Magazine.