A Hidden Procedure Is a Threatened Right

No matter how much people intellectually accept that contraception has a failure rate and that even very good, responsible people have a behavior failure rate, admitting an abortion in our society is taken as an admission of carelessness.

I was asked to host the most recent book salon at Firedoglake on the memoir by doctor and abortion provider Dr. Susan Wicklund called This Common Secret. I worried that, at such a high traffic blog as that, we would be facing down some hostility, or at bare minimum some commenters making tired points as if they were great insights, but luckily, the Firedoglake community stepped up and provided an interesting and insightful discussion. Nary a troll in sight, a rare and beautiful sight when it comes to the reproductive justice debate.

Much of the discussion centered around the great paradox of abortion: It's one of the most common procedures performed in the country, and certainly the most discussed. Some estimates put the number of women who will have one at some point in their lives at 40% of the population. But for all this, for all that women actually talk about their own abortions, it would seem to be a rare procedure indeed. Phoenix Woman suggested that women are growing more reluctant to talk about their own abortions.

As you mention, abortion is a very common surgical procedure, yet there's been this intense effort to force people, women especially, to be silent about it, as if silence would make it go away (and certainly, acting silent and ashamed about it will make it easier to be outlawed). Yet of course abortions won't go away – they just won't be done safely. The AIDS activist motto "Silence = Death" comes to mind.

In the book, Dr. Wicklund illustrates how this common procedure stays secret in many ways. One doctor she worked under in a hospital practiced abortion in his small town practice both before and after Roe v. Wade, but simply recorded a different procedure on his charts to create the illusion that no abortions happened in the town. Dr. Wicklund tried to break that tradition, charting abortion correctly, and was rewarded with a ban on abortion on demand in her hospital, which caused her to have to revert to coloring outside the lines to make voluntary terminations look like miscarriages. This thread of people's hypocrisy on the issue, to both have their abortion cake and the no-abortion illusion, runs throughout the book. Here you have prominent Catholic women driving in from way out of town so no one knows. And there you have the woman who was picketing the clinic the other day inside today demanding an abortion. Hypocrisy on this issue comes easily to many. It's easy to support an overturn of Roe if you have the means to have an easily hidden abortion.

But even adamantly pro-choice women might feel too much shame to speak out about their own abortions, I pointed out in the discussion. No matter how much people intellectually accept that contraception has a failure rate and that even very good, responsible people have a behavior failure rate, admitting an abortion in our society is taken as an admission of carelessness. In a nation where women are taught to monitor every little calorie that passes between their lips, the idea that women could let that carefulness go when it comes to allowing a penis into their bodies defies outrageously but commonly accepted social standards. We all stand in supermarket lines and stare at the tabloids; we know what punishment awaits a woman with a modicum of fame and a willingness to leave her house in a bathing suit while bearing human imperfections. Those levels of perfection expectation make admitting that you got knocked up on accident way outside the bounds of discourse.

Of course, as Phoenix Woman stated, the problem with this deafening silence about abortion is that it makes it a lot easier to dehumanize women who get abortions, and therefore take steps to make it illegal. In the anti-choice argument, the woman who gets an abortion and goes on with her life is beyond reckoning, impossible and a monster. In reality, she's your sister, neighbor, friend, wife, or coworker. If women spoke about it more, and the real face of who gets abortions had more play, it would become much harder to argue against those women's rights.

Which leads to the other great irony in all this: The importance of privacy. Roe was decided on the basis of privacy, which is not just the idea that our private medical lives should be outside of someone else's control, but also outside of someone else's prying eyes. The reason we bloggers routinely call anti-choice nut Phill Kline a "panty-sniffer" is because he's obsessed with invading women's privacy, using the fear of having your private medical records exposed to dissuade women from getting abortions. Privacy is sacred.

But privacy is also why so many women have abortions without creating the society-wide true understanding of how common abortion really is. But the more hidden the procedure is, the more threatened the right. How to get around this problem?

I humbly suggest that the anonymity of the Internet, which is already being used at places like I'm Not Sorry, might offer a way for women to protect their privacy while also reminding the world that abortion is commonplace, women of every color, marital status, and class status get abortions, and ultimately that we are human. I recommend sharing copies of This Common Secret with everyone you can get to read it, because Dr. Wicklund, while protecting the identities of her patients, tells their stories and shows how diverse, and how real, they really are.