Water children

Harvard Review, Dec, 2007 by Nina De Gramont

Every year in Wilmington, North Carolina, pro-life activists stage a silent protest. For a single day they stand on either side of Oleander, one of the city's main thoroughfares, holding up neatly lettered placards. It's a harbinger of autumn, and I know that the long, southern months of Indian summer have arrived when the quiet chain appears. It goes on for miles--solemn and plaintive faces of all ages. Last year there were nearly two thousand of them, their lips sealed in self-restraint as passing motorists hurled eggs from car windows. The eggs didn't hit anyone, just splattered angrily at their feet, slowly cooking on the still-hot pavement.

Oleander is a road I drive down often, and in the three years I've lived here I've always managed to stumble upon the so-called Life Chain. The first time, in the moment I recognized the nature of the demonstration (words steadily hanging in the air: "Abortion Kills Children"), I started to make a reflexive gesture at the protesters, who stared--insistent and inquisitive--through every windshield. It wouldn't have been a hostile gesture, nothing obscene. Just an exaggerated frown, a dramatic shake of my head, perhaps accompanied by a raised and wagging finger, to let them know how vehemently I disagreed.

But somehow, returning the protesters' unspeaking gaze, I couldn't manage an expression of disapproval. As a teenager, I had been deeply involved in protesting nuclear weapons and took intensive courses in civil disobedience and nonviolent protest. That long river of silence struck an admiring chord. It impressed me and it moved me. If I didn't agree with their politics, I could still appreciate the poetry of the gesture, and the undeniable power of silent numbers.

I have a friend who's opposed to abortion. Recently, she asked me if I'd ever had one.

"No," I answered truthfully.

"Would you have?" she asked. "When you were single?"

"I guess so," I said. "It was always my contingency plan."

As a single woman--from my teens and into my twenties--I was assiduously careful about birth control. The closest I ever came to an unplanned pregnancy was one drunken night on Nantucket, with a good-looking and cocky boy who'd never read The Catcher in the Rye.

"I don't really like to read," he'd told me, back at the Chicken Box, the only bar that would accept our fake IDs. I remember sipping my sea breeze and feeling sad for the boy, who didn't realize he'd just blown his chances.

Several hours and several sea breezes later, literary credentials didn't seem so important. As we made out on a deserted beach with no birth control in sight, I remember having a very specific, very drunken thought: that if I got pregnant, the subsequent abortion would be another life experience, like getting lost on the London tube or drinking wine with homeless sailors on the docks at Key West. Perfectly in tune with my youth, the trauma would make me a deeper, more fully realized person. These ideas, or something close to them, actually formed in my foggy head.

Luckily, a weeping friend interrupted our embrace, distraught over an altercation with her boyfriend. The boy who didn't like to read disappeared into the night--as surely as he would have had the evening proceeded to its inevitable drunken conclusion.

I used to know a girl who became pregnant during a similar encounter. Describing her subsequent abortion, she'd said, "I wanted it out of my body as fast as possible."

If I'd become pregnant on Nantucket by a boy I barely knew and didn't even like, never mind my conscious decision--in the supposed heat of passion--to take my chances, I would have felt precisely the same way.

At the southern university where I teach English, students are not so cavalier about premarital sex, let alone abortion. Many of them come from deeply Christian backgrounds, and I regularly receive passionate and well-written papers about love for Jesus, the importance of chastity, the evils of abortion. During classroom discussions on the topic of abortion, the pro-life students speak fervently, their spines straight and certain, while the pro-choice students slump apologetically in their chairs. Once, when I asked students to separate into groups and discuss the issue of abortion, a group of young men--athletes, mostly--came back with the conclusion that they had no opinion either way. "It's none of our business," they explained. "It's something for women to decide."

A student who had already identified herself as pro-life turned around in her chair with an assertive snap of her ponytail. "That's pro-choice," she informed them, and then turned back toward me, her chin raised in self-assured defiance. When I was not much older than she, I volunteered for NARAL's phone banks and escorted women across picket lines into abortion clinics. I would never have associated with someone who felt the way she did.

But the passage of time has made it hard for me to see the world in absolutes. I liked seeing a teenage woman confident enough to challenge a group of handsome men. When she looked at me for approval, I couldn't help but smile at her.