Another aunt had an abortion when, with two small children and a new job, she got pregnant accidentally. “How would we raise a third child in New York?” she reflected. “So I had an abortion.” My mother also had an abortion, due to medical complications in early pregnancy, when I was one and a half and before my brother was born. I don’t consider the number of terminations in my family unusual. After all, about half of my 40-ish friends—that I know of—have had abortions. I know so many women who’ve had abortions simply because I know so many women.
After Roe was decided in 1973, the varied experiences of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends, and selves suddenly seemed drained of their value. It was as if in gaining rights, not just to abortion, but also to greater professional and economic and sexual opportunity, women lost any claim to morality—a morality that had, perhaps, been imaginatively tied to their exclusively reproductive identities.
What rose up instead was a new character, less threatening than the empowered woman: the baby, who, by virtue of not actually existing as a formed human being, could be invested with all the qualities—purity, defenselessness, dependence—that women used to embody, before they became free and disruptive.
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