The Idea of Abortion and the Fact of Abortion

May 10, 2009

This week I heard an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air that gave me a glimmer of hope that abortion will one day be unthinkable.  Terry Gross was interviewing Ayelet Waldman-a mother, writer, and former attorney-when she asked about her brand of feminism compared to her mother’s feminism.

Waldman (born in 1964) turned to the example of abortion, stating that her mother’s generation labored so fiercely to have abortion legalized that it was important for them to use certain language, such as referring to the womb-dweller as a fetus or embryo or clump of cells.  She continued, “But to women like me who have grown up in the age of the ultrasound, we now have 3-dimensional ultrasounds of our babies from the very beginning where we can actually see their features-recognizable features (you can see them suck their thumbs)…For us, the idea of abortion and the fact of abortion has become something very different.”

This “fact of abortion” factored heavily in Waldman’s decision to abort her third child when she and her husband discovered that the baby had an ambiguous chromosomal defect that could result in him being mentally retarded, predisposed to kidney defects, or completely normal.  After an arduous decision process, Waldman and her husband decided to have the abortion in the second trimester.

Describing the dilation and extraction abortion her “incredibly generous, gentle doctor” performed, Waldman again contrasted her mother’s ideological fight with her own wrestling with the “fact of abortion.”  Whereas her mother’s generation avoided the details of the procedure, Waldman told Terry Gross, “I needed to know exactly what was happening.”  So she explained, “The baby is extracted in pieces from your uterus….It’s horrible.  The photographs that you see, that the right-to-lifers show, they’re real photographs.  That’s really what it’s like.”  Why was this important to know?  Because Waldman, as pro-choice as her mother before her, said “I can’t support a woman’s right to choose unless I’m willing to look at the darkest side of it.  And that was the darkest side of it.”

Thus she had one non-negotiable request to her doctor, that he “make sure that the baby didn’t feel anything.”  She explains, “That was really important to me-that he be dead, essentially, before that grim process took place.  And the doctor promised me that he would give an injection that would make that happen.” 

What is unmistakable in this interview is that Ayelet Waldman came to grips with the fact that a doctor killed her son four months after he was conceived.  In fact, she fell into a deep depression following the abortion, haunted by that thought that “I had killed a baby because I was a coward.”  During this time her mother tried to comfort her by saying, “This wasn’t real; this wasn’t a baby.”  Such words rang hollow for Waldman, who kept the ultrasound pictures and continued to refer to her son as “him” rather than “it.”  (Incidentally, Waldman said “It was only when I got pregnant again [five months later] that the depression lifted.”)

So what about this interview gives me hope that abortion will one day be unthinkable?  Because I have some glimmer of optimism that our society cannot live with such cognitive dissonance for generations to come.  Somehow Ayelet Waldman can call abortion murder and advocate it.  I do not know how, and regretfully Terry Gross did not press her on this issue.  But perhaps her children, who nicknamed their aborted brother “Rocket Ship,” will grow up in a generation that grapples enough with the fact of abortion that this horrible practice finally becomes unthinkable.

Praying toward this with you,

Pastor Chris

You can find the interview mentioned online athttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103794433