“Because I had had sex, someone thought I deserved to die.”  (Cerullo qtd. in Hadley 79)   “She was bleeding at the wrong time, and it didn’t stop.  She went to the emergency room here at a Catholic hospital, and they refused to take care of her.  They just flatly refused…they would not touch her because she might be pregnant, and they might disturb the child.  She continued to bleed.” (Paley 8)  
“I found out I was pregnant when I was fourteen.  I didn’t get a period.  I talked to nobody.  I panicked.  I sat in hot baths.  I drank these strange concoctions girls told me about—something like Johnny Walker Red with a little bit of Clorox, alcohol, baking soda—which probably saved my stomach—and some sort of cream.  You mixed it all up.  I got violently ill.” (Goldberg 116)
“I didn’t make any noise at all.  I bit through my lip.  I tried not to cry; I didn’t want him to see me cry.” (Bergen 29)
“He showed up at midnight.  He had on a black overcoat.  He had the whitest, pastiest face I’ve ever seen, with large pock marks, and his fingernails were dirty—I remember that…He did not give me a number to call if anything went wrong.  He did not tell me I would be cramping.  And he was not there when I woke up.” (Ellerbee 85)  
“When I came to—I don’t know how many hours later—a doctor and a nurse came in, and they looked very scornfully at me, the nurse with a bit of pity.  I was told that I had almost died, that the woman had filled me full of Lysol.”  (Kidder 98).  
“Blood was on the bed; it was on the floor; it was on the carpet.  We had run out of sheets and the mattress was ruined.  I guess I did think I was dying…I’m sure there was a part of me that thought I was supposed to die.  I had done this terrible thing—I had had sex and I’d gotten pregnant.  The abortion added to it, but that was not the terrible thing.”  (Bergen 30)  
“I went to the drycleaners and got a hanger.  I took it to the park in Chelsea because it was close and had a bathroom.  There wasn’t a lot of traffic in and out…It was just a private thing, something I needed to do.  I never thought I was going to die; young people never think they’re going to die.  It seemed very simple at the time: You just do that, and it goes away.” (Goldberg 116)

I don’t know exactly when they ceased to be just words on a page, when the elegant curves of each letter became cheekbone and shadow, when the margins, pressed tightly into the block of text, became lash, shoulder, breastbone.  But they had faces.  They were young and old, abused, sophisticated, wealthy and educated, poor and ignorant.  I could have known them; I could have been them.  They are a testament to the truth that making abortions illegal will not stop women from having them, by any means necessary.  These are the voices of women who had been denied control of their fertility and their bodies.  In the time before Roe v. Wade, they were the victims of a legislation that perceived them as little more than a vessel for the unborn, an empty jug in want of filling.  
On my walk home from the library that afternoon, arms laden with books, I felt the weight of my guilt.  I had been born, female, after 1973.  By virtue of birth, under current legislation, I do not need to be a slave to my biology.  I will not have to get married to save my name, I will not live—or die—in disgrace, I will not bow my head to society and someone else’s warped moralistic dogma.  But my freedom has been bought with another woman’s suffering, at a price that never should have had to be paid.  Criminalizing abortion infringes upon a woman’s bodily autonomy, violates her right to control her own fertility, and relegates her to the status of a second-class citizen.  These women shared that fate.
Abortion.  The word comes with its own sad heaviness.  Even after thirty years of nursing and another three years at Planned Parenthood, Cathy Keith still could not say the word with ease.  “But I’m glad,” she had said, “I’m glad that I’m not perfectly comfortable with everything, even though I believe that women absolutely need this.”  I can still see her, sitting comfortably cross-legged in her study.  I can see the lines of her body that tensed and stretched with passion as she spoke.  Mrs. Keith is a nurse-midwife and heads the pre-natal section at a Planned Parenthood clinic.  She is also the mother of three.  
When I interviewed Mrs. Keith, she exposed a different aspect of abortion.  Even today, I realized after speaking with her, women are still struggling under the stigma and taboo that surrounds unplanned pregnancy and abortion.  At Planned Parenthood Mrs. Keith usually encounters young women, in their teens and twenties, girls who cannot confide in their parents, who are still ignorant about pregnancy, sex, and birth control.  “They’re from single family homes,” she said, “they’re afraid of getting beaten, getting thrown out, they’re from very religious families, they’ll be forced to give up the baby for adoption, they’ll be ostracized.  Real or imagined, that’s how they perceive it.”  She told me about a girl who had come in, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, suspecting she was pregnant.  She couldn’t remember when her last period was, and she was eight and a half months pregnant.  “Denial,” Mrs. Keith explained simply.  
The women who come to Planned Parenthood are given free testing, counseling, and advice.  “We just ask, ‘What do you want to do?’”  Because Planned Parenthood is such an outspoken advocate for women’s reproductive rights, the name carries the stigma of being pro-abortion, a suspected abortion mill.  “People don’t understand that Planned Parenthood is not pro-abortion,” said Mrs. Keith, “it’s pro-choice.  That’s what we’re all about: choice. We never talk a woman into abortion.  We do what you want, in the healthiest, safest way.”  Similarly, the notion that women who have abortions do so nonchalantly is false.  “It is always, always a painful decision,” she said.  “There are some girls, you just look into their eyes and you know.  There are girls who are sobbing through the entire procedure.  They’re devastated.”  While there are undoubtedly women on their third and fourth abortions, their behavior is not encouraged or accepted.  “I have a lot of problems with that,” Mrs. Keith admitted.  “Because we don’t want to see you come back.  We do not want you to come back.”
Yet could laws conceivably be passed to restrict factors such as the number of abortions, or second and third semester abortions?  “Nothing is ever black and white,” she said.  She related her fear that if the government began restricting some things, or passing laws requiring parental consent or mandatory delay, more and more restrictions would be passed, until Roe has been chipped away into nothing.  Some of these restrictions may appear reasonable, but the situations of individual abortion are always changing.  “Yes, she could be an irresponsible twenty year-old, or a forty-year-old who has a genetic disease and three other children.  Nothing is ever black and white.”  Her response to parental consent laws paralleled this view: “Families are complicated.  Not everyone has a mother or father, or an eighteen year-old who isn’t using crack.”  
But despite her personal problems with some aspects of abortion, Mrs. Keith was adamant in her support for a woman’s right to choose.  “To think that making abortion illegal will deter girls from having sex—it’s not realistic,” she declared.  “That making the morning after pill over the counter will promote promiscuity—it’s not realistic.  Abstinence, though important, if you do just that, it’s not enough education for kids.  I believe that in my heart if abortion is outlawed it will be devastating to women.”  When I asked her if she knew what abortions were like before Roe, she shook her head after a moment, glancing down at her hands.  “I worked with a nurse who saw what it was like before Roe,” she answered slowly.  “She told me that she watched several women hemorrhage, die, in the emergency room.  Girls would douche with lye.  Lye!  Which would just burn your insides out.  Some would throw themselves down stairs.  I think the big thing back then was using hangers to scrape out the uterus.  Women would have to get hysterectomies to save their lives.  I wasn’t a witness.  But I believe them.”
And why?  I cannot help but ask this, I cannot help my anger and I cannot escape my fear.  Why have countless women bled to death in silence, why have teenage girls undergone hysterectomies to say their lives, why did ignorant women have to resort to scraping out their uteruses with wire hangers?  Mrs. Keith can give me no answers.  When pro-lifers confront her, she does not defend her position.  “I don’t defend it when someone has a different view, when someone believes that life starts at conception.  I don’t agree with them, but that’s that.  I’m not going to argue because you can’t argue with that.”  I strongly suspect that I lack her stoic resolve.  
Anti-abortion advocates make the claim of “protecting life.”  Abortion is murder; killing a two-year-old child is the same as aborting a two-week-old fetus.  Inevitably, this argument hinges on the question of personhood: a fertilized egg has all the 46 chromosomes needed to determine its development, the same 46 strands of DNA it will have in every somatic cell as an adult, and thus only conception can be considered the moment when personhood is determined.  This is a seemingly simple definition, but personhood is a social, philosophical, and legal construct and cannot be established by biology alone.  Scientists can make no definite statement on when human life begins.  Surely the egg and sperm are alive, so would these too not share in the right to life?  Yet no one argues for the protection of the sperm or egg.  Furthermore, a hydatidiform mole, an abnormal placental mass which mimics pregnancy but wherein there is no actual fetus, has 46 chromosomes, but is not considered a person nor will ever develop into one.  (Hadley 72) Legally, the Supreme Court decision in Roe determined that fetuses are not, under the Fourteenth Amendment, persons, and thus do not share in the same rights guaranteed to persons in the Constitution, including the right to life.  (Hull and Hoffer 175)  
Yet surely, pro-lifers argue, while a fetus may not be a person, it is undoubtedly a potential person.  After the union of the sperm and egg, the “blue print” for a unique individual has been laid.  In nine months, that fertilized egg will become a person.  However, as journalist and women’s rights advocate Janet Hadley writes, while a fetus may be a potential person, “this does not tell us the moral value of that potential being at a given moment in its development,” (67).  Potential will never hold the same weight as actual.  For example, putting a hen’s egg—a potential egg—into a pot of boiling water is not the same thing as frying an actual hen.  An acorn is not an oak tree.  80% of fertilized human eggs fail to implant into the uterine wall and are lost in the next menstrual period. (Hadley 67) What about these potential people?  They are fertilized eggs, they have unique genetic blueprints.  Furthermore, twining can occur up to fourteen days after fertilization.  Can one say that there is already a permanent, individual, unique potential person directly after fertilization if that unique person can split into two?  Does this potentiality extend to the sperm and egg?  They undoubtedly, under certain circumstances, have the potential to become born persons.  (Hadley 67) Not only could this argument plausibly lead to the criminalization of birth control, but also that of menstruation itself.   
Inevitably, one cannot assign rights based on potential, for in the case of fetus and woman, how can a potential person, the fetus, have more rights than an actual person, the woman?  This is the dilemma one faces in investing two sets of rights into one body.  At one point one set will have to outweigh the other, denying the latter of its Constitutional rights, “inside a single human skin there is room only for one being with full and equal rights,” (Hadley 68).  As moral philosopher Mary Ann Warren declares, “It is impossible in practice to grant equal moral rights to fetuses without denying those same rights to women,” (Warren qtd. in Hadly 69).  Pregnancy demands physical and emotional hardship, injury, and perhaps death.  Though maternal fatalities are very low, the risk of death in a pregnancy that goes to term is eleven times that of abortion.  Two hundred and sixty women are estimated to have died in childbirth every year. (Guttmacher Institute) A great wrong has been committed if just one of these women was forced to give birth against her will, and died as a result.  Forcing gestation and childbirth in order to preserve a fetus’s right to life infringes on a woman’s rights to life, liberty, and self-determination.  
For this is what the question of abortion whittles down to: women’s rights.  As Judith Jarvis Thomson argues in her 1971 essay “A Defense of Abortion,” even if a fetus can be considered a person, its right to life does not necessarily outweigh a woman’s right to bodily autonomy.  Thomson applies this famous analogy of a violinist to the case of pregnancy: imagine you wake up one morning and find yourself plugged into a famous violinist.  His kidneys are failing, and the Society of Music Lovers has found that only you have the right blood type and kidneys to sustain him, and thus without your consent they have attached his circulatory system to yours.  To unplug him from your body would kill him, but, as the director of the hospital assures you, it is only for nine months.  As Thomson questions, “is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?” (2) What if the duration of time were not nine months, but nine years, even the rest of your life?  For surely, as Thomson’s imaginary hospital director points out, “all persons have a right to life, and violinists are person.  Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body.”  (Thomson 2)
But what exactly is a “right to life”?  Is it the right to have the bare minimum required for survival, or the right to not be killed by anyone?  In the case of the former, what then is a “bare minimum”? As Thomson speculates, if she is on her deathbed, and only the touch of Henry Fonda’s hand on her brow will save her, she still does not have the right to be given that touch on her brow.  Surely, it would be a great kindness on the part of Henry Fonda, but Thomson does not have the right against him that he board an airplane, fly to her home, and touch her brow.  And, just as Thomson has no right against Fonda, the violinist also has no right against you that you must give over the use of your kidneys, and consequently the fetus has no right against the woman that she give over her uterus and bodily functions, even for a period of nine months.  (Thomson 5-6)
Undoubtedly there is such a thing as a “right to life,” but “having a right to life does not guarantee having either a right to be given the use of or a right to be allowed continued use of another person’s body—even if one needs it for life itself.” (Thomson 6) For surely, if one has the right to control anything, it is what happens in and to one’s own body.  This is the reason women proclaim so boldly, “My body, my choice.”  If, for example, Mr. Jones has found a coat, and has put it on to keep from freezing to death, and Mr. Smith also needs the coat to keep himself from freezing to death, one cannot arbitrarily choose between the two who is to have the coat.  However, if Mr. Smith owns the coat, the solution becomes obvious. (Thomson 4) A woman quite simply owns her body, and when a state, government, Congressmen, or President proclaims that no she does not own it, or has the right to control it, even for nine months, even for just nine minutes, an entire sex has been relegated to second-class, second-best, by virtue of birth.
Admittedly, Thomson’s analogy is not without flaws.  In the case of the violinist, you were hypothetically kidnapped, and you did not volunteer for the operation.  This situation is comparable to pregnancy resulting from rape, and some pro-lifers will make the concession of abortion in these circumstances, a fact that Mrs. Keith found a little strange.  “This” she said, “is what I just don’t understand: people who say that, “yes, there is life at conception, but somehow it doesn’t matter because the mother was violated.”   Indeed, it sounds wrong to disregard a supposed person’s personhood simply because of his father’s sins.  Thomson echoes the sentiment in her essay: “Surely the question of whether you have a right to life at all, or how much of it you have, shouldn’t turn on the question of whether or not you were a product of rape.”  (Thomson 2)  
The analogy of the violinist does not seem applicable, however, to pregnancy resulting from consensual sex.  Pro-lifers argue that because the woman consented to sex, knowing the risks that accompanied it, she is therefore responsible for the fetus’ existence and use of her body.  In consenting to sex, she tacitly consented to pregnancy, and must give the fetus her body for food and shelter.  But is consent to sex actually equal consent to pregnancy?  Just as consenting to driving in a car is certainly consenting to dying in a car accident, and just as leaving a window open is giving consent to a burglar to come in and rob a house?  As Thomson argues, “in what pregnancy could it be supposed that the mother has given the unborn such a right?  It is not as if there are unborn persons drifting about the world, to whom a woman who wants a child says, ‘I invite you in.’” (7)
Arguments such as this denigrate children—and consequently motherhood—to, quite simply, punishments for sex.  As Janet Hadley writes, “the unwanted pregnancy or the child that must be given up for adoption becomes the woman’s punishment—for having desires of her own, for being ‘feckless’…It is wildly discriminatory, proscribes all thoughts of sex for pleasure, and takes no heed of the fact that, for many women, heterosexual penetrative intercourse is more or less compulsory in their relationships.”  (Hadley 79)  When the sole purpose of sex is considered to be the begetting of children, when women are forced to gestate against their will, I have become merely an “ingenious container for growing babies,” (Hadley 69).  
In the end, this is what banning abortion is about: controlling women.  Pro-lifers may wave images of bloody fetuses, almost completely developed, but in actuality almost 90% of abortions in the United States take place in the first trimester, in the first twelve weeks after the last menstrual period.  (Guttmacher Institute)  At this point, the “baby” is little more than an “unrecognizable group of the mother’s cells,” (Lakoff 264).  Less than 2% of abortions occur after twenty weeks, and .08% occur after 24 weeks, when the fetus may be viable—able to survive outside the woman’s body.  (Guttmacher Institute) According to Mrs. Keith, these late term abortions take place predominantly for medical reasons—either for the mother’s health or tests, such as amniocenteses, have shown fetal deformities incongruent with life.  
Pro-lifers may claim that women will use abortion as their primary method of birth control, but the majority of women having abortions have not had them before.  In fact, if a sexually active woman were to use abortion as her only birth control, she would have had about thirty abortions by forty-five.  (Guttmacher Institute)  
Pro-lifers may insist that allowing widespread abortion will “herald a slide into moral decline,” but in Japan, where abortion is not stigmatized or socially unacceptable, women have an average of two abortions each.  While abortions are not taboo, neither are they treated lightly, and many Buddhist temples provide religious rituals for those who have had abortions.  Abortions are common, but there are certainly no signs of “further stages of moral turpitude.” (Hadley 69).  
Pro-lifers may declare that criminalizing abortion will end it.  Yet twenty million women have abortions in countries where they are restricted or illegal.  Furthermore, mortality rates are hundreds of times higher in countries where abortion is illegal or very restricted.  I remember Mrs. Keith’s words: Women will hurt themselves, everything will be unsafe.  Women will die.  I believe that in my heart if abortion is outlawed it will be devastating to women.  Girls with hangers sticking out of them, douching with bleach, swallowing lye.  Girls will always get pregnant and not want children, and they will do anything to stop the pregnancy. Abortions have occurred in every culture, throughout history, whether legal or illegal.   
Pro-lifers have fallen back on the stereotypes of the careless and foolish teenage girl and the overly-ambitious career woman.  They have alleged that abortions “sanction immoral behavior.” (Lakoff 267) They have even gone as far as to write, “unmarried lust and abortion go together like a horse and carriage…men and women who shack up are nine times more likely to engender abortion than their married counterparts…anything that increases promiscuity and discourages marriage…increases abortion,” (Olasky qtd. in Lakoff 267).  
But overturning Roe v. Wade, making abortion illegal, is not about fetal rights.  It’s not about a sacred egg meeting a sacred sperm and 46 chromosomes slathered in proteins.  It’s about restricting the freedom of women.  Perhaps it may not seem that way at first, perhaps this may sound like hyped-up feminism, but once women can no longer make their own reproductive decisions, when we must resort to something illegal to implement something so personal and private, we have become, intentionally or not, vessels, untapped fertility, slaves to our biology.  No other person in the United States is forced to “lend” his organs to another; men are not compelled by law to give blood or organs, even to save a life, even if he was responsible for endangering that life to begin with.  If you crash into someone’s car, and as a result that person needs a new liver, no court in the land will order you to hand yours over, even for just nine months.  Yet this movement demands that women do just that, at the risk of their own lives and livelihood.  
In certain circles, women are perceived as no more than this, no more than “ideal fetal containers,” (Hadley 72).  Since 1980, more and more criminal charges have been brought against women for “prenatal child neglect,” because of their actions while gestating.  They have been imprisoned or committed for the duration of their pregnancy, they have been sued by their children for “prenatal injury,” they have been tied down and forced to undergo cesarean sections.  While these women were charged for the use of drugs or alcohol, according to Janet Hadley, “children have even been taken into care because a mother ‘ate what she liked’ during pregnancy without considering whether the foods ‘were good for the unborn child.’” (72) In 1979 a West Virginia Cyanamid company gave five female workers the choice of being sterilized or fired from the factory, as the environment could be dangerous for pregnant women.  These women were not pregnant at the time, but the company claimed they were nevertheless seeking to protect “unborn children,” whether they existed at the moment or not.  Some steel, chemical, and rubber companies now have “fetal protection” policies and will not hire women of childbearing age.  In 1991 the Supreme Court ruled that the Cyanamid company had acted unlawfully.  Sperm are just as vulnerable to toxins, but the “ideological obsession with the fetus is what underlies these policies, not protection of workers.” (Hadley 72)
Yet the anti-choice movement supports these cases.  Their motivation, Hadley posits, is that “gaining legal rights for the fetus and controlling pregnant women’s behavior is useful foundation for curbing access to abortion.  It works both ways: curbing access to abortion and gaining legal rights for the fetus is also a foundation for controlling pregnant women’s behavior, and maybe the behavior of women in general.” (72)
For that is what is threatened here.  The behavior of women.  My behavior.  When I imagine a world where Roe has been overthrown, I am deathly afraid.  I wonder what would happen if I got pregnant, without wanting to, without choosing to.  I could go to Canada perhaps, I could afford to take off, stay in a hotel, pay for the surgery with my own money.  I could fly over the heads of the millions of women who must instead resort to shady back-alleys, unmarked pills, and gruesome “home remedies.”  But afterwards I would return to a country where I am no more than a dumb body, no more than the sum of my reproductive parts.  And if I remained pregnant, would I be released from my job, because stress isn’t good for the baby?  Could I drive a car, could I ride a horse, could I be an athlete?  Will I even have a job, or will they tell me that whatever life I lead now is superfluous, “biding time” before “motherhood”?  Will I be told that careers, that science isn’t good for babies?  Will I become a thing, rather than a person, a means to an end instead of an end, an asset, in and of myself?  Because if a law, a Congressman, a government can have ultimate control over my body and what I do with it, my labor, how I spend my breath and blood and flesh, my life is no longer my own, my person has no value.  
If a man impregnates me, I am consigned to that man and his laws.  Will he hide me away, a trophy on his mantel?  Will I become Elsa to his Rick, and just murmur back at him, “You’ll have to think for the both of us”?  Will I mean it?   Once I allow someone to take this choice from me, will it ever stop?  As Polly Bergen argues, “once you allow politicians to tell you you must have [a baby], those same politicians can turn around and say you can’t have one, or it can only be a boy, it can only have blue eyes, it can only be a girl, you can only have two, you can’t have any.” (Bergen 32)  The thought terrifies me.  
But then, Roe still stands.
When I look at the opposition, the “pro-lifers,” the “anti-choicers,” in a way I cannot help but think that they are right: it is about life.  I have read pages of vivid accounts of abortion experiences, from women of different ages and backgrounds, yet they all seem to resonate with the same subtle pleas: let me live, let me be forgiven, let me determine my own life.  And I feel guilty because they could not, not then, and I still cannot absolve them of their shame, their anger, their suffering.  I want to return their lives to them, because they have allowed me mine.  My life now has value too.

Works Cited
Bergen, Polly.  “Polly Bergen.”  The Choices We Made.  Angela Bonavoglia.  New York: Random House, 1991.
Ellerbee, Linda.  “Linda Ellerbee.”  The Choices We Made.  Angela Bonavoglia.  New York: Random House, 1991.
Goldberg, Whoopi.  “Whoopi Goldberg.”  The Choices We Made.  Angela Bonavoglia.  New York: Random House, 1991.
Hadley, Jane.  Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Hoffer, Peter Charles, and Hull, N. E. H.  Roe v. Wade The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001.
Kidder, Margot.  “Margot Kidder.”  The Choices We Made.  Angela Bonavoglia.  New York: Random House, 1991.
Lakoff, George.  Moral Politics.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Paley, Grace.  “Grace Paley.”  The Choices We Made.  Angela Bonavoglia.  New York: Random House, 1991.
Thomson, Judith Jarvis.  “A Defense of Abortion.” Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 1, no. 1.  Fall 1971.



Website:
The Alan Guttmacher Institute.  2003.  The Alan Guttmacher Institute.  25 March 2005.  <http://www.agi usa.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.pdf>