Ban on abortion
Remember how it was in the 1950s when a girl from a wealthy family -- or even a middle-class family -- got pregnant? Where I grew up, it always worked the same way. The teen-age girl would disappear for a period of time, she would give birth and the baby would be adopted, usually by a relative. Then she would return to school and none of her friends would breathe a word about her absence.
There were homes all over the country where girls with financial backing could deliver a baby, have every detail of the pregnancy kept secret and then return to her normal life.
But then in the 1960s, attitudes began to change about out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Many young women made decisions to keep their babies and raise them. Even before the Roe vs. Wade decision in the late 1960s, America was beginning to look differently at single mothers and their offspring.
I remember a woman in her 20s calling me on a spring day and asking for confidential help. I was an associate pastor of a large metropolitan Lutheran church, and a portion of its ministry focused on poor families. Roe vs. Wade would become law several months after this incident.
In this case, I had just buried the woman's husband, a troubled man who shot himself in the head as he worked the night shift at a cut-rate department store. His method was bizarre and particularly cruel because he telephoned his wife at home to tell her he was going to kill himself. She begged him, pleading with him to reconsider. Then she heard the shot and knew he was dead.
Several days later she discovered she was pregnant and came to me for help. In those days, there was no help. If you were poor, as she was, you delivered a baby and raised the child. There was no choice in such matters. I had no options to offer this sad woman.
She already had one child, a 3-year-old daughter. Considering the woman's destitute situation, a second child was out of the question. There was one option she thought might work.
She had an uncle who lived in a major Eastern city, and he was connected to the Mafia, she said. She telephoned him, and he agreed to find a doctor who would perform an abortion.
With the help of family and friends, she put together the money for a three-day trip East. Her uncle met her at the airport, took her blindfolded to a hotel and within an hour of arrival her fetus was aborted. She never heard a voice, just felt a needle going into her arm and when she awakened, the only other person in the room was her uncle. She waited in that room alone for three days.
Then she was blindfolded again, examined by a silent person and pronounced fit to return home.
That trauma never left her mind. For months, she came to my office to talk about life and the rot she had endured. That abortion episode was central in her memory. I believe she never fully recovered from that experience.
Contrast that story with young women today who receive counseling and care at an abortion clinic and leave knowing they are not alone in the trials of life.
Any day now, I expect new challenges from conservatives who want to return to those dark days of blindfolded mothers seeking silent abortions. As it has always been, the choice today is between the rich and the poor. There always will be abortions for those young women who are wealthy. But poor women will be denied any reproductive choice if Roe vs. Wade is overturned.
Of course, with the passing of legislation on partial birth abortions and the advent of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, the trend is moving toward greater freedom for women.
But the price of freedom is constant vigilance, and we can never relax in our protection of the reproductive choices afforded women in our day.
I think the Bush administration already is being burdened with huge expectations from fellow conservatives. The single-issue religious right, the Catholic bishops of the United States and the ultraconservative politicians, particularly from the South, will form a coalition that eventually will ask for a complete ban on abortion.
It's a religious and a political issue. But I maintain that no bishop or religious leader and certainly no male politician can ever know the pain and shame of a blindfolded abortion.
Clark D. Morphew
3-10-01
