Abortion: Trouble in Numbers?
Even among pro-choice activists, why does having more than one abortion
imply a woman has been 'careless'?
My friend Marion Banzhaf is the kind of feminist who wears an "I had an
abortion" T-shirt with "TALK TO ME" scrawled by hand beneath the message.
She worked at feminist health centers throughout the 1970s where she
demonstrated vaginal self-exams and performed menstrual extractions. In its
1980s heyday, she was a pioneering member of the AIDS activist group ACT-UP.
She recounts the story of her abortion in a film I produced called Speak
Out: I Had an Abortion.
The year was 1971, and there were only a couple of states, notably New York,
where abortion was legal. Although her boyfriend thought they should drop
out of school at the University of Florida and get married -- they could
live with his mother -- Marion disagreed. She raised the money for her
abortion in one afternoon by standing on the quad, asking for donations.
She then flew from Gainesville to New York, had her procedure, and, after
she left the clinic, ran skipping down the street. "I was so happy to see
that blood," she says, in a trademark Marion Banzhaf way (somewhat shocking,
totally confident). "It meant I had my life back."
Dauntless radical though she is, there is a part of her abortion story she
rarely tells. A year after her 1971 procedure, Marion got pregnant again.
This time she didn't have to worry about the money. Her new boyfriend pulled
out his checkbook and put her on the next flight -- and she knew it was the
right decision. "But it was a much harder [abortion] for me personally. I
felt I shouldn't let myself get pregnant," says Marion, now fifty-two. "Even
to this day, I have shame about it. An accomplished, consciousness-raised
feminist like me!"
One abortion, that happens. Two? Well, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, two smacks
of carelessness. My father, a doctor in Fargo, North Dakota, expressed
surprise when I mentioned the second-abortion stigma to him: "It's odd,
given that it's the exact same situation as before, no more or less of a
life," my father said. "It's as if women don't really believe they have the
right to have abortions."
Dad, like Marion, is often shockingly logical. Still, abortion itself
(whether your first or fourth) is so shrouded in secrecy, it's easy to
imagine that only certain kinds of women would ever make a mistake like that
twice. If "she" did, this almost unconscious thinking goes, it's clear "she"
didn't care enough to learn from the first one. Fears about these repeat
cases contribute to the unlovely idea that, because terminating a pregnancy
is legal, women use abortion as birth control, leading to a cliché of this
debate: the "I'm pro-choice, but I don't think it should be used as birth
control" line.
In the clinic world, repeat visitors are called, not unkindly, "frequent
flyers." The reason that casual term is not an insult is simply due to how
common multiple abortions are. "You have 300 possibilities to get pregnant
in your life," says Peg Johnston, the director of an abortion clinic in
Binghamton, New York. "A one percent failure rate -- assuming the best
possible use of contraception -- is still three abortions," she says. "In
what endeavor is a one percent failure rate not acceptable?"
According to Planned Parenthood, two out of every 100 women aged fifteen to
forty-four will have an abortion this year and half of them will have had at
least one abortion previously. Yet virtually everyone I've talked to about
multiple abortions said she shouldn't have let it happen again, implying it
was her fault.
Why is that? Well, some of it is surely the anti-woman culture, a robust
pro-life movement that, when abortion became legal, mobilized to scream at
women on what is already not a fun day. But it's not just a vast right-wing
conspiracy. Many women -- pro-choice women -- believe that abortion is
taking a life (although not an independent life). What justifies that loss
of life is the woman's own life. It's almost as if she is saying, "I
recognize that this is serious, but my own life is too important to
sacrifice for an unplanned pregnancy." But each additional abortion makes it
harder to believe she is making an honorable decision.
Or that he is. My friend Matt, like many men in my life, has been part of
more than one abortion. When he was younger, he was "knee-jerk pro-choice."
If an unplanned pregnancy occurs in high school or college, he figured, of
course you have an abortion. That's just commonsense. He didn't revisit that
with any sort of introspection until the first abortion, "but I wasn't in
love with [the woman in question]. We had no future together. I was
comfortable saying we need to abort," Matt concludes. "I gave her money. She
didn't express any need for me to be there with her."
He says, bluntly, that the abortion last year felt "more like murder," and
that he was disgusted at himself for being the reason his girl was at
Planned Parenthood, confronting scary toothless protesters and enduring this
awful procedure. The circumstances had changed -- Matt did have a future
with the woman he got pregnant with the second time, although having a baby
just then, a few months into their relationship, wasn't a good idea at all.
Mostly, though, it felt unseemly and immature to be there. "I sat at the
clinic with all of these younger guys and I thought, 'I am too old to be
here, man,'" says Matt, now thirty-eight. "When do I stop giving myself the
out -- that is what abortion feels like -- a free pass. But it's not totally
free. There are emotional consequences, and as you get older the sense of
taking responsibility for your actions grows."
"There is something in that moment where you are supposed to smarten up,"
agrees Jenny Egan, a twenty-five-year-old ACLU staffer who had an abortion
at age sixteen. "That is your one *****-up. [After that,] birth control can't
fail and a condom can't break." But, as Jenny points out, the shame is often
not the abortion itself -- it's not the idea of killing a second baby when
we are only allowed to kill one -- the shame is the shame of getting
pregnant. It means that you don't having enough control and power to take
care of yourself.
Which brings us to a paradox of feminism. The success of the women's
movement is not just in its overhaul of all of the institutions that kept
women down -- although it has made inroads in all of them, including
national abortion rights, birth control for single people, and sexuality
education (all under fire and that last almost eradicated in favor of
abstinence-only education). The more profound revolution, though, was the
raised expectations this once-utopian movement suggested to its daughters.
The mantra of empowerment means that women feel like responsible actors in
sex -- not merely ignorant victims -- and that knowledge makes it harder, in
a way, to justify the "mistake" of unplanned pregnancy. If you're so smart,
if you read "Our Bodies, Ourselves" at age thirteen, if you knew about
condoms, how did you get pregnant?
In Speak Out, the film ends with dozens of women saying, "My name is ____
and I had an abortion." A few -- an older matron, a curly-haired professor
type -- say "I had two abortions." One woman says "I had three abortions,"
and at a recent screening her presence provoked one young female audience
member to wonder aloud why the multiple-abortion woman didn't use birth
control and should we, the filmmakers, be promoting that?
At that same screening, a well-known second-wave feminist, the writer Alix
Kates Shulman, replied to the requisite "where's the birth control" comment
that she had had four abortions -- "and not one was the result of
carelessness." A few audience members vigorously nodded their heads in a
"Hear, Hear" manner. But it looked as if most people quietly wondered if the
birth control girl -- the one pointing out that once was funny, but twice is
a spanking -- was right.
In September, Pauline Bart, another second wave woman of some reputation
within the movement, suggested at a screening of Speak Out that younger
women learn to do abortions themselves just as the collective of women known
as "Jane" did pre-Roe v. Wade.
"It's just like taking a melon-baller and scooping out a melon," she said,
referring to performing an abortion in ones' own apartment. I nodded
earnestly but thought, "No, it isn't." Or, at least, it isn't to me. I don't
doubt that some women experience abortion as devoid of angst as Pauline Bart
depicts, and for them each abortion is created equal.
For many women, though, getting pregnant when you don't want to be is
because you made a mistake. Often the mistake is not your own fault -- Alix
was not told by her doctor that diaphragms could slip out of place, Marion
got depressed on the high-dose pill and found it almost impossible to take.
But if an abortion is meant to correct that mistake, is it anti-woman to
presume a learning curve? I don't know. Fertility and sexuality are very
complex. Let's be real, some people are better at birth control than others.
I've had unprotected sex more often than protected sex myself, so I'm hardly
one to tsk-tsk.
Peg Johnston, the clinician, thinks multiple abortions points to something
larger than an individual snafu -- occasionally that larger thing is
carelessness, but usually in the context of a life out of control in other
ways. Often it's a woman who has several children already and a chaotic,
stressful life. At around $30 a month for the pill, others can't afford
their birth control.
"That's very common," says Johnston, noting that a majority of the
forty-five million uninsured in this country are women. Meanwhile, "some
people are really fertile and others simply have lots and lots of sex.
Frankly, if you have a lot of sex, you'll get pregnant more often."
As for Marion Banzhaf, she did find a way to make sure she didn't have
another birth control failure but still had lots of sex. Soon after the
second abortion, she came out as a lesbian.
Jennifer Baumgardner is the co-author of "Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism
and the Future."
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