Who Let the Dogs In? (57 page)

Liz was a doctor; that was her life. Of course she did abortions: When did Liz Karlin ever not do what a patient needed? But something happened after our trek, something I wish I had taken more time to understand. When they started picketing her clinic, hounding her at home, threatening her, making the horrible phone calls late at night—well, as any fool could have predicted, when the going got tough, Liz got tougher. She had to. She started helping more and more women who needed abortions because where else could they go?

Shalala says that just a few weeks before her death, Liz’s greatest concern was that “they” would win, the people who had made her life such a hell, people so persuaded of their own moral rectitude they had no idea of the incredible courage and compassion that drove a sunny, funny lady with black curls and extraordinary energy to keep helping the people who needed her.

One finds a tendency (born of tiredness, I think) to excuse those who commit acts of terrorism in the name of “life” on the grounds that they feel so passionately about the issue—as though passion were an excuse. Backing down on abortion rights because those who oppose them are “passionate” is simply rewarding terrorism.

Why should it take as much strength and courage as Liz Karlin possessed to allow women to decide whether they will bear children? The only question is: Who decides? A woman and her doctor, or some set of fanatics with no knowledge of the woman or her circumstances? I know these are old arguments, and that we are all tired of hearing them, but it seems to me we owe it to Liz Karlin to make the arguments again, with all the passion they deserve, with all the passion it cost Liz.

If you believe abortion is wrong, don’t have one. No one can force you to have an abortion. By what right do these few fanatics think they can force a woman to have a child? The child is not their responsibility. They bear none of the risks or the consequences. There are always two lives at stake. And by the rules of logic, if you give government the right to force you to have a child you do not want, you also give government the right to force you to abort a child you do want, as has happened in China. Abortion will either be safe and legal or unsafe and illegal. Abortion occurs in any case. The latest numbers from Latin America, where abortion is still illegal, are heartbreaking. The best estimates are that the rate of abortion in the United States is lower today than it was when abortions were dirty, dangerous, and illegal.

I think any fair-minded person will admit there is a terrible strain of misogyny in the anti-abortion movement: One has only to hear the rhetoric about “abortion on demand” or “partial-birth abortions”—as though women used abortion, even in the eighth month, like some casual morning-after pill. As though any woman eight months pregnant ever waddled past an abortion clinic, snapped her fingers, and said, “Oh darn, I knew there was something I’d been meaning to get around to.” One aborts a child, and I use the word
child
advisedly, in the eighth month for exactly one reason—because one has to.

Despite the constant misdescription of
Roe v. Wade
as “abortion on demand,” it is a carefully calibrated, tripartite system. In the first trimester, abortion is relatively easy to obtain; in the second trimester, more difficult; in the third trimester, it is practically impossible.

Sometimes women who are told they are going to bear a child that is hopelessly deformed or handicapped decide to abort. Sometimes they don’t. As God is my judge, I cannot judge them. Sometimes a woman has the physical, emotional, and financial ability to care for such a child. Sometimes she doesn’t. Among other factors to be considered in these cases, the divorce rate among couples who have handicapped children is horribly high and the effect on other children in the family is extremely heavy. (I have known families that not only bore the burden superbly, but found having such a child a source of wisdom and joy in their lives: On the other hand, all of them were well-to-do families.)

I know one woman who was divorced and left to fend for herself and her oldest child, and who had to put the younger child, profoundly retarded, into a state home. I sometimes think that has been harder for her than the girl’s actual condition.

Another friend, the single mother of five who is a Hispanic housekeeper, has a child with spina bifida. She is a devout Catholic and travels every year forty-eight hours by bus to make a pilgrimage for that child. She has told me, with tears running down her face, that she believes in abortion in such cases. And any fool, from pope to Pentecostalist, who thinks she is wrong is welcome to walk a mile in her moccasins. She was, by the way, recently notified that thanks to the action of our Republican Congress, her handicapped daughter’s qualification for Supplemental Security Income would have to be reviewed. You cannot imagine her panic. Have you ever seen a child with spina bifida?

The Republicans said too many people were “abusing” the system. In one totally berserker speech, House Speaker Newt Gingrich actually claimed poor people were “coaching” their children to “act crazy” so they could obtain “crazy money” and then beating the children if they didn’t get it. There is no evidence whatever for this insane charge. Try to get a three-year-old to fake cerebral palsy sometime. Gingrich actually implied Congress was justified in cutting SSI as a way of ending child abuse. The sheer hideousness of the insult to the poor families who care so devotedly for their handicapped children is beyond my ability to describe. Gingrich would rather dump them into state hospitals—where their lives are often without any joy, and, incidentally, cost us all a lot more money—than pay their own families a pittance to care for them.

Shalala and others have since at least managed to provide a review procedure for handicapped children who were cut off SSI by this madness. I’m sorry, but if I could find evidence the anti-abortion activists gave half as much of a damn about what happens to the children who are actually born as they do fetuses, I would feel a lot better. I know this is, in some cases, an unfair generalization. I do know fundamentalist Christians who are just as active in helping handicapped children and very poor children as they are in the anti-abortion movement. But not many.

As for people like Gingrich, who promote these nutty anti-abortion amendments on matters as remote as appropriations for the International Monetary Fund and at the same time insist on cutting the very few services that help poor families care for damaged children, O, let me just say that when it comes to anger and a sense of moral rectitude, I think we can match the anti-abortion movement any time.

God bless you, dear Liz.

September 1998

Paul Wellstone

S
AN FRANCISC
O
— he was the rarest of all rare breeds—a mensch from Minnesota. But this is not a column about Paul Wellstone. No one has to wonder for a minute what he would have wanted. “What would Wellstone do?” The answer all but roars back: “Don’t mourn, organize!”

The contrast between Paul’s passionate populism and this dreary mid-term election is as sad as his death. There’s many a contest between political pygmies this year—we’re down to seeds and stems again—but even in proud Texas we have to admit that this year’s palm for nose-holding voting must go to California. Not to overstate, two of the most titanically unattractive candidates in the history of time—Gray Davis and Bill Simon—are vying for the governorship. A new nadir in modern politics. How we got from the Lincoln-Douglas debates to this—or what we ever did to deserve it—is unclear. The debate between Davis and Simon raised the always-timely question: Is God punishing us?

Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hairsbreadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?

One sorry excuse for a decent, fighting people’s pol or the other; what difference does it make?

Oh, just that your life is at stake.

What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols. “I’m just not interested in politics.” “They’re all crooks.” “Nothing I can do about it, I’m just one person. I can’t buy influence.”

Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom you can decide you don’t much care for. Is the person who prescribes your eyeglasses qualified to do so? How deep will you be buried when you die? What textbooks are your children learning from at school? What will happen if you become seriously ill? Is the meat you’re eating tainted? Will you be able to afford to go to college or to send your kids? Would you like a vacation? Expect to retire before you die? Can you find a job? Drive a car? Afford insurance? Is your credit card company or your banker or your broker ripping you off? It’s all politics, Bubba. You don’t get to opt out for lack of interest.

In this putrid election season, every television ad seems to announce that the other guy sucks eggs, runs on all fours, molests small children, and has the brain of an adolescent pissant. It’s tempting to join the “pox on both their houses” crowd. They’re close to right, but they’re still wrong.

Here’s the good news: All of this can actually be fixed. By me, you, us—no kidding, no bull. Nothing you can do about it? Just one person? As an American at this time, you have more political power than 99 percent of all the people who have ever lived on earth. And should you round up four friends who don’t usually vote, you’ll have four times that much political power. Why throw that away?

And you have other kinds of power as well. Hundreds of thousands of Americans demonstrated against war in Iraq Saturday. I don’t know why the mainstream media are so allergic to reporting this, but the turnout was stunning. In San Francisco, middle-aged protesters with gray ponytails mixed with punk kids with orange hair and earrings in their eyebrows and with suburban families toting toddlers. The old coots griped about their feet and about having to listen to speeches through a bad sound system again (digital sound has not yet made it to the peace movement). But the kids were, like, totally awed. They had not, in their young lives, ever seen anything like tens of thousands of Americans peacefully exercising their right to assemble and to petition their government for redress of grievances. The creativity and humor of the signs was fabulous, though often impolite. A grand exercise in citizenship.

And will it make any difference? Does the Bush administration care that 40 percent of Americans are opposed to this war and that almost all of us have doubts about it? Politicians are much more sensitive creatures than is generally assumed. In political science circles, the technical term we use for this is
goosey
. Pols not only listen to public opinion, they usually overreact to it.

The Bush administration has announced this grand imperial plan, the “National Security Strategy of the United States,” under which America is to dominate the world forever, and we’ll attack any country that doesn’t agree with us. Frankly, it’s nutty. But they made a big mistake. They forgot to run it by the people first.

October 2002

Warren Burnett