One woman's journey: following my own unguided will - Los Angeles, California resident's anti-abortion narrative - Cover Story

Some mornings I wake stupefied with wonder that I have come of my own free will to the neighborhood in which I live. A complicated confluence of events has brought me to this my forty-third year, this mahogany bed, this husband beside me, this cat's breath in my ear: Koreatown, Los Angeles, California. It is a neighborhood under physical, mental, and spiritual siege. Here, encircled and infiltrated, we live in the agora. As I write, a man ten feet from my desk puffs a cigarette on his porch; I can see the whites of his eyes. Even sex in your own bedroom has the aura of public spectacle.

Here it is not an exaggeration to say that somebody will steal it if it's not nailed down. Somebody, for instance, stole my brand-new bicycle, then somebody stole my car. When I secured the steering wheel of the new one with a "Club," somebody smashed the side window and stole my battery, spare tire, and jack. The hood is now secured with a length of stout chain and a Master's padlock. My husband's pickup has been relieved of both headlights, a radio, the antenna, several Freddy Fender tapes, and a full set of mechanic's tools.

The majority of our neighbors are Latino and Korean and the place is lousy with children. Mothers and fathers--mostly mothers--throng the sidewalk with their litters of offspring. I used to wonder with irritation why these people give birth so relentlessly. The hands of every woman seemed to have a permanent grip on the handle of a baby stroller: more hungry mouths, more consumers, more litterers, more criminals. Had news of the population explosion somehow failed to reach them?

I like to think of myself as a solitary sort, yet I am drawn by the carnival of life that surrounds me. This disintegrating neighborhood seems to be a sterling example of the effect of global overcrowding; collective wisdom has it that the solution to the problem is more guns, more locks, more money, and fewer people. But living in Koreatown for three years has taught me that far from making me safe, those things are a symbol of a mortal danger; the danger of becoming unable to hear the deepest cries of our soul. An odd thing has occurred in the midst of this seething, surging mass of humanity: in spite of having undergone three, I have developed the conviction that abortion is wrong.

My husband and I moved to this part of town from the more fashionable, homogeneous, and Caucasian Westside for one basic reason: it was cheaper. Our decision grew partly out of the dawning realization that the only way to save money was to live below our means and partly from a growing unease with the relentlessly upscale, supposedly ultrahip "lifestyle" the Westside seemed to encourage and support. One of the advantages of Koreatown is that the buildings tend to be older and possess some charm; our 1940s French Normandy courtyard apartment has hardwood floors, crown moldings, and a bathroom lined with hand-painted tiles. We eat beneath a chandelier in the formal dining room. I hang my clothes out to dry on a line ringed by geraniums, gardenia, and hydrangea.

Three times a day the produce truck parks out front, blaring "Turkey in the Straw" or "O'er the Bounding Main" for twenty minutes at a stretch. At 8 P.M., a man who sells bread out of the back of his car pulls up and emits a haunting wail, like a mullah calling the devout to prayer. Women balancing towel-covered recycled spackling compound buckets on their heads ply the street chanting, "Ta-MA-les, ta-MA-les...." We fall asleep to the whirr of circling helicopters and the staccato lullaby of gunfire. Crack addicts propel their shopping carts through the alley; car alarms shriek like wounded animals; the spray cans of the graffiti "taggers" hiss audibly. Girlish screams follow the thud of fist against flesh.

The litter is ferocious. A set of unspoken rules prevails: when holding something you no longer have any use for--a newspaper, a napkin, a styrofoam cup--open your hand and let the thing drop to the ground where you stand. When finished eating, throw what's left--a chicken bone, a corn cob, a banana peel--in the street. If there's something you don't want indoors--a sofa, a mattress, a refrigerator--open the door and put it on the sidewalk. If you've come to pick someone up, lay on the horn as you turn onto the street and sit in front of the building, blasting away, until your passenger strolls out. If you're drunk and have to urinate, lean up against a busy storefront, zip down your fly, and let 'er rip.

When I do the dishes, I can see the Korean mother across the way stirring a pot and wiping her table. A kind of blue-net birdcage, housing what appear to be dead sardines, dangles from an eave; kimchee ferments below in an earthenware crock. My husband jokes that they won't eat anything unless it's rotten. On the porch, shoes are aligned in a neat row--plastic flip-flops, blocky sandals of butterscotch leatherette, cracked black pumps from Payless. Babies with duckling hair teeter across the porch. A girl clomps up and down on pink roller skates; the husbands pace and smoke.

The Latino kids live in the buildings south of ours. They patrol on bikes, brandish guns fashioned from scrap wood, and throw their ice cream wrappers in the street. Juan and Fidel help me carry groceries. Tito sells chocolate bars to raise money for his school band. When our cat disappeared, Carlos presented us with a scrawny black kitten he found rooting in the garbage. I walk by their apartments at night and see whole families sprawled on the floor, bathed in the blue light of TV screens.

I come from a white working-class family in which I was the first ever to complete college. Coming of age in the '60s, I believed passionately in sexual freedom and the concomitant right to choose abortion. Also a staunch supporter of drinking and drugs, I became deeply alcoholic and sobered up in my mid-thirties to discover that I had somehow graduated from law school. I have now been married for six years, and, at forty-three, am childless. It is difficult to admit that two of the babies I aborted were conceived with married men, one of whom was a one-night stand, and that the third abortion was performed during the course of a long-term relationship. I would like to be able to say that I agonized over the decisions, but the fact is that they were based on expedience and fear. Motherhood would have disrupted my life in every conceivable way. It would call upon resources I was not at all certain I possessed--patience, selflessness, the ability to go without sleep--and I viewed it, frankly, as a kind of prison sentence. It seemed inconceivable that a woman would actually invite the upheaval that a baby entails. I don't care how much joy they say it brings, I said to myself, no way am I getting sucked into that trap.

When we arrived in Koreatown, I was working as a litigation attorney in a Beverly Hills office. I could scarcely have been more temperamentally ill-suited for the job, but it was the first time in my life I had made decent money and I was desperately afraid to give it up. My eyes, red-rimmed with fatigue, fell upon the bimonthly paycheck with the same grim relish a buzzard displays for carrion; I dragged through each day consumed by anxiety and the hideous fear that I would contract some stress-based disease and keel over dead at my desk. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but there was something fundamentally artificial and dishonest and life-diminishing about the lawyering I was doing. Part of it was the fact that the basic object of litigation is to manipulate the truth, rather than bring it to light; but it also had something to do with the stomach-turning arrogance that prevailed among my colleagues, a presumption of entitlement and innate merit that was doubly repulsive because of the lack of even a rudimentary moral compass.

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During those four years my life felt, oddly enough, like a prison sentence--the sentence I had hoped to avoid by exercising intelligence backed by the unfettered exercise of free will. As a matter of fact, although I had enjoyed virtually every purported freedom that modern life has to offer, I realized that in one way, my life had always felt like a sentence. I had drunk and smoked and slept around to my heart's content, yet the apotheosis of my personal freedom had consisted of servitude to a bottle of booze and getting pregnant by someone whose name I barely knew. My expensive legal education had bought me a different kind of bondage: in the name of what was supposed to be truth, I took advantage, at least vicariously through my employer, of the opportunity to lie, cheat, steal, bully, lord it over the rest of the peons, and rake in the cash.

This awareness crept over me slowly, in the context of, and strongly abetted by, a religious conversion. It was a long, arduous process, which, though I didn't know it at the time, began the day I stopped drinking. The devil is very much a going concern in the life of an active alcoholic; he is cast out by slow degrees. But the small sense of wonder that accompanied the first blush of freedom from physical dependence was the mustard seed from which everything grew.

One of the people who helped me was Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor lived a monkish life that looked like a kind of penance, but her outlook was breathtakingly devoid of selfpity; in fact, she was dryly, hilariously funny. She wrote--a goal to which I had always aspired and had never done a single thing to advance--with a fierce and uncompromising passion that encompassed and reflected her entire existence. O'Connor saw her writerly vocation as pure grace, once remarking of a trip to Lourdes, made for the ostensible purpose of restoring the use of her legs, that she would rather be able to write than walk.

I had followed my own unguided will, and it had led me straight to hell on earth: an existence characterized by guilt, shame, doubt, insecurity, and the inability to love or be loved. I lived the kind of violence that appears so inexplicable yet real in O'Connor's stories. And seemingly against every rational instinct, the violence prepared the way for that freedom from the bondage of self that can only be achieved in seeking Christ's will, not our own.

While I could never quite decide whether life in Koreatown was a blessing or a curse, I increasingly began to see that it was the same combination of the grotesque and sublime for which Christ had died and that O'Connor captured in the beauty of her strange and startling stories. Tentatively, I began to attend Mass and study Scripture. I read Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Romano Guardini, Saint Augustine, each of whom helped, in his own way, to introduce me to a new way of looking at and being in the world. The church's opposition to abortion, however, seemed an insurmountable stumbling block. I still could not see how any intelligent, progressive woman could seriously subscribe to the notion of depriving herself of the right to make choices about her own body.

But the more I thought about it seriously the more I found that much of the public debate centers on semantics: around "viability," trimesters, whether a finned creature with a shadowy spine is or is not yet "human," the legal definition of murder. These are questions that can go whichever way the wind blows and will never be fully resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Still, sooner or later everyone is forced to agree that scraping off or sucking out whatever you choose to call the living creature in a mother's womb is an act of violence--defined by Webster's as "acting with or characterized by great physical force, so as to injure or damage." Abortion is an exercise of power by the strong over the wholly weak. The women's movement has been on the bandwagon for years about the issue of power and exploitation--as it pertains to men. Yet jeremiads against violence, I came to think, eventually ring hollow when we resort to violence ourselves.

Nitpicking about whether a fetus somehow "equals" a human being misses the point; what matters is that abortion is the willful destruction of a potential human life, and that's wrong. Abortion profanes the most mysterious act of creation we can know on this earth. It's emblematic of the distorted orientation of our hearts and minds: the faithless heart that makes women want to emulate the "freedom" of the men who have abused or abandoned them.

Women are wrong if we think that the right to abortion gives us the same kind of "autonomy" men supposedly enjoy. It won't because it can't: in the worst-case scenario, the guy walks away, but we destroy the human life that's growing inside us. We must first recognize that the freedom to deny responsibility for one's actions--whether the actor is a man or a woman--is really no freedom at all. The freedom to choose cannot mean the freedom to choose evil. Above all, the violence implicit in the act of abortion is directed not only against our children but against ourselves; women are implicated physically, mentally, and spiritually in the act of human creation--or its destruction--in a way men cannot be. That is an inexpungable fact of life; instead of being grateful, it seems to piss women off.

Many people justify abortion on compassionate grounds, saying they don't want to bring a child into a world that doesn't share their own sense of compassion. The vague notion underlying my abortions, and I suspect of the vast majority of other women's as well, is the idea that there wouldn't be enough to go round--not enough time, not enough energy, not enough space, not enough people to help. But when I examined my motives honestly, I realized that though I said not enough for the kid, I meant not enough for me. I mouthed platitudes about the global population boom; in fact, I was most worried about overcrowding in my own bedroom. I chafed against the "enforced labor" of motherhood while accepting without question the prevailing consumer ethic that sentences the vast majority of us to a lifetime of economic servitude. The truth in my case is that there was not only enough to go round, there would probably have been more than most of the rest of the world will ever enjoy: maybe not an expensive home or fancy cars--I don't have those things now--but nourishing food and a roof over our heads and comfortable clothes. There would have been books and music and museums. It would have meant sacrifice, deferred plans, missed vacations, no slipcovered down sofa, no hundred-dollar shoes, but there would have been enough. The truth was that I simply did not want to share.

My sense of neurotic guilt is as highly developed as anyone else's. In the course of renouncing my own sins, I know I run the risk of romanticizing the virtues of others. I am attracted, for instance, to the starry-eyed view that every mother is fully conscious of having safeguarded a great mystery and, in the care and education of her child, will continue to do so. I tend to stereotype the Mexican women in my neighborhood as being "natural" mothers and caretakers, with the ability to sacrifice running in their blood. "I have different genes," I tell myself. "I come from a different culture...." This is as far removed from reality and just as wrongheaded as saying that every woman who has an abortion is selfish and irresponsible. The truth is that each of us is a combination of various moral strengths and weaknesses, which is precisely why all need to be held to the same standard. I can't ask for an exception because I think, erroneously or not, that caretaking and doing without are inherently easier for some other group of women, just as the woman with less money or fewer resources can't ask for an exception because some other people have more.

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.

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