Seduction, Back-Street Abortion, and the Unpunished Guilty

Posted by Kate Flora

The murder of Dr. Tiller has been much on my mind this week. I expect it has been on many minds. I came of age in the early years of MS magazine, the second wave of the feminist movement (the first having brought us the right to vote and a few other good things) and women's struggles for birth control, the right to seek any job they were qualified for instead of being confined to "HELP WANTED MALE" and "HELP WANTED FEMALE," and the right to own our own names rather than lose them automatically upon marriage.

For years, I've been embarrassing my sons by asking their girlfriends how young women on college campuses are dealing with the abortion issue. I've been repeatedly shocked to learn how indifferent they are, how casually they assume that the battle has been won, our rifles stacked in the corner, and that there is no need to even think about such details as access and training. Perhaps now, in the wake of this taking of a life in the name of preserving life, there will be more discussion. More concern. Perhaps women, who now are the majority in most medical schools, will wonder why so many schools are refusing to teach the basics of performing an abortion to their students. Perhaps our daughters, our nieces, our daughters-in-law, the women for whom we fought the battles, will look around and realize that there are issues of particular concern to women, and those issues will not take care of themselves.

I heard a doctor on NPR today talking about how she has performed perhaps 30,000 abortions over the course of her medical career, and she has not encountered a single woman who was casual about the process. It isn't something to be casual about. Like marriage, it is not to be embarked upon unadvisedly or lightly. Those friends who have embarked upon it did it with trepidation, deliberation, fear, regret, and a great deal of pain.

What I was thinking about today in the car, listening to the stories on NPR, were the revelations about abortions past that I've only learned about recently, as there has finally been enough time past for people to discuss them. Both cases involve young, naive, innocent girls away from home for the first time and at college in the sixties, and older boys--or men--who set out to get them intoxicated and then seduced them. At least one of the seducers was a law student, the other a graduate student, perhaps a medical student--the story does not say. In both cases, their immediate and selfish goals achieved, the men--who had failed to take any precautions about the risks to their prey, the women they'd targeted and seduced--walked away without knowledge, guilt or regret.

Even hearing these stories after forty years, I get angry. Part of it is sisterhood. It could have been any of us, naive, innocent, and trusting, unused to drinking and being plied with lethal punch. Part of it is the mystery writer in me, knowing that many times what drives the plot in the present are secrets from the past, or acts committed by someone who believes they've gotten away with it, when suddenly, it rises up to smite them. Part of it is in the thinking that these men have probably never known the pain, disruption of lives, and the subsequent distrust of self and others that their casual, selfish pleasure seeking at the expense of others, wrought.

So I sit here in 2009, thinking about how much people are still trying to control others' decisions, and I imagine a terrified young Catholic girl in the late 1960's, seduced and pregnant, calling her big brother for help because she cannot tell their parents. I hear him recount the details, this responsible brother, of using the underground college networks to help him find a doctor who will "help." And I think of the pain and anguish of these young people, and the lasting damage done by one young man's selfishness, and I wonder. Did the men who used those girls to satisfy their momentary lust ever wake up and feel regret at what they did? Would they today, if they knew?

Comments

[Sheila Connolly]

Thanks for tackling a difficult subject.

Will someone please explain to me why most of the people who rant about the doctors who perform abortions, and who resort to violence, are men? Men, who don't have to carry the child or care for it for life, and who all too often walk away from their baby-mama when things get tough?

When I was growing up in the sixties, my mother made sure that she knew where the local go-to doctor was (which was absurd, because I went on about two dates in high school), and how much an abortion would cost--and let me know. No judgment. In hindsight, I'm grateful.

[Kate Flora]

Most people don't want to touch a subject like this. It's not pleasant. But I was struck by these stories (only one of which is told here. The other young woman was forced by her parents to leave college and live at home where they could "watch" her)and how they come out years after the fact. And as a writer, I confess that I love imagining someone coming back years later for revenge.

The custom of targeting vulnerable young woman, getting them drunk, and then taking advantage is very much alive today. Anyone who can should take a look at Dr. David Lisak's (a professor at UMass Boston) research and the ugly, but compelling video he made from his research interviews at Duke.

[Judy Alter]

I know from my daughters that the custom of getting girls drunk was very much alive when they were in their teens and twenties. But I also know that they and their two brothers are the products of unwanted pregnancies--their biological mothers cared enough to go to a home and place the babies for adoption. I am forever grateful to those young women for what I'm sure was an agonizing decision. I know for sure that the mother of one of my sons couldn't tell her parents and went to an uncle for help--and got it. I am 100% pro-choice, but I'm still grateful to have had my "babies," now all in their thirties--and one, omigosh, forty!