Triggers: Abortion, Reproductive Choice, Italian Pastry (if you’re triggered by cheese pies, please write me), The Exorcist, sexual content, #metoo moment, ketchup (happily, other condiments not mentioned), possible blasphemy.
Always Curious, Always With An Opinion
My mother was curious about everything, and she was herself a curious mixture of progressive and traditional values. She was certainly a product of her time, but even as a child she read widely (not just Cosmo and its ilk, as implied in an earlier post), following the progress of World War II by reading the daily newspapers as a child under 10. Her sociopolitical engagement from childhood
onward ensured that she outstripped the mantle of housewife-and-mother that she had assumed when she married at age 21. She was conversant in current events, trivia, history, entertainment (movies AND television. She would have LOVED Netflix…), current books, even sports. She had a wicked sense of humor, and she delighted in the unusual, the deviation from the expected. She was, in general, kind, although her outward kindliness masked darkness and a world of pain that emerged in mini-Passion Plays co-starring my teen-aged self. Her early and persistent interest in psychiatry found an outlet in pithy and well-aimed barbs that unerringly found their target in me, releasing their slow-acting poisons that would blossom and take up residence in my psyche.
But as I was saying, she really was very kind, both in spite of and in reaction to abuses, psychological and physical, that she endured in her own youth. Perhaps her interest in people’s stories was a remedy for her own demons; so much easier and more pleasant to immerse yourself in someone else’s story! But her fascination seemed genuine. She loved biography, not just in books but in real life where she would draw out a person’s story like pulling a strand of yarn from a sweater. And she would remember that person’s story in excruciating detail, even years later, pulling it out and retelling, fingering that old strand and remembering, honouring the story it told, to illustrate some very real, very human point.
She did not hesitate, either, to insert herself and play her own pivotal role in individuals’ stories, even sticky, thorny situations. This played out most notably, in my memory, in the 1960s, when she was a conductor on the informal Cincinnati underground railroad of women seeking a safe abortion. I was very young when she first told me of how one procured a safe abortion in those dark days, days which now loom close in our rearview mirror once again. If you don’t know how it worked back then for whatever reasons – youth, lack of need, lack of access, your not existing at that time – I’ll break it down for you: a pregnant woman seeking an elective abortion required signed affadavits from no less than three psychiatrists attesting to the emotional frailty of the woman and the psychological damage that was certain to ensue – i.e., she “would need to be designated as suicidal”, my mom would clarify, if this latest pregnancy continued to term. My mother had a list of the bad psychiatrists in the city who would sign off on these requirements. When I was a little older I wondered if those psychiatrists were just consciously helping to circumvent the system, but my mother said with surety that that was not the case. She loaned or gave women the money needed for the hospital procedure, arranged the particulars (including necessary childcare), and enabled many women to exercise control over their own reproduction before it became the law of the land (in the United States) in 1973.
Saturdays Off From Grad School
I am and always have been avidly pro-choice. I’ve spent time on the front lines in Boston (my boyfriend-now-husband at my side most of that time) working to ensure clinic access. This involved getting up pre-dawn on many, many Saturdays instead of sleeping in and eating Italian pastry (never fear, gentle reader: I caught up on my pastry consumption on Sundays). My husband and I found creative ways to accomplish our mandate of getting women who wanted to avail themselves of the clinic’s health services – not just abortion services, but more general health care, as well – safely into the clinic. This entailed bodily protecting them as we ran them through the gauntlet of anti-choice people. These anti-choice protesters, drawn from the “Christian Right” included, amidst lots of men and older women well-past their own reproductive days, a few young women in their teens and early 20s. We would recognize these young female protesters when occasionally they came in as clients for their own abortions, only to reappear outside the clinic in following weeks once again as protesters. Of course, we would never ‘out’ them as the hypocrites they were: ‘Privacy’, don’tcha know…. These protesters used religious sanctimony as their first weapon of choice (the lethal weaponry was just starting to appear) and in response, Michael and I employed baseball cards and National Geographic magazines to counter their harassment tactics. There we would be, escorting a frightened young woman through a corridor of hostile anti-choice people who’d be screaming accusations of murder and of Jesus’ disappointment. Michael and I would echo their body language and tone, trying to cancel out their vitriol with humour: for example, if someone was hollering scripture at a woman (who might just have been entering the clinic for birth control, who knows), then Michael would read out baseball statistics in counterpoint to the biblical recitation.
Show us your 1956 Life magazine photos of a 22-week fetus and hurl religious imprecations at a scared clinic client? I’LL show you great photos of ring-tailed lemurs, their striped tails held jauntily erect as they strutted about their Madagascar stomping grounds. I remember one woman, trying to shrink into herself to make herself as small a target as possible as she was being escorted through the angry crowd. The shouting horde of protesters hurled insults and threats at her, practically spitting in her face. As she was guided inside by two escorts, she did a double-take at my lemur picture and burst out laughing. Those were great moments and were appreciated by clients and clinic escorts alike.
Being pro-choice is a huge deal to me – personally, politically and as a public health official (spiritually; no longer as a job description); I believe that the right to privacy and reproductive self-determination is key to women’s health and the well-being of any society; there are reams and reams of data supporting – no, proving this. Even if you think abortion is wrong, you can be pro-choice – to me, being pro-choice reflects respect and support for the well-being of women.
So Nice To Meet You! Now Let Me Show You Something…
That said, my mother remains the only person I’ve ever met who was not just pro-choice but actually pro-abortion. When I brought my boyfriend-now-husband home to meet my family for the first time, my mom met us at the airport, brought us back to the house, and the three of sat down with a cup of tea to get acquainted. I reiterate: Michael had never met my parents before we landed that evening at the Cincinnati Airport. We sat in the kitchen nursing our tea, and at some point I ran upstairs to get something. Finding herself alone with Michael, my mom pounced. She grabbed a paper napkin and demonstrated to him, using the napkin and a bit of ketchup as props, what a first-term elective abortion looks like: “It’s just a bit of tissue and a little blood, that’s all it is!” Having assisted in a few early term elective abortions myself I can confirm that yes, that is really what it looks like, although the reality is much less viscous and nowhere near as delicious-looking. Also, viewing actual POC (‘products of conception’, what the aborted embryonic tissue is called) don’t inspire in me a hunger for onion rings. Thankfully, Michael was not scared off by this impromptu let’s-get-acquainted session and we finished our visit to my family still as a couple. (He remembers this first-meeting with my mother vividly and these are his recollections, corroborated many times over through my own experiences with my mother.)
Further, my mother proclaimed many times over the years, including in the presence of company, that if one of her daughters were to get pregnant (presumably before we were married), she “would drag [us], kicking and screaming, to the abortionist!”. Thanks for the Choice, Mom. The woman had opinions.
She also had stories, a few of which have been related via My Mother Part 1.
Walking The Walk
Michael often recalls his first meeting with my mother and her demo. It is part of our lore as a couple, and it also informs my own memory of my mother’s no-nonsense approach to life. One of her favourite axioms was “Don’t focus on what ‘should be’; focus on ‘what is‘” and she always did, through to her dying day, doing whatever she actually could do and not fretting over (in any visible way) what she thought was a fruitless battle. If fighting for women’s agency involved, for her, picking up a paper napkin and a little bit of Heinz ketchup to create a narrative that helped her to, er, explain her mission and aid her fight, then I respect the addition of the ketchup bottle and paper products to her arsenal. She feared neither condemnation nor condiment.
When I took up the fight in Boston for reproductive choice as a Clinic Escort and Peacekeeper (already, so Canadian!) in my own small way, twenty-five years after my mother’s tour of duty, the anti-choice movement was just starting to employ more serious, even deadly, weapons against women and our right to privacy. In my early days of those years of clinic protests, there was just shouting, screaming, physical blocking of access. Later, of course, this anti-choice ‘Christian’ Right brought physical intimidation and interference, guns and firebombs – so Christian! – to the clinics, and they combined these with their hypocrisy, invoking Jesus’ name even as they injured or killed doctors, health care providers, bystanders. I believe that Jesus would have been inside the clinic, assisting in terminating a pregnancy that was undesired, holding a woman’s hand as she made what was certainly a well-considered and agonizing decision based on whatever basis: economic or other hardship; compromise of personal opportunity and potential; birth control failure; rape; incest; health/mortality concerns of mother and/or embryo or fetus, to name a few reasons – or even just the simple decision that bringing her pregnancy to term was wrong for her. Jesus has always sounded to me like a man of great sense as well as great compassion, and I believe that he truly cared about people on this earth. I don’t think that he would have appreciated the thinly-veiled desire of the anti-choice faction to yoke women to poverty and powerlessness once more through forced reproduction. I am dismayed at the support the anti-choice folks have found in government, and at the effects of the de facto elimination of women’s reproductive choice that are already very much in evidence. I am heartened by news I heard this week, that most Democratic candidates still vying for candidacy in the U.S. presidential 2020 race are finally opening their mouths and committing to women’s choice, to safeguarding access to means by which women can exercise that choice.
I wish I were braver. Despite my considerable privilege, I am quite risk averse. What I have learned through my time on the frontlines at Boston’s clinics, however, is that I’m not averse to getting beat up when I am defending something important to me. Unfortunately, the other side has, long ago, lowered their bar to the point of non-existence when deciding what is morally acceptable; this has resulted in the accretion of danger to my and others’ safety. The personal risks involved in fighting for social change may evolve, but what is at stake justifies whatever is needed to inform meaningful change: in the fight over abortion rights, this is a Red Queen’s Race, where both sides are running as fast as they can just to stay in the same place.
My mother understood the risks she ran, from incurring my father’s ire if he found out about her covert activities, to social censure, arrest and possible loss of her children. These were the threats she faced at that time, real threats employed to keep women of her day under control. But, undeterred, she saved her energy for what mattered. She didn’t allow herself to be distracted by things that were better dealt with through humour and/or ketchup, and she made a world of difference to a small group of women in her own corner of the world. When I think of The Best Of My Mother, this is what I remember. She taught me well.
I Started the Prozac In Paris 