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NY Times Op-Ed, June 24, 2019
The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade
By John Irving
Mr. Irving is a novelist and a screenwriter.
Amid the anti-abortion measures being pushed through state legislatures,
consider the mazy history of abortion in the United States. Women,
capable of determining and managing their reproductive rights, have been
undermined by men in power before.
Prior to the 1840s, abortion was widespread and not illegal in our
country. In the time of the Puritans, America’s deeply religious
founding fathers, abortion was allowed until the fetus was “quick” —
when the woman could feel the fetus move. Before modern diagnostic
ultrasound, abortion was permissible beyond the first trimester — up to
four or five months. Our founding fathers got this right; the choice to
have an abortion or a child belonged to the woman.
Beginning in the 1840s, and continuing over decades, abortion was
outlawed state by state, becoming illegal everywhere in the United
States by 1900 — until 1973, when the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision
held that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion. For more
than two centuries, after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, abortion
was largely permitted. Why was it prohibited for almost a century?
In the 1830s, women having babies at lying-in hospitals ran a far
greater risk of dying from puerperal sepsis than women having babies at
home. With the help of midwives, women had been having babies and
abortions at home — since colonial times. Had midwives been as busy
performing abortions as delivering babies? Beginning in the 1840s,
doctors sought to gain control of the reproduction business. Doctors
were establishing their new profession; midwives and homeopaths were
their competition. But why did doctors lobby for abortion to be illegal?
What was their logic? Did doctors underestimate how great the need for
abortion was? We know what the doctors wanted, and they achieved it;
they became the arbiters of women’s reproductive health care. We don’t
know the doctors’ reasons for making abortion illegal. In the 1840s, the
fetus wasn’t yet sacred. Fetal life was still defined by “quickening” —
when the woman felt the fetus move, not before the fourth or fifth
month. From the 1840s to 1900, we know the results of what the doctors
did — not their thoughts.
One job of a society with a social conscience is to rescue its citizens
who are trapped, who are painted into a corner. I see my job as a
fiction writer with a social conscience as the opposite. As a
storyteller, I look for worst-case scenarios; my job is to trap my
characters. I began “The Cider House Rules,” my sixth novel, in the
early 1980s. I purposely wrote a historical novel, beginning in the
1920s, when abortion was illegal, unsafe and (for the most part)
unavailable. Maine was one of the first states to make abortion illegal;
I put the orphanage I called St. Cloud’s in Maine. I purposely painted
my protagonist, Homer Wells, into a corner. Homer is an orphan; his
several adoptions don’t work out. Homer keeps coming back to the
orphanage — St. Cloud’s is his only home. Dr. Larch, the orphanage
physician (and abortionist), teaches Homer to be a doctor. In Dr.
Larch’s opinion, Homer has near-perfect obstetrical and gynecological
procedure. But Homer doesn’t want to perform abortions. He’s an orphan;
his mother let him live.
Homer has no argument with Dr. Larch’s decision to give women what they
want, but Homer has a personal reason (and a good one) not to perform
abortions. Here’s the corner Homer is painted into: How can Homer not
feel obligated to help women, when women can’t get help from anyone
else? If women have no choice, how can doctors have a choice? Homer will
leave St. Cloud’s; he refuses to perform abortions. What he will
encounter, in the world outside the orphanage, is a woman who can’t get
help from anyone else. The death of Dr. Larch will bring Homer back to
the orphanage — this time, to be the physician (and the abortionist) at
St. Cloud’s. In a no-choice world, Homer is trapped.
It took 14 years to make the film of “The Cider House Rules.” I won an
Oscar for best adapted screenplay. Over time, it’s more meaningful to me
that the movie also won a Maggie Award — named after Planned
Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, in recognition of “exceptional
achievement in support of reproductive rights.”
I respect your personal reasons not to have an abortion — no one is
forcing you to have one. I respect your choice. I’m pro-choice — often
called pro-abortion by the anti-abortion crusaders, although no one is
pro-abortion. What’s unequal about the argument is the choice; the
difference between pro-life and pro-choice is the choice. Pro-life
proponents have no qualms about forcing women to go through childbirth —
they give women no choice.
Before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973, the opposition to
abortion wasn’t widely referred to as right to life. Pope Pius XII used
the “right to life” term in a 1951 papal encyclical — an “Address to
Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession.” “Every human being, even
the child in the womb, has the right to life directly from God and not
from his parents, not from any society or human authority,” the pope
told the midwives. Poor midwives — first doctors stop them from helping
women, then the pope. I must remind the Roman Catholic Church of the
First Amendment to the United States Constitution: “Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof.” In other words, we are free to practice the religion
of our choice, and we are protected from having someone else’s religion
practiced on us. Freedom of religion in the United States also means
freedom from religion.
The “pro-life” term was adopted by anti-abortion crusaders after the Roe
v. Wade decision. The anti-abortion cause didn’t promote itself as
“pro-life” until the more punitive-sounding “anti-abortion” label
failed. In 1976, with the passing of the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the
use of federal funds for most abortions, opposition to abortion gained
support among Republicans. The Christian right was on the rise; their
socially conservative policies are inseparable from today’s Republican
Party. In 1980, aided by the Baptist minister Jerry Falwell’s Moral
Majority, the pro-life zealots took control of the Republican Party’s
platform committee. Four anti-abortion presidents followed — Ronald
Reagan, George H. W. and George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Isn’t it as
clear now as it was in the Reagan years? Aren’t the same people who
sacralize the fetus generally opposed to any meaningful welfare for
unwanted children and unmarried mothers?
The prevailing impetus to oppose abortion is to punish the woman who
doesn’t want the child. The sacralizing of the fetus is a ploy. How can
“life” be sacred (and begin at six weeks, or at conception), if a
child’s life isn’t sacred after it’s born? Clearly, a woman’s life is
never sacred; as clearly, a woman has no reproductive rights. The Roman
Catholic Church, and many evangelical and fundamentalist churches,
willfully subject women to mandatory childbirth and motherhood —
procreation is deemed a woman’s primary purpose and function. I’m not
overstating. In his 1951 “Address to Midwives,” Pope Pius XII states
that “the procreation and upbringing of a new life” is the primary end
of marriage.
When “The Cider House Rules” was published, some of my younger friends
and fellow feminists thought it was quaint that I’d written a historical
novel about abortion. They meant: now that abortion rights were secure,
now that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. At the time, I tried to
say this nicely: “If you think Roe v. Wade is safe, you’re one of the
reasons it isn’t.” Not surprisingly, my older women friends — women who
were old enough to have had sex before 1973 — knew better than to
imagine that Roe v. Wade would ever be safe. Men and women have to keep
making the case for women’s reproductive rights; women have been making
the case for years, but more men need to speak up.
Of an unmarried woman or girl who got pregnant, people of my
grandparents’ generation used to say: “She is paying the piper.”
Meaning, she deserves what she gets — namely, to give birth to a child.
That cruelty is the abiding impetus behind the dishonestly named
right-to-life movement. Pro-life always was (and remains) a marketing
term. Whatever the anti-abortion crusaders call themselves, they don’t
care what happens to an unwanted child — not after the child is born —
and they’ve never cared about the mother.
John Irving is writing his 15th novel, and is adapting his fourth novel,
“The World According to Garp,” for television.
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