imposed by state or local governments until overturned by federal courts
(paternal and parental consent requirements, for instance).
who admits to having had an illegal abortion allows whoever hears
her to picture her—her as an individual in that wretched body—in
unbearable vulnerability, as close to being punished purely for
being female as anyone ever comes. It is the picture of a woman
being tortured for having had sex.
There is the fear of having murdered: not someone, not real
murder; but of having done something hauntingly wrong. She has
learned (learned is a poor word for what has happened to her) that
every life is more valuable than her own; her life gets value through
motherhood, a kind of benign contamination. She has been having
children in her mind, and getting her value through them, since
she herself was a baby. Little girls believe that dolls are real babies.
Little girls put dolls to sleep, feed them, bathe them, diaper them,
nurse them through illnesses, teach them how to walk and how to
talk and how to dress—love them. Abortion turns a woman into a
murderer all right: she kills that child pregnant in her since her
own childhood; she kills her allegiance to Motherhood First. This
is a crime. She is guilty: of not wanting a baby.
There is the fear of having murdered because so many men believe so passionately that she has. To many men, each aborted pregnancy is the killing of a son—and he is the son killed. His
mother would have killed him if she had had the choice. These
men have a peculiarly retroactive and abstract sense of murder: if
she had had a choice, I would not have been born—which is
murder. The male ego, which refuses to believe in its own death,
now pushes backward, before birth. / was once a fertilized
egg; therefore to abort a fertilized egg is to kill me. Women keep
abortions secret because they are afraid of the hysteria of men
confronted with what they regard as the specter of their own extinction. If you had your way, men say to feminists, my mother would have aborted me. Killed me. “. . . I was born out of wedlock
(and against the advice that my mother received from her doctor), ”
Jesse Jackson writes in fervent opposition to abortion, “and therefore abortion is a personal issue for me. ” 2 The woman’s re
sponsibility to the fertilized egg is im aginatively and with great
conviction construed to be her relation to the adult male. At the
very least, she must not murder him; nor should she outrage his
existence by an assertion of her separateness from him, her distinctness, her importance as a person independent of him. The adult male’s identification with the fertilized egg as being fully
himself can even be conceptualized in terms of power: his rightful
power over an impersonal female (all females being the same in
terms of function). “The p o w er I had as one cell to affect m y environment I shall never have again, ” 3 R. D. Laing laments in an androcentric meditation on prebirth ego. “M y environment” is a
woman; the adult male, even as a fertilized egg, one cell, has the
right of occupation with respect to her— he has the right to be
inside her and the rightful power to change her body for his sake.
This relation to gestation is specifically male. Women do not think
of themselves in utero when they think either of being pregnant or
of aborting; men think of pregnancy and abortion prim arily in
terms of themselves, including what happened or might have happened to them back in the womb when, as one cell, they were themselves.
Women keep quiet about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because they are humiliated by the memory of those abortions; they are humiliated by the memory of their desperation, the panic, finding the money, finding the abortionist, the dirt, the danger, the secrecy. Women are humiliated when they remember asking for help, begging for help, when they remember those who turned aw ay, left them out in the cold. Women are humiliated by
the memory of the fear. Women are humiliated by the memory of
the physical intrusion, the penetration, the pain, the violation;
countless women were sexually assaulted by the abortionist before
or after the abortion; they hate remembering. Women are hum iliated because they hated themselves, their sex, their female bodies, they hated being female. Women hate remembering illegal abortions because they almost died, they could have died, they wanted
to die, they hoped they would not die, they made promises to God
begging him not to let them die, they were afraid of dying before
and during and after; they have never again been so afraid of death
or so alone; they had never before been so afraid of death or so
alone. And women hate remembering illegal abortions because
their husbands experienced none of this: which no woman forgives.
Women also keep quiet about illegal abortions precisely because
they had married sex: their husbands mounted them, fucked them,
impregnated them; their husbands determined the time and the
place and the act; desire, pleasure, or orgasm were not necessarily
experienced by the women, yet the women ended up on the
butcher’s block. The abortionist finished the job the husband had
started. No one wants to remember this.
Women also keep quiet about abortions they have had because
they wanted the child, but the man did not; because they wanted
other children and could not have them; because they never regretted the abortion and did regret subsequent children; because they had more than one abortion, which, like more than one rape, fixes
the woman’s guilt. Women keep quiet about abortions because
abortion inside marriage is selfish, ruthless, marks the woman as
heartless, loveless—yet she did it anyway. Women also keep quiet
about abortions they have had, illegal abortions, because the
woman who has had one, or tried to induce one in herself, is never
really trusted again: if she will do that to herself—hurt herself, tear
up her own insides rather than have a child—she must be the
frenzied female, the female gone mad, the lunatic female, the
female in rebellion against her own body and therefore against man
and God, the female who is most feared and abhorred, the Medea
underneath the devoted wife and mother, the wild woman, the
woman enraged with the sorrow between her legs, the woman