Violation: Collected Essays - Sallie Tisdale

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circumstances. If the human bond to a child were as primitive and unflinchingly narrow as that of other animals, there would be no abortion. There would be no abortion because there would be nothing more important than caring for the young and perpetuating the species, no reason for sex but to make babies. I sense this sometimes, this wordless organic duty, when I do ultrasounds.

      We do ultrasound, a sound wave test that paints a faint, gray picture of the fetus, whenever we’re uncertain of gestation. Age is measured by the width of the skull and confirmed by the length of the femur or thighbone; we speak of a pregnancy as being a certain “femur length” in weeks. The usual concern is whether a pregnancy is within the legal limit for an abortion. Women this far along have bellies that swell out round and tight like trim muscles. When they lie flat, the mound rises softly above the hips, pressing the umbilicus upward.

      It takes practice to read an ultrasound picture, which is grainy and etched as though in strokes of charcoal. But suddenly a rapid rhythmic motion appears—the beating heart. Nearby is a soft oval, scratched with lines—the skull. The leg is harder to find, and then suddenly the fetus moves, bobbing in the surf. The skull turns away, an arm slides across the screen, the torso rolls. I know the weight of a baby’s head on my shoulder, the whisper of lips on ears, the delicate curve of a fragile spine in my hand. I know how heavy and correct a newborn cradled feels. The creature I watch in secret requires nothing from me but to be left alone, and that is precisely what won’t be done.

      These inadvertently made beings are caught in a twisting web of motive and desire. They are at least inconvenient, sometimes quite literally dangerous in the womb, but most often they fall somewhere in between—consequences never quite believed in come to roost. Their virtue rises and falls outside their own nature: they become only what we make them. A fetus created by accident is the most absolute kind of surprise. Whether the blame lies in a failed IUD, a slipped condom, or a false impression of safety, that fetus is a thing whose creation has been actively worked against. Its existence is an error. I think this is why so few women, even late in a pregnancy, will consider giving a baby up for adoption. To do so means making the fetus real—imagining it as something whole and outside oneself. The decision to terminate a pregnancy is sometimes so difficult and confounding that it creates an enormous demand for immediate action. The decision is a rejection; the pregnancy has become something to be rid of, a condition to be ended. It is a burden, a weight, a thing separate.

      Women have abortions because they are too old, and too young, too poor, and too rich, too stupid, and too smart. I see women who berate themselves with violent emotions for their first and only abortion, and others who return three times, five times, hauling two or three children, who cannot remember to take a pill or where they put the diaphragm. We talk glibly about choice. But the choice for what? I see all the broken promises in lives lived like a series of impromptu obstacles. There are the sweet, light promises of love and intimacy, the glittering promise of education and progress, the warm promise of safe families, long years of innocence and community. And there is the promise of freedom: freedom from failure, from faithlessness. Freedom from biology. The early feminist defense of abortion asked many questions, but the one I remember is this: is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most.

      Oh, the ignorance. I take a woman to the back room and ask her to undress. A few minutes later I return and find her positioned discreetly behind a drape, still wearing underpants. “Do I have to take these off too?” she asks, a little shocked. Some swear they have not had sex, many do not know what a uterus is, how sperm and egg meet, how sex makes babies. Some late seekers do not believe themselves pregnant; they believe themselves impregnable. I was chastised when I began this job for referring to some clients as girls: it is a feminist heresy. They come so young, snapping gum, sockless and sneakered, and their shakily applied eyeliner smears when they cry. I call them girls with maternal benignity. I cannot imagine them as mothers.

      THE DOCTOR SEATS himself between the woman’s thighs and reaches into the dilated opening of a five-month pregnant uterus. Quickly he grabs and crushes the fetus in several places, and the room is filled with a low clatter and snap of forceps, the click of the tanaculum, and a pulling, sucking sound. The paper crinkles as the drugged and sleepy woman shifts, the nurse’s low, honey-brown voice explains each step in delicate words.

      I have fetus dreams, we all do here: dreams of abortions one after the other; of buckets of blood splashed on the walls; trees full of crawling fetuses. I dreamed that two men grabbed me and began to drag me away. “Let’s do an abortion,” they said with a sickening leer, and I began to scream, plunged into a vision of sucking, scraping pain, of being spread and torn by impartial instruments that do only what they are bidden. I woke from this dream barely able to breathe and thought of kitchen tables and coat hangers, knitting needles striped with blood, and women all alone clutching a pillow in their teeth to keep the screams from piercing the apartment-house walls. Abortion is the narrowest edge between kindness and cruelty. Done as well as it can be, it is still violence—merciful violence, like putting a suffering animal to death.

      Maggie, one of the nurses, received a call at midnight not long ago. It was a woman in her twentieth week of pregnancy; the necessarily gradual process of cervical dilation begun the day before had stimulated labor, as it sometimes does. Maggie and one of the doctors met the woman at the office in the night. Maggie helped her onto the table, and as she lay down the fetus was delivered into Maggie’s hands. When Maggie told me about it the next day, she cupped her hands into a small bowl—” It was just like a little kitten,” she said softly, wonderingly. “Everything was still attached.”

      At the end of the day I clean out the suction jars, pouring blood into the sink, splashing the sides with flecks of tissue. From the sink rises a rich and humid smell, hot, earthy, and moldering; it is the smell of something recently alive beginning to decay. I take care of the plastic tub on the floor, filled with pieces too big to be trusted to the trash. The law defines the contents of the bucket I hold protectively against my chest as tissue. Some would say my complicity in filling that bucket gives me no right to call it anything else. I slip the tissue gently into a bag and place it in the freezer, to be binned at another time. Abortion requires of me an entirely new set of assumptions. It requires a willingness to live with conflict, fearlessness, and grief. As I close the freezer door, I imagine a world where this won’t be necessary, and then return to the world where it is.

      Harper’s, October 1987

      I began my long relationship with Harper’s by sending this essay in cold, “over the transom.” It has since been reprinted in anthologies and textbooks many times, sometimes with a set of ham-handed study questions attached. That means I’ve corresponded with a lot of college students—and a few high school students—over the years. Many of them wonder whether I am “still pro-choice,” and a few wonder if I have ever been pro-choice. The ambiguity—far more apparent to others than to me; I think this essay is indubitably pro-choice—is intended. I think the most appropriate response to problems as complex and nuanced as abortion must be complex and nuanced itself. But I have always been a stalwart supporter of reproductive rights and express this in time, money, and votes.

      This story began my long conflict with my editors at Harper’s over titles. It was originally published as “We Do Abortions Here.”

       The Only Harmless Great Thing

      THE BEST TIME TO WATCH THE ELEPHANTS AT THE WASHINGTON Park Zoo is in the early hours of a sunny day, when their bulky bodies cast wide, dark shadows in the bright, transparent sunshine. The elephants are more energetic in the morning, more likely to wrestle in one of the wading pools or sing in a frequency that I can hear. (A variety of elephant calls are pitched too low for human ears.) The elephant barn, a complex of chambers and yards partly surrounded by a dry moat, is at the far end of the zoo, tucked along a curving terrace carved from a steep hill on the west side of Portland, Oregon. The largest of the yards, at the back of the complex, is separated by the moat from a small railroad track, travelled every half hour by the open-air zoo train, on its way to the Alaskan tundra and back to the bear grottoes; on the slope beyond the track is a thick stand of fir,

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