This is a true story, or at least, as true as a memory can be. All names have been changed, including my own. My mother always said, “You can write anything you want about the family, darling, as you long as you do it under a different name. I want to pretend that’s someone else’s dysfunctional relatives. Did you see where I left my cigarettes?”
When I was fourteen, my mother was fired from a senior position in a major right-to-life organisation. The cause? She was too feminist.
Okay, what they actually said was that she wasn’t a “good cultural fit for the organisation.” But what they meant was that they weren’t comfortable with her status as a soon-to-be-divorcee, her refusal to apologise for “depriving her children of a father,” and also she liked to wear trousers.
Now, this is Australia. As a general rule, our pro-life movement is less fanatics bombing clinics and more middle-class women passive-aggressively disapproving of things. Especially other women. Especially if those women happened to do shameful things like leaving their abusive husbands. And having abortions, that’s pretty bad, too.
Mum was nineteen years old when she heard of abortion for the first time. She recoiled from the whole concept. She had been a premature birth, not expected to live for more than a few hours. I suspect she over-identified with all the embryos and foetuses being callously kicked out of unwelcoming wombs.
I was ten when Mum explained it to me. I said, “That’s…well, I guess I can see how it happens…”
Then I received my first lecture on the sanctity of life, Catholic teachings about sex and intimacy, and that women who had abortions weren’t bad, but they made bad choices. Picture my mum, a lower-middle-class Kathleen Turner, with a menthol cigarette in one hand as she explains how we live in a culture of death.
Many years later, I thought about that afternoon, and set it against our family’s history. And for the first time, I realised that, as she delivered that lecture, my mother was struggling with her own unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.
My parents had split up for the first time. Weirdly, it was a happy time for me; Mum had a job, a nice car, a brand new house. My father went from authoritarian to melancholy, which was less scary.
Then Mum became pregnant, in circumstances I never fully understood. She stopped working, and started going to Mass every day. And the pro-life pamphlets appeared, piles of them, all over her room.
She and Dad got together before it started to show, but it wasn’t until late in the pregnancy that she stopped talking about adoption.
It was after my sister was born that Mum returned to pro-life politics. She had been an able and respected political organiser before she got married, one of the few female members of the anti-capitalist Catholic right wing that would eventually spawn Australia’s current prime minister. Dad put an end to that, and to her education, but Mum still kept in touch with her old friends and colleagues.
(Not the current prime minister, though. He abandoned that course in favour of capitalism and a career in the political mainstream. My mother’s people hate him almost more than the Left does.)
It started with volunteer work, but when I was thirteen, my parents split up again, this time for good. My sister was two at the time; I was almost thirteen. Mum was offered a paid position as a state secretary and spokeswoman (we’ll have no gender-neutral language in this organisation, thank you). “Just while you sort everything out,” said Patricia, the organisation’s president.
If I was sick–and I was sick a lot that year–I got to accompany her to the office. This meant a trip into the city and a day spent making myself useful to The Cause. They also had a set of life-sized rubber embryos, which I liked to (guiltily) pretend were monstrous aliens.
Once I got to read through submissions to the organisation’s newsletter. Most were poems written from the point of view of a foetus. Ideological correctness, in my opinion, was no substitute for artistic merit.
Patricia used to watch me closely on those days, waiting for signs of the delinquency that inevitably sprouted in children from broken homes. I was mostly into Star Trek, which Patricia seemed to find troubling. Mum explained that Star Trek was a very pro-life show, all those aliens they refuse to kill, and Patrick Stewart was very good.
They let Mum go a few weeks later. Our income was reduced to the single parents’ welfare payment, which was enough to live on provided you didn’t eat too much. Unemployment was high in our town, and Mum’s skills and experience were decidedly niche. In any case, my sister turned out to have special needs, and had worn out her welcome with every babysitter in town. To fill the hours, Mum did what any welfare-dependent single mother would do: she volunteered for a pregnancy crisis hotline.
Looking back, it’s decidedly ethically shady to go around advertising yourself as a proper, open-minded hotline, and then be all pro-life at people. (I realise that most people don’t take a decade or more to realise that, but I was coming at it from the other side.)
But I’ll say this for my mother: she has all the empathy in the world. This meant she was very bad at counselling people, but very good at being their friend. I’d come home from school and find a strange woman in our tiny flat, drinking tea and sharing her gynaecological history with Mum. A few of these were women my mother had persuaded not to have abortions. Some chose otherwise, yet they stayed friends with her.
Most were women who had had abortions in the past, and regretted them. “Post-abortion syndrome” is often regarded as another pernicious anti-choice lie, but I’ve met them, women whose terminations were followed by depression and breakdown. Many had identified as feminists until they were told their problems didn’t exist. That has changed in the years since–it probably wasn’t even universal then. My distaste for the pro-choice movement deepened, even as the pro-life movement exploited these women’s experience for their own “side.”
The common element between all of them, I eventually realised, was that none had really made a choice. Some had been faced with economic necessity; more were coerced by abusive partners. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe the problem wasn’t so much abortion, as a society that permitted men to mistreat and exploit women.
That was scary stuff, though, verging on feminism. So I concentrated on more important things, like school assignments about how abortion was very wrong indeed.
Picture a skinny sixteen year old presenting a lecture on the moral bankruptcy of a society that killed unborn children. She’s an officious little thing with very little sense of humour and a notebook full of out-of-context quotes and dubious facts. Why, did you know that in cases of rape, the human body has a way of shutting that whole thing down? That abortions cause breast cancer and women drop dead every day because the contraceptive Pill causes strokes? I believed it. I did.
And yet, I didn’t. I knew the pro-life movement, all its nasty middle-class hypocrisies and lies. The older I got, the clearer it became.
Mum worked for charities that supported single and teenaged mothers. She built networks among women who were isolated, sometimes uneducated, in need of a friend. Her friends–including Patricia, because my mother is eternally and ridiculously forgiving–turned their noses up at that type of person.
I went to uni, and found information that hadn’t been approved–or manufactured–in some right-to-lifer’s office. I started to think dangerous thoughts like, “I personally could never have an abortion, but what business is it of mine if someone else does?”
And, “If a woman needs an abortion, she should be able to do it safely and privately, with a good doctor, not having to run a gauntlet of protestors and people who think they can baptise a foetus.”
“You’re not pro-choice, are you, darling?” my mother said a couple of years ago.
“No,” I said. But only because I chose to avoid labels.
My mother is changing, too. A few years ago, she rejoined the organisation that fired her when I was a teen.
“That’s an interesting choice,” I said.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said airily, and I pictured her waving her cigarette around, dropping ash on a pamphlet. She was a board member now, advancing a policy of working with feminist organisations to promote contraception and sex education. She sometimes sent me drafts of her speeches, and I sent them back without the “facts” I couldn’t verify outside of a pro-life website. She started talking about meaningful choices, and support for single mothers in poverty, domestic violence and escaping cycles.
Needless to say, this wasn’t going to last. After a few months, she rang me.
“I quit,” she said.
“Before you were fired?”
“You know,” she said, and she sounded deeply tired, “I’m starting to think those people don’t care about women at all.”
Ahh. Yes, this was so great. I don’t really remember even talking about abortion very much as I was growing up, even though I went to a super-lefty feminist public girls high school. I knew what it was but that’s about it. I think it was just a Thing we don’t discuss.
(GO AUSSIE)
I had both ends of the economic spectrum in high school – I did the 1st 3 years of my high schooling in a high-SES school, where everyone talked about birth control and condoms almost non-stop (it was second only to eating disorders).
Then I went to a school in the West of Sydney for the final 3 years – lower SES school. We never talked about it in class, but probably about 20% of the girls in my class had abortions and one or two had resolved that they didn’t regret them, but if they fell pregnant again, they would not abort. Both of them fell pregnant within a year of graduating and are now mothers to babies who are very wanted and loved.
Tasmania decriminalized abortion yesterday.
I’m praying for a day when it’s bulk-billed.
It’s shameful to see both sides engage in selective listening to patients. Is it any wonder some turn to the pro-life side when they’re the only ones that provide in-person post-abortion counseling (no matter how bad it is)?
Shout out to Backline, Exhale, Connect and Breathe, and Faith Aloud for at least providing nonjudgmental hotlines in the US. Can’t wait to see in-person post-abortion counseling widely offered by pro-choice/pro-voice folks. I hope that’s coming.
That’s not actually true? I know planned parenthood (a pro choice organization) offers post abortion counseling and has as long as I’ve known about it. I doubt they are the only one.
Good! There are a lot of women seeking post-abortion counseling who don’t feel their negative feelings (guilt, regret, mourning, etc.) are validated by people who are concerned with keeping abortion legal, and so want the language surrounding it to be all positive all the time.
Planned Parenthood/abortion clinics in general aren’t nearly as widespread as crisis pregnancy centers (some states only have one or two clinics vs. a dozen CPCs), so that’s what I mean when I say the latter is the only place some women can find. Also, if someone has a bad experience with the staff at a particular clinic, it would be nice if they had somewhere else to go for counseling.
In my experience pro choice organizations are very open about the fact that it can be a difficult, confusing, or upsetting experience for a number of women and address that in their post abortion counseling. Planned Parenthood is one of the, the National Abortion Federation is another (most of their clinics provide counseling and those that do not provide referrals to local post abortion counseling).
I have to disagree with you that pro-choice organizations want to keep the language all positive all of the time, and by doing so limit the assistance offered to women. That’s a stereotype that popped up after the idea of ‘post-abortion syndrome’ was debunked (and it was debunked because it was found that women experience a wide variety of emotions after an abortion, and one experience can’t be pinned on everyone). In my experience pro-choice organizations make a point of emphasizing that an abortion is a very personal experience and that different people will react in different ways to it, so post abortion counseling is focused on helping each individual woman based on her own unique feelings about her abortion, positive or negative. This may not be true of individual supporters of the pro-choice movement, or individual activists but it is true of the major organizations involved with providing abortions and post abortion counseling.
I do agree with you that there need to be many more options for post abortion counseling, including for women who may not identify as pro choice. One big reason why crisis pregnancy centers are much much more common than planned parenthood is because planned parenthood is often being de-funded and pushed out of neighborhoods because it offers abortions. I think a better solution to offering post abortion counseling would be to get Planned Parenthood and similar organizations back into neighborhoods, or promoting hotlines like Exhale (which you mentioned above). Crisis pregnancy centers are known for providing misleading or false medical information in order to push people away from an abortion (including telling pregnant women that they are not pregnant, to keep them from making their own decisions until it is too late) and offering post abortion counseling that focuses of demonizing the health care provider rather than helping women work through their feelings about their abortion.
TL;DR I think that there need to be more post abortion counseling options for women who may not identify as pro choice, but I don’t think crisis pregnancy centers are a positive solution.
CPCs are definitely not a positive solution. I’m writing based on what I’ve read from Exhale and their ambassadors (provoicesupportblog.tumblr.com, for example), the people they’ve talked to, and people who’ve blogged about their experiences on Tumblr – they have felt that people the pro-choice movement (not specifically any organization) preferred they stick to positive reviews of their experience in order to show that abortion is a valid choice. Which it is, it’s just not as clear cut as “most women experience relief after an abortion.” I tend to believe them, even if it’s not my personal experience.
Personally, I’d like to see not only more clinics (obvz) and more clinics offering counseling, but organizations not affiliated with clinics offering unbiased counseling as well. Perhaps they would have more luck than clinics in areas unfriendly to abortion. Clearly we are not doing enough if crisis pregnancy centers’ “counseling” business is booming.
I think that would be really great (and Exhale is a great organization, I know NARAL promotes them a lot and I’ve read positive things about them in a number of places). I think it would be great to have lots of standalone counseling centers. It would have the double benefit of reaching out to women who may not be comfortable with going to a planned parenthood or another organization/clinic that provides abortions (either because she’s afraid of someone seeing her go in, or she doesn’t really know what planned parenthood does, or she identifies as pro-life, or because she doesn’t want to return to the place where she had the abortion) as well as places where planned parenthood can’t reach due to local laws or lack of funding. Hotlines (like exhale) are also great because they allow you to talk to someone from the privacy of your own home (much like rape crisis hotlines).
“Clearly we are not doing enough if crisis pregnancy centers’ “counseling” business is booming.” yes yes yes. Agree with this.
For some perspective, there are at least 19 states with two to zero Planned Parenthoods, and 7 states with only one or two clinics at all. Even if some clinics provide post-abortion counseling, it’s a small help to those who live half a day’s drive away.
That was such a great piece! I also really appreciate hearing more about Australian politics/feminist issues. Another thing we don’t really hear about in the US. We’re happy to learn about immigration policy or make fun of Tony Abbott but I rarely hear about these issues with nuance. So thanks for that!
And yes to above comments. There is a serious lack of resources even in the most pro-choice, feminist-loving areas.
>As a general rule, our pro-life movement is less fanatics bombing clinics and more middle-class women passive-aggressively disapproving of things. Especially other women.
So true! Probably the most honest description of feminist politics in Australia I’ve ever read.
Very interesting! Sounds like your mother is a very genuine and caring person.