One woman's journey: following my own unguided will

Commonweal, May 3, 1996 by Heather King

I recently heard a female physician from Wisconsin gleefully relate how she couldn't pass up the offer to become an abortionist because she came from the land of Senator Joe McCarthy. The irony, she said, was too delicious. But, in fact, there is no irony, just sad proof that violence, whatever form it takes, always begets more. The doctor went on to say that there was really only one reason that women get abortions: it just wasn't time. The majority of the women who came into her clinic had been anti-abortion--until they got pregnant--which, she noted, put them in a "terrible psychological bind." It occurred to me that the bind was rather more spiritual than psychological, and that having an abortion was an odd way to resolve it. Concluding that it isn't time now presumes that somewhere down the road it will be time. The idea that killing an unborn child now will contribute to the parenting skills you hope to develop in the future is a dubious proposition.

Still, the hearts of these women were in a better place than where mine had been: my feeling was that the time to disrupt my life would never be right. To be honest, I often still feel that way. But I have also come to believe that there is an invisible dimension where the smallest act of creation, or love, holds us together; where destruction, no matter how it is rationalized, or what it is called, inevitably tears us apart. I am convinced, for instance, that if Flannery O'Connor hadn't faithfully sat at her desk writing four hours a day, day after day, every week of her adult life, even when swollen and crippled with pain, that I would not have finally quit my job as a lawyer so I could write, would not have agonized over this essay, would not have recently been received into the Catholic church. There is something unimaginably, mysteriously powerful at work that is called, I'm told, the Communion of Saints.

If I discovered today I was pregnant, I hope my convictions would be steadfast and unwavering. I hope I would know enough to weigh my fear--of birth defects, of making do with less, of not being a good parent, of noise and anxiety and lack of sleep--against the possibility that a child would change me in ways I cannot imagine, in aspects of my life that probably desperately need changing. I hope that I would be so filled with joy and anticipation and wild, abandoned love for the life inside me that it wouldn't occur to me for a second to destroy it. I hope so, but I can't be sure. And although part of my faith is believing I've been forgiven, what I have to live with is the knowledge that three times I forfeited the opportunity to receive the very kind of transforming grace I long for now with all my heart--because I didn't think it was time.

At Jon's Grocery on Eighth and Normandie the other day, a dark-skinned woman with wide hips, short legs, and a shopping bag on each arm, waited patiently while her shrieking little boy took a twenty-five-cent ride on a mechanical horse. Two other children with dirty faces tugged on either side of her skirt, one dripping ice cream, the other waving a toy gun. We had each made our choices, the Latina mother and I, and though the cries of a hungry brat will never wake me, I couldn't help but wonder which one of us rests easier in the long, noisy nights.