Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace (16 page)

When I scrolled through documents on the Internet about Rocketship’s abnormality, my eyes skipped past the reports of newborns with no apparent malformations and children of normal intelligence, to the ones describing predispositions to cancers of the kidneys and urinary tract or instances of psychomotor retardation. I looked up words like “dolichocephaly” (having a long, narrow head) and “kyphosis” (hunchback). I did calculations in my mind of what I could tolerate—physical malformations, fine. Who cares? I measure five feet—I bet there are parents in the world who’d be horrified at the prospect of having a child doomed never to grow taller than that. But developmental delay. That shook me to my core. Mental retardation. I couldn’t go there.

Michael, on the other hand, always feels lucky. He is an eternal
optimist. The glass is not merely half-full; it is a crystal goblet, a chalice of the gods, and its nectar, ambrosia. Were he ever to take the Internet happiness survey on which I scored a dismal 30 percent, he would score in the 99th percentile; I know this because I took the test for him, and while I know the results are only really an accurate reflection of what
I
think of his mental state, I am confident that I answered the questions as he would have. When Michael heard the statistical possibility of Rocketship being unharmed by his genetic condition, he breathed a sigh of relief. “We’re safe,” he said.

How could two people with such opposing reactions possibly reach an agreement on what to do?

Michael and I clung to Sophie and Zeke. I remember sitting on the couch, the two of them draped over our laps. I could feel Rocketship kicking inside me, his perfect little toes prodding the belly that had, until that moment, sheltered him so well. I concentrated on Zeke’s silky skin beneath my fingers, on the smell of Sophie’s hair, at once sweet and musty, like a puppy’s. I pressed close to my husband and clutched my children and tried frantically to convince myself not to do what I knew, almost immediately, that I would.

For the next few days I continued my research. I found a therapist who specialized in people considering genetic termination, and for a long and anguished hour she tried to help us decide. We sought counsel, spiritual and emotional, from our rabbi. I talked to my friends, to my mother, to my mother-in-law. I e-mailed with a man whose son was born with the condition and was now a perfectly normal, bright, and cheerful child. One of my sisters-in-law knew someone in Israel who had received this diagnosis, and early one morning I talked to her. Her doctors had supported her decision
to terminate. Their research indicated a higher chance of abnormality than did the single published study.

I found an Internet support group called A Heartbreaking Choice, and the founders, whose heroic generosity I will never forget, in spite of everything that followed, gave me the Pyrrhic but nonetheless tangible comfort of knowing that I was not the first mother in the world to contemplate ending her baby’s life.

Finally, at dawn on the third day, after another sleepless night, I picked up the phone and dialed information in New York City, hoping that the research scientists who authored that single major study would live in the city where their university’s medical school was located, and that they would be listed in the phone book.

Miraculously, I found one of them. I caught her at her breakfast table. This impossibly kind woman did not hang up on the stranger who disturbed her privacy. She seemed neither shocked nor angry when I asked, in a voice strangled with suppressed tears, what I should do. The doctor was kind, but she told me that she had no information beyond what had been published. She had not continued further in her research. She could not give me a medical key to unlock my terrible puzzle. But, she said, she could talk to me as a parent. She told me that she had a son, a teenager now, who was mentally retarded. “He’s the light of my life,” she said. “I love him desperately.”

I listened, wondering if I could ever be such a self-abnegating mother. Such a
Good
Mother.

“But if I had to do it all over again,” she continued, “I would have an abortion.”

I remember holding the telephone in my hand, my breath caught in my throat. I remember the gray light of the kitchen, the
sun not yet risen. I remember the sound of her voice, and of my crying. I thanked her—for her generosity but, more important, for her brutal honesty. I knew what I wanted to do.

But as certain as I was that we should end the pregnancy, Michael was equally certain that we should not. For the next day we debated, never once with anger, but always holding each other’s hands, weeping, apologizing. And in the end, my beloved optimist of a husband said to me, “I think, really, that we have no choice. If we do what you want, if we have the abortion, and it turns out that Rocketship would have been healthy after all, I can live with your mistake. I can love you, no matter what. But if we do what I want, if we have the baby, and it turns out he’s not okay, it’s too massive of an error. The ramifications are too lasting, not just for us, but for Sophie and Zeke. My mistake would burden them for the rest of their lives with the care of their brother, and burden us so much our relationship might be in danger.”

I have never loved my husband so much as at that moment, when he sacrificed himself and his happiness to me. When he decided to love me even though I was not strong enough to give birth to Rocketship. When he decided to make a choice that was to him not merely incomprehensible but horrible. When he proved how capacious and forgiving is his love.

There was a single clinic that would perform the procedure, an hour’s drive away. There was also a doctor in my obstetrician’s practice who would consider doing it, but she was on vacation that week. And then there was a man, another hero of this least heroic of stories, a physician who had spent his career bringing babies into the world, and who had decided that what the world needed, what our community was sorely missing, was a doctor who would, with a sure hand, and a kind heart, ease them out. By the time we became his patients, he was exclusively performing abortions,
one of those doctors whom pro-life advocates like to call mass murderers, and whose homes they stake out, whose windows they shatter with rocks and sometimes bullets.

Sitting in his office, I couldn’t stop crying. Finally, he reached behind his desk and pulled a large stack of photographs off his shelf. The pictures were of babies. Babies of every color, shape, and size. For a moment, I wondered how he could be so cruel. Then he asked me, “Do you know what those are?”

I shook my head.

“Those are the babies born to women who were once my patients. Look at them.”

I leafed through the stack. I wasn’t the first to have cried over these pictures. Many of them were already marked with stains from other people’s tears.

“Every one of those babies is healthy. Every one is wanted. Every one is loved,” he said. “And you will have another baby. A healthy baby whom you will love.”

“Do you promise?” I asked, as if he had the capacity to grant the wish. As if he were the one spinning the awful roulette wheel.

“Yes,” he said. “I promise.”

On our way out, he took Michael aside, put his hands on his shoulders, looked him in the eye, and said, “I will take care of her for you.”

That night I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed with my hands on my belly and felt the baby kick. I felt him wriggle inside me, rolling and flipping, like a little seal in the ocean of my body. I felt sad and guilty, but I was just so glad he was moving. It was the last I would feel of him. The last I would know him. Fully aware of the horrible irony, I tried to savor every one of his last hours.

The next morning we went to the hospital’s outpatient surgical clinic. While they prepared me for surgery, Michael met our
rabbi in the hospital’s chapel. They prayed, I think, but mostly Michael cried. He’d been trying so hard not to let me see him cry, as if only my tears were permissible. As if mine meant more than his. As if he was not suffering as much as—or more than—I was.

They gave me general anesthesia, and before the lights in my brain dimmed, I asked the doctor to please, please make sure the baby would feel no pain, that Rocketship would be dead before it all began.

The medical procedure my obstetrician chose to do was not dilation and extraction, the one that pro-life activists have managed to convince the country to refer to as partial-birth abortion. It was a dilation and evacuation, but the actual physical process is no less horrifying, and if horror is the justification for the partial birth abortion ban, then the legality of the dilation and evacuation will inevitably be called into question someday.

When women of my mother’s generation fought for the right to choose, they did not need to confront the ugly physical reality. But women of my generation, women who hang strips of grainy ultrasound photographs on our fridges, women who watch on three-dimensional monitors first flickering heartbeats at six weeks, then babies who suck their thumbs and wiggle their toes at four months, cannot deny it. When we choose to have an abortion, we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me to be hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.

Since my experience with Rocketship, I have come to question most things about the abortion debate, except my commitment to the right to privacy and to choice. In the deepest throes of my pain, my mother, trying to comfort me, told me that it was nothing more than a fetus, not a baby, just a glorified bundle of
cells. Cells, I said, with fingers and toes, a tiny but visible penis, arms and legs and elbows and knees, and a brain, damaged, perhaps, or simply unlucky. Even though the Supreme Court in
Roe v. Wade
specifically declined to rule on the question, the debates about abortion often degenerate into an argument about when life begins. Does it begin at conception, at birth, at viability? Before Rocketship, I never questioned the terms of this debate. But now I worry that if all this hinges on the question of when life begins, then our right to terminate our pregnancies will be lost.

Although I know that others feel differently, when I chose to have the abortion, I feel I chose to end my baby’s life. A baby, not a fetus. A life, not a vague potentiality. As guilty and miserable as I felt, the only way I could survive was to confront my responsibility. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.

I know my opinions on the subject are harsh and unpopular. Many mothers who have gone through what I have shy away even from the term “abortion.” As if merely having once wanted this baby so badly makes choosing to end its life something different.

In the weeks following my abortion, I spent hours of every day on the Web site A Heartbreaking Choice, reading other women’s stories, seeking and giving support. What drove me away, finally, was the language of discourse on the Web site. Women there did not have abortions. They made heartbreaking choices. They had “AHCs.” As in, “After my AHC it took six months to get pregnant again.” Or “My religious Catholic mother hasn’t spoken to me since my AHC.” The word “abortion” was forbidden, as was the word “death,” and the word “anger.”

But I was so very angry. Angry at fate, angry at myself. I felt like that epitome of evil: a mother who has killed her child. Whatever maternal crimes I had committed before were nothing
to this one, mere whitecaps to this tsunami. If ever I felt like I earned the title of this book, it was then. I was not just a Bad Mother; I was the worst of mothers.

I woke from the anesthesia absolutely certain that Rocketship’s collection of triplicate chromosomes would have done him no harm. I was sure that if he had had a mother with more faith and courage, he would have been perfectly normal. This certainty was hardly a surprise; a pessimist is committed with all her heart to the notion that the worst will happen, and the worst that could happen at that moment was that I had killed my baby with no cause or justification.

These feelings were ugly—too ugly, it turns out, for the Inter net. I frightened the other members of A Heartbreaking Choice with my shame and anger. I made them uncomfortable—especially the many pro-life women among them—by insisting that we accept the term “abortion” for what we had done. There is no denying, I wrote in my posts, that this is what we did. We cannot hide from the fact that when Congress or the courts restrict abortion, we are the women they are talking about. Our refusal to confront this truth will be the undoing of the women who come after us. If we allow the language of the debate to encompass only the experience of those women who abort for what others like to call “convenience,” and they themselves know as necessity, then we risk losing this precious right altogether. How many of us, I asked, would want to have been forced to carry these babies to term?

In the end, I and a small group of like-minded, bitter women with black senses of humor and hyper-developed political consciousnesses went off to form our own support group. A group that we, in all our bitterness and black humor, called the Dead Baby Club. Our club grew larger and larger. Once something like this
happens to you, you learn that among the happy community of Bugaboo strollers and preschool picnics is a secret society of loss, of miscarriage and stillbirth, genetic termination and SIDS, like a single black thread winding through a length of white silk. The club has more members than you would believe.

The Dead Baby Club met regularly. We worked our way through the restaurants of the Bay Area, weeping in one after the other, frightening waiters and driving away customers. We shared an embarrassing fury at pregnant women, whom we considered ridiculously naive. We used to joke that we would take our lunch one day to our obstetrician’s office and tell our stories in the waiting room, just to teach the smug pregnant ladies a lesson. Yeah, maybe you’ll have a baby. And maybe you won’t.

This anger was a kind of insanity, one of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, I suppose, that was alleviated in the end only by becoming pregnant again. One by one most of the women in the Dead Baby Club got pregnant. I did, after five long months, during which I sank into a despair unlike any I experienced before or since. Although none of us ever again approached pregnancy with the blissful hopefulness of an unburdened mother, we all managed to pass through and out of our fury. After a while we were able once again to express congratulations to other pregnant women, rather than issuing dire and dour warnings.