An Open Letter to Barbara Ehrenreich
We need to deal with our grief before joining the political fray
Editors Note: On July 22, 2004 The New York Times printed Owning Up To Abortion, a scalding commentary on A Heartbreaking Choice by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich. The following letter of response was signed by 21 members of A Heartbreaking Choice and e-mailed to Ms. Ehrenreich on July 25, 2004. She chose to curl into a fetal position rather than acknowledge it. Copyright considerations prevent us from republishing her piece in its entirety. Her specific comments addressed here are indicated with bold text against a yellow background.
Dear Barbara,
I admire your previous work and have recommended your bookNickel & Dimed to many people. So I was quite stunned to see one of my heroes slagging off on women who’ve terminated pregnancies because of fetal defects. As a woman who turned to the A Heartbreaking Choice website for support four years ago, let me first assure you that the majority of women who face this nightmare will eventually become staunch pro-choice activists.
You can blame a lot of folks, from media bigwigs to bishops, if we lose our reproductive rights, but it's the women who shrink from acknowledging their own abortions who really irk me.
…go to the Web site for A Heartbreaking Choice, a group that provides support for women whose fetuses are deemed defective, and you find 'Mom' complaining of having to have her abortion in an ordinary abortion clinic: 'I resented the fact that I had to be there with all these girls that did not want their babies.'
Like you, we’ve little patience for those who wish to go on pretending it wasn’t “really” an abortion. But unlike you, we understand that it can take time for the newly bereaved to accept the fact that it was. This is why our website contains stories like that of grieving women like “Mom.” The fact that we grieve our babies does not mean we're in denial that we've had to have an abortion.
A crisis pregnancy is a crisis pregnancy is a crisis pregnancy, whether it’s a matter of finances being temporarily tight, or a lifetime responsibility for someone who is severely mentally and/or physically disabled, or learning that your child will be born only to suffer and die. In addition to the upheaval and heartbreak such a birth would bring, it also has the negative financial implications of which you so heartily approve. Barbara, you are an excellent journalist: I am sure you could do the research to learn why it is that insurance companies refer to medically fragile newborns as “million dollar babies.”
You are usually so good at putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, it surprised me how you failed to do so here. The woman facing this nightmare usually has planned her pregnancy, told family, friends and co-workers that she was expecting, redecorated the nursery, made plans and dared to dream, then suddenly learned that her child would either die shortly after birth, or face a lifetime of physical and mental incapacity. This is not simply a disappointment for her or a matter of her insisting on “perfection.” The diagnosis may represent a lifetime of suffering for her child and an emotional, physical, financial and social burden for her entire family.
Furthermore, the pregnancy she must end may have been preceded by multiple miscarriages, or be the result of years of trying to conceive or have been achieved on the emotional rollercoaster of invasive and expensive fertility treatments. It is a huge loss, and you should not insist that she jump into the political fray before she's even had a chance to grieve it.
I had two abortions during my all-too-fertile years. You can call me a bad woman, but not a bad mother. I was a dollar-a-word freelancer and my husband a warehouse worker, so it was all we could do to support the existing children at a grubby lower-middle-class level. And when it comes to my children - the actual extrauterine ones, that is - I was, and remain, a lioness.
Like you, many women choosing to terminate because of fetal anomalies have existing children they too must fiercely protect. I know I do. You did not want your children sinking below a certain standard of living: many of us who’ve made this choice don’t wish to saddle our other children (both living and yet-to-be-conceived) with the care of a severely disabled sibling long after we are gone. Nor do we wish to give them short shrift while we are chasing after the special surgical, therapeutic and educational needs of a severely handicapped child.
Heart failure is the usual cause of death for the defect my unborn baby had. The certainty that he would suffer and the high probability that he would die became even more frightening when I realized my then-3-year-old-daughter might be the first to find him lifeless.
Or go to the Web site for A Heartbreaking Choice, a group that provides support for women whose fetuses are deemed defective, and you find 'Mom' complaining of having to have her abortion in an ordinary abortion clinic: 'I resented the fact that I had to be there with all these girls that did not want their babies.'
Of course “Mom” is going to feel out of place among women who are choosing to abort healthy unwanted pregnancies. Since she is undoubtedly months farther along than they are, she is probably also feeling defensive about their assumptions that she too is aborting a healthy pregnancy but has just been dilly-dallying about her decision for a couple of trimesters. Furthermore, she would give anything to be carrying a viable child and probably deeply resents that they seem to be throwing theirs away, no matter how much she may politically support their right to do so.
…Mom: You've been through a hellish experience, but unless I'm missing something, you didn't want your babies either. A baby, yes, but not the particular baby you happened to be carrying.
Yes, I assure you that you are missing something. As a woman who has aborted for multiple fetal defects, I can tell you that I wanted that baby with all my heart. But I had to put compassion for him and the suffering he would face ahead of my own desires to hold onto him for as long as I could. There were many reasons I chose to become pregnant: allowing my child to suffer needlessly then die was never one of them. Your breezy assertion that we didn't want this paricular baby couldn't be further off the mark.
I had an induced labor abortion at 20 weeks, and after 41 hours gave birth to him, held him, named him and provided him a formal burial. I’m going to go out on a limb now and guess that this is a little bit more than you did for the “financially defective” fetuses you aborted. The fact that most of us here felt strongly about our babies and may still be in the process of grieving them is what sets this loss apart from your everyday abortion.
It's not a matter of denial, but of a need to get through our grief before lunging into the brutal fray of abortion politics.
Medically informed 'terminations' are already catching heat from disability rights groups, and, indeed, some of the conditions for which people are currently choosing abortion, like deafness or dwarfism, seem a little sketchy to me. I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.
I’ve met hundreds of women online who have terminated for a terrifying assortment of defects, but have yet to hear of a termination for a mild problem and have never heard of a termination for deafness! As far as dwarfism is concerned, you trivialize this grave diagnosis by calling it “sketchy.” Sadly, 13% of infants with skeletal dysplasia (the term "dwarf" is considered derogatory) are stillborn and 44% die during the perinatal period. Some particularly excruciating forms of this condition cause the upper organs to outgrow the ribcage while still in the womb. Clearly you should have done your research before dismissing that as a "sketchy" reason to terminate.
The prejudice is widespread that a termination for medical reasons is somehow on a higher moral plane than a run-of-the-mill abortion. In a 1999 survey of Floridians, for example, 82 percent supported legal abortion in the case of birth defects, compared with about 40 percent in situations where the woman simply could not afford to raise another child.
Perhaps that is because 82 percent of Floridians surveyed are compassionate enough to realize that, quite unlike affordability, birth defects are not a problem that can ever be resolved by education, job training, charity, welfare or adoption.
But what makes it morally more congenial to kill a particular "defective" fetus than to kill whatever fetus happens to come along, on an equal opportunity basis?
It is not more morally congenial, nor is it less. Your unwanted pregnancy was a crisis pregnancy; my wanted pregnancy became a crisis pregnancy when I received a catastrophic diagnosis. Abortion rights allowed us each a safe passage out of a crisis situation.
I'll still defend the right to choose abortion in these cases, even if it isn't the choice I'd make for myself.
You really can't know that until you have personally faced a specific diagnosis and learned what suffering and hardships it may entail for your baby, for you and for the rest of your family. That you so readily chose abortion for financial reasons alone indicates you probably wouldn't continue following a catastrophic diagnosis, so you may dismount your high horse now.
Choice can be easy, as it was in my case, or truly agonizing. But assuming the fetal position is not an appropriate response. Sartre called this 'bad faith,' meaning something worse than duplicity: a fundamental denial of freedom and the responsibility that it entails. Time to take your thumbs out of your mouths, ladies, and speak up for your rights.
If you had actually bothered to contact us rather than jumping to conclusions, we would have informed you that in April, 2004 A Heartbreaking Choice formed an official delegation and stood up for our reproductive rights (and yours) at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington D.C. To get there, I took a 14-hour trip on a packed Planned Parenthood bus with a narcoleptic driver. No thumb suckers here, Barbara.
Will you march with us next time?