Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (30 page)

But as good parents, it also seems reasonable to wonder why a girl who cannot go on a school field trip without our knowledge can end a pregnancy without it.

The Supreme Court found succor in a Minnesota law that provides
for something called “judicial bypass.” If you are fifteen and want to have an abortion but cannot tell your parents—the law provides that both must be informed, not simply one—you can tell it to the judge. You come to the clinic, have an exam and counseling. Then you go to the courthouse, meet with a public defender and go to the judge’s chambers, to be questioned about your condition, your family, your plans for the future.

If the judge agrees, you can have the abortion.

The Court did not find this an undue burden for a frightened fifteen-year-old.

Tina Welsh, who runs the only abortion clinic in Duluth, remembers the first girl she took to the courthouse when the law went into effect. The young woman did not want to notify her father; he was in jail for having sex with her sister. Ms. Welsh remembers taking girls up in the freight elevator because they had neighbors and relations working in the courthouse. You can just hear it:

“Hi, sweetheart, how are you? What brings you here?”

So much for the right to privacy.

But Ms. Welsh best remembers the young woman who asked, “How long will the jury be out?” She thought she was going on trial for the right to have an abortion.

Much of this debate centers, like the first sentence of
Anna Karenina
, on happy families, and unhappy ones. Abortion-rights activists say parental notification assumes a world of dutiful daughters and supportive parents, instead of one riven by alcoholism, incest, and abuse. Those opposed to abortion say it is unthinkable that a minor child should have such a procedure without her parents’ knowledge.

But I remember something between the poles of cruelty and communication. I remember girls who wanted their parents to have certain illusions about them. Not girls who feared beatings, or were pregnant by their mother’s boyfriend. Just girls who wanted to remain good girls in the minds that mattered to them most.

Ms. Welsh remembers one mother who refused to let her husband know their daughter was having an abortion. “Twenty-five years ago,” the woman said, “we made a promise to one another. I would never have to clean a fish, and he would never have to know if his daughter was pregnant.”

If parental-notification laws are really designed to inhibit abortion—and I suspect they are—Ms. Welsh’s experience suggests they are not terribly successful. Not one teenager who came to the Duluth clinic changed her mind, even in the face of public defenders and judicial questioning. If the point is to facilitate family communication, that’s been something of a failure, too. In the five years the Minnesota law was in effect, seven thousand minors had abortions. Half of those teenagers chose to face a stranger in his chambers rather than tell both parents.

But perhaps there is another purpose to all this. If adolescents want their parents to have illusions about them, parents need those illusions badly. These laws provide them. They mandate communication. If she has nothing to tell you, then it must mean nothing is wrong.

Ah, yes—I remember that.

These are difficult questions because they involve not-quite adults facing adult decisions. The best case is the daughter who decides, with supportive parents, whether to end a pregnancy or have a baby. The worst case is the girl who must notify the parent who impregnated her. Or the worst case is Becky Bell, a seventeen-year-old Indianapolis girl who died after an illegal abortion. She could not bear to tell her parents she was pregnant.

In the middle are girls who have been told by the Supreme Court that they must trade. They can keep a good-girl persona at home, but in exchange they must surrender some of their privacy and dignity. That is what adults want, and that is what we will have. We will take our illusions. The teenagers will take the freight elevator.

THE NUNS’ STORY
September 16, 1990

Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey are no longer nuns. They did not leave the convent as so many others did, finding fulfillment within the smaller circle of marriage and mother-hood. These two spent years finding reasons to stay: to serve the poor, to fight for social justice. They resigned from the Sisters of Notre Dame in 1988, four years after a full-page advertisement appeared in
The New York Times
under this headline:

A D
IVERSITY OF
O
PINIONS
R
EGARDING
A
BORTION
E
XISTS AMONG
C
OMMITTED
C
ATHOLICS
.

Ninety-seven people signed it.

Barbara Ferraro and Patricia Hussey were two of them.

They have written a book about what happened after that day, and what their lives were like before it. It is called
No Turning Back
, and it is sure to be seen as an attack on the Church. That oversimplifies its most important message, contained in an anecdote about Barbara’s encounter at a poor parish in Massachusetts. A woman blurted out, “Sister, I had an abortion five years
ago.” Barbara Ferraro was stunned. Finally she said, “Tell me about it.”

Tell me about it. Tell me about the thing I have never experienced and cannot begin to understand. Tell me, as one of the girls did at the juvenile home where Pat Hussey worked, about the biker’s initiation rite, the gang rape that left you pregnant. Tell me, as that woman told Barbara, of the abortion when your marriage was falling apart and the children you already had were as many as you could support. Tell me about the lives I haven’t led, the demons I’ve never faced.

Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey stayed in the convent because they saw it changing. When Barbara entered in 1962, she was given a habit that left only her face and hands uncovered. Her hair was shorn, her name was changed, and she was given a whip to discipline herself. By the time she resigned, she was wearing slacks and running a homeless shelter.

In between she learned that “Tell me about it” would never be the motto of the Church to which she had given her life. Those nuns who signed the ad were given a choice: Retract or face dismissal. Barbara and Pat were eventually confronted by a Vatican representative and an apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Washington. The former pinched Barbara’s cheek and told her she reminded him of his grandmother. The latter said they would have a dialogue. “But I must insist,” he said, “that after our time together you must put in writing that you support and adhere to the Roman Catholic teaching on abortion.”

They couldn’t do it. They had had too many women tell them about it.

The Church is not a democracy. The editorial-page editor of
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, David Boldt, referred to it several months ago as “un-American,” and was vilified by Catholics, from parishioners to cardinals. What he meant was that it is not democratic. The people cannot vote on Church positions. The decisions are made by the men at the top.

They are uniquely unqualified to face the most pressing issues
of their time. Birth control, the ordination of women, permission for priests to marry, abortion—all arise from sexuality and femininity. The primacy of the priesthood rests upon celibacy and masculinity. The Catholic bishops in this country decided last week to postpone indefinitely a final vote on a pastoral letter on women’s concerns. It is born to fail, a précis on women written by men who haven’t lived with one since they left their mother’s house.

Last week, too, Judge David H. Souter was questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Souter archaeology,” they had been calling it the last time I was in Washington, and they had come up with barely a pottery shard on abortion. During the hearings Judge Souter said two things that captured my attention. He said as a young man he once spent two hours in a college dorm room talking to a young woman who was desperate to end a pregnancy. And he said, “What you may properly ask is whether I am open to listen.”

Tell me about it.

Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey judged the hierarchy of the Catholic Church on that basis. “The Vatican’s version of Catholicism is a culture of oppression,” they write, “a church that is only about itself.” Those are harsh words. These are harsh times. And faced with harsh laws of Church and of state, women like these will continue to speak, no matter what the consequences.

Barbara Ferraro and Pat Hussey shouldn’t have been nuns in the first place.

They should have been priests.

OFFENSIVE PLAY
January 24, 1991

On Sunday the Super Bowl will be played in Tampa, and so, inevitably, my thoughts turn to abortion.

If that seems like a preposterous connection, it is only because you have not seen
Champions for Life
, the video featuring scenes from the New York Giants’ last Super Bowl victory and six members of that championship team talking about their blocking, their passing, and their opposition to legal abortion. It might be reminiscent of
Saturday Night Live
if it weren’t so offensive.

“The skies were sunny, the temperature a comfortable seventy-six degrees,” says the narrator as we-came-to-play music is heard in the background. Fans wave pompons. Players take to the field. “What follows are a few highlights from the game and some comments from the champions.”

Mark Bavaro catches a pass, then appears in street clothes to say: “At the end of the game all the Giants players left the field champions. Now with the abortion death squads allowed to run
rampant through our country, I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day.”

George Martin sacks John Elway in the end zone. His thoughts? “I’m glad I was able to help turn the tide in the Super Bowl with that safety. I hope and pray that the Supreme Court has begun to turn the tide against the legalized destruction of babies allowed by the
Roe
v.
Wade
decision. That infamous decision said that unborn babies have no rights just as the shameful Dred Scott decision said that black people have no rights.”

And Phil Simms, musing on his record-breaking day: “When I woke up the next morning and read those statistics in the paper, I was very pleased and proud. But there was another statistic in the paper that morning that didn’t get the same coverage the Super Bowl got. I guess they thought it wasn’t very important. It was just a little item that stated there are an average of forty-four hundred babies killed every day by abortion.”

I’ve left out Phil McConkey, Chris Godfrey, and Jim Burt. They’ve left out women; the word is not used once during the ten-minute film. But you get the idea. Abortion and football—you just can’t separate them. The video ends with the question “If the abortionists had their way, which two of these Giants might never have had the chance to be champions?”

It had never occurred to me that this was a central issue in the debate over reproductive freedom.

Wellington Mara, an owner of the team, was the guiding spirit behind
Champions for Life
. He is one of its producers and says he was largely responsible for financing it. The American Life League, an anti-abortion group based in Virginia, which distributes the video, has sent it to hundreds of organizations. Their records show that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles alone bought almost three hundred copies, some to be shown in schools to kids who may think the words “quarterback” and “god” are synonymous. The players who appear volunteered.

That’s no surprise. We’ve become accustomed to movie actors and bass guitarists who believe that notoriety has given them a
flair for geopolitics. But whether or not a pregnant woman should be allowed to end a pregnancy is a serious, complicated subject. Using football wrapped around self-righteous bromides to sell opposition to legal abortion is a little like using sex to sell cigarettes. It’s permissible. And it’s unseemly. Like the moment in the video when Jim Burt holds his young son on his shoulders and the kid says, in a way I assume is meant to sound unscripted, “It’s great to be alive.”