But then she fails to have the camera running for the dramatic moment when her car service driver, on hearing that he's taking her to her abortion appointment, pulls the car over, on a bridge, in traffic, to say: "Don’t kill the baby."
“Keep driving! I have an appointment!” I shook his headrest. This was not part of the script.We're told this man was "Middle Eastern."
“Please don’t kill the baby,” he said again, turning around to face me. He had beautiful big brown eyes — almost black. “I will take care of you and the baby. I work two jobs.”
But would she have wanted that scene in her movie? Later, she chose not to turn the camera on in the waiting room, she says, because the women there didn't fit her mental image. She hadn't planned for a baby, and she hadn't planned for "the saturnine cloudiness" of the waiting room and "all those sad-looking women burying their faces in tabloid magazines."
If they'd been reading The New Yorker, would it have had a more feminist vibe — more of a sense of informed, intelligent, autonomous individuals discovering and delineating the meaning of life for themselves?
Describing these women, Davis deadpans, "The video camera stayed sleeping in my lap," as if she could have filmed patients in a clinic waiting room if only they conveyed the message she'd hope to find.
The film prospects are also undercut by the need for general anesthesia. But the writing prospects remain, of course, and that's what we are reading.
The first thing I thought when I awoke from the anesthesia was that I’d never be pregnant again, that I had just squandered my only chance at motherhood.That's quite a sentence, exposing her to the criticism that she's thinking only of herself. The lost child becomes the lost opportunity to be a mother. The pregnancy was an opportunity to make a feminist film, and with the opportunity to make the film disappointed, the writer shifts us forward to the new lost opportunity, motherhood.
Davis ends upbeat. We jump 20 years into the present, where she's "happily coupled with a wonderful man," and 2 daughters. She still supports abortion rights, but she wants women to know that having an abortion is brutal and traumatic.
I suspect that Davis got the idea to write this piece because of the recent attention to a film that did get made of a woman getting her abortion and presenting abortion in the cheerful, liberating way that had been Davis's original conception.
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The films are an outgrowth of the women talking about their plumbing inclination.
Some people just treat abortion as backup to failed birth control, not a good first choice but good as a backup.
There's been a decline in fertility rates and shotgun weddings corresponding to it.
I wonder what her children think about this. No, not what they say. What they think.
So she selectively edited out (by not filming) the waiting room scene which must be absolutely central to the process of having an abortion.
Just like the media only showing the interviews of passersby with positions which support their story.
Fortunately Althouse passerby interviews are more open - generally.
“Please don’t kill the baby,” he said again, turning around to face me. He had beautiful big brown eyes — almost black. “I will take care of you and the baby. I work two jobs.”
We're told this man was "Middle Eastern."
He might have been a man born to an unwed teenage mother in a barn.
The child was also denied a chance to be a mother (or father), being dead and all.
The Guy Who Poops in the Hall says:
I am meaningless. I am male, and can never have an abortion of my own: I can only experience it through others. This pain is brutal and traumatic and I mourn my loss. A form of art, denied to me: I can only poop in the hall. My inner self is in turmoil.
Feminist mugged by reality...
@David
I could forgive my mom, if she was young and abandoned. Now if she chose to have an abortion, because she already had two or didn't want to cut back on a middle class lifestyle.... I would have a hard time.
Pretty happy in my family, we don't abandon young pregnant relatives. We just help out with the baby.
"all those sad-looking women burying their faces in tabloid magazines."
Those sad-looking women spoiled her chance at fame. How inconsiderate! Didn't they know killing their babies was a joyous occasion, time to bring out the bubblies and celebrate that the "rapist's" spawn would soon be no more?
believed she "could make art out of anything,"
Ugh. Idiotic
Before putting her 22 year old idiotic, insular life thoughts to paper she should read history in particular the 20th Century bloodbath, experience life, see the bloodbath in Iraq, visit a Syrian refugee camp, volunteer at animal kill shelters..........and the list goes on.......
That pro-abortion advocates want to treat abortion like any other medical procedure seems to run afoul of the vast majority of people who get abortions recognizing that it is not that.
"I suspect that Davis got the idea to write this piece because of the recent attention to a film that did get made of a woman getting her abortion and presenting abortion in the cheerful, liberating way that had been Davis's original conception."
JUNO?
Althouse, this is really beautiful. It made me cry. Thanks for writing about it.
The first thing I thought when I awoke from the anesthesia was that I’d never be pregnant again
I have met women, young women, who have told me, "I'm not going to have children." And I've met women who get upset when you talk about babies. Not unborn babies, just babies in general. I met a pregnant woman, who was happily pregnant, and I asked her if she had seen a 3-D ultrasound. And she said "No, I don't want to see it, it's not a baby yet." (She was at 22 weeks).
In my own life I am more and more aware of women who might have had an abortion, and the way it affects them. And men too are not immune from this guilt and trauma.
I think abortion stays with people for the rest of their life. I think it's a defining moment and a dark tragedy. There is a lot of guilt. This is why we don't talk about abortion in our society. It's why we don't show abortion photographs. It's a traumatizing experience. Even for people who don't seem aware of it.
For instance, I think a lot of the anger on the pro-choice side is from women who have had abortions. There's repressed guilt and they lash out at pro-lifers for bringing up the subject.
Meanwhile, our authorities deny that there is any trauma at all. And yet so many people cannot talk about their abortions. There's a huge amount of repression and denial over this subject.
there was a creepy letter in the "Prudence" column in Slate the other day. Woman has been together with a man for 2 years, both in their late 30s. She's certain she never wants kids; he hopes she'll change her mind.
She gets an abortion, secretly, then asks Prudence if she should tell him.
Prudence says, you don't have any moral obligation to do so, but you should be sure he understands that you really, really don't want children and would abort any child that came your way. It's OK, though, if you phrase this hypothetically.
Eeew!
(Besides the inherent creepiness, a hypothetical scenario isn't enough -- only if she says, "I aborted a child that you fathered" will he get the message.)
It is easy to talk about this issue when you are anonymous, or semi-anonymous. I've recently brought up abortion at my Episcopal church. My church, I would guess, is financially conservative and socially liberal. Not a pro-life church. These conversations are really difficult. People take it personally. I have no desire to blame the men and women who have had abortions.
I blame our elites. I blame the Supreme Court (who defined the babies as sub-human and said it was a right thing to do), our medical authorities (who created a billion dollar industry and violate the Hippocratic Oath every time they perform an abortion) and our media (who hide the bodies).
So I don't blame mom and dad. And I know there's a lot of trauma there. And I feel bad for them.
I remember when I first started my abortion book, I wanted to hide under the name Saint Croix. Or maybe "Anonymous Pro-Lifer." I didn't want to use my real name.
It is painful, and incredibly difficult, to have these conservations with people in the real world. Online it is so easier to talk about homicide and baby-killing.
I find myself far more careful in my speech when people know who I am and there are real world consequences. The truth is the same, but it can be hard to say when you know you will pay a price.
Abortion is an art like everything else. She did it exceptionally well.
If anybody would like to read The Seen and the Unseen: Abortion and the Supreme Court, shoot me an email and I'll send you a free copy. I owe a huge debt to Althouse and her blog for bringing up this issue so often, and for all the feedback I've gotten from people. Thanks so much.
Taylor Carmichael
oystermanproductions@gmail.com
Baby steps. Maturation is a lifetime process. Acknowledging reality and rejecting fantasy (or innocence of youth) is the first step to adulthood.
"The video camera stayed sleeping in my lap."
Babies also sleep on laps...so, two things sleeping in that vicinity.
Interesting that this visit to the clinic also ended her aspiration to be a filmmaker. I hope she finds that again.
I suspect the problem with the waiting room occupants was that they were mostly lower income women of color, instead of the white upper middle class achievers who, in the Left's collective mind, are the ones benefiting most from abortion's wide availability.
Tens of millions of women have had abortions in the last forty years. Many of them are now entering their twilight years, bereft of offspring. They have no weddings to plan, no grandchildren to anticipate, no one to leave their accumulated material wealth to. I anticipate many more honest, first-person accounts like this in the years to come. Very moving. I wonder how Cecile Richards is able to sleep at night.
"I suspect that Davis got the idea to write this piece because of the recent attention to a film that did get made of a woman getting her abortion and presenting abortion in the cheerful, liberating way that had been Davis's original conception."
JUNO?
No, not "Juno," in which the Ellen Page character considers getting an abortion but decides against it.
The reference here is obviously to "Obvious Child" (which, unlike "Juno," I have not seen).
there was a creepy letter in the "Prudence" column in Slate the other day
Wasn't she a piece of work? That woman should really do the man a favor and tell him, so he can dump her. I'm glad she was able to abort, I guess, because she certainly is way too self-centered ever to raise a child to productive adulthood (In fairness, I think, at least she recognizes this, and yet she still "falls pregnant!"). She could have given the kid up for adoption, true, but I suspect she would not have parted with any part of herself.
It strikes me that Lisa Davis is of a similar ilk -- she takes her experiences and extrapolates them out to the entire population, as if the way she lives her life is how everyone else should.
That's not how life works.
Since the woman in the story went through with her abortion, we'll never know if the taxi driver would have held true to his promise to take care of the mother & baby. But, if he what he said he sincerely meant, may God bless him. One never knows where one will stumble upon a saint.
"She still supports abortion rights, but she wants women to know that having an abortion is brutal and traumatic."
Most important line in the whole thing. I think it's quite possible to argue that in many circumstances abortion is better than the alternatives. That doesn't make it something to be celebrated as a mark of liberation, but rather an ugly reality to be tolerated because the alternative to tolerating it would be worse.
St Croix,
You don't blame mom and dad? So if the government says something morally repugnant is OK, the people who participate are not to be blamed at all?
"But would she have wanted that scene in her movie?"
It's such a strange notion to see life's value only in terms of its utility as raw material for an art project. But it's an idea not all that far from the core justification for an abortion -- my body, myself.
The personal ain't political. Especially this kind of personal.
Whatever your thoughts on abortion, the downward pressures on some women to share and exploit such an experience, would, I hope, cause serious pause.
It's tough for me to imagine a cause (art, ideology, knowledge) worthy of this kind of 'celebration' surrounding abortion.
"Happily coupled with a man". You gotta love the euphemisms that are both designed to hide more than they disclose and to normalize even that. I'll bet that the intervening 20 years have been swell. Someone should interview the kids, alone to find out
To any post-abortive Althousians who regret their earlier choices:
The Catholic Church actually has a ministry that reaches out to post-abortive women. They're called "Rachel's Vineyard" and they do retreats. If you contact the Diocese or Google, you can find one in your area.
And a link to their site: http://www.rachelsvineyard.org
Interesting to compare abortion songs. The Sex Pistols sang perhaps the most famous pro-life song. They are screaming about the baby and how abortion is murder. Always loved the Sex Pistols, they're awesome.
Ben Folds Five (who is from my home, North Carolina) is another awesome band who also sang an abortion song. While the Sex Pistols are like right-wing anarchists, I suspect Ben Folds is a nice liberal man. He is ignoring the baby. He probably thinks there is no baby. Regardless, however, he feels like shit.
Note too how repressed the song is. It never mentions the word abortion. Anyway, here is Brick.
This is an old article, by Naomi Wolf, but it's quite good.
Wolf quotes an anonymous woman...
I had an abortion when I was a single mother and my daughter was two years old. I would do it again. But you know how in the Greek myths when you kill a relative you are pursued by Furies? For months it was as if baby Furies were pursuing me.
WWJD DKTB
St Croix,
You don't blame mom and dad? So if the government says something morally repugnant is OK, the people who participate are not to be blamed at all?
Kermit Gosnell was prosecuted and convicted for multiple counts of murder. Prosecutors could have prosecuted all the moms (and dads) for murder, too. After all, they paid for it. In many cases they were quite aware that Gosnell murdered a newborn.
But the D.A. decided to go after the abortionists, and not the mothers. I think that was wise politically. But I also think that they were less morally culpable than he was.
I blame the Supreme Court, our medical authorities, and our media. Of course tens of millions of people are implicated in this mess. But those are the groups who are most responsible, I think.
By the way, if and when we recognize the humanity of the unborn, and start defining abortion as murder, there can be no criminal prosecutions for the people who had abortions when it was legal. The ex post facto clause and the due process clause forbid it.
Similarly there were no criminal punishments for slave-owners after slavery was abolished. We can't define crimes after the fact, it's unconstitutional.
Do you remember hearing the position that there should be an exception to protect the life of the mother? Deciding to choose the mother over the baby is not easy, either.
My wife and I were faced with making that decision. We were in our second year of marriage as early 20-somethings. We wanted a child. We now know my wife has a condition that causes clotting in the placenta and we have never successfully finished a pregnancy--although we have started at least five.
We did not have any reason to suspect there would be a problem when we started the first pregnancy. Her blood pressure shot up at about the five-month mark and we ended up at a hospital staffed by specialists. We were told our choices were to deliver the baby very early--probably too early for her to live--or risk losing both the mother and child. My wife wanted to take the risk and try to keep the baby. When I said I did not want to lose her she got a new perspective on the risk to her own life. She agreed to induce labor. Our baby lived 11 hours. We have a birth certificate and a death certificate.
That was 33 years ago. We still think about what our daughter might be doing if she had lived.
We made the right decision but it is not easy. Ending a pregnancy really does end the life a child and it affects the adults involved.
I come from a very pro-abortion background, I've never had an abortion, and I find regular old OBGYN appts traumatizing, so I mostly leave the subject alone...but this thread is a strange yang to yesterday's yin.
My mom, who had nine babies before she dumped my dad and the Catholic Church, came along as moral support for my (not at all abortion-related) medical appointment. Someone had left a bunch of pro-life literature all over the waiting room. While I was otherwise occupied, my still-beautiful, now-elderly mother apparently wandered around the waiting area gathering up all the magazines a few at a time, surreptitiously rolled them into tight cylinders and quietly threw them in the trash.
Hah. Love you, Mom.
my still-beautiful, now-elderly mother apparently wandered around the waiting area gathering up all the - pro life - magazines a few at a time, surreptitiously rolled them into tight cylinders and quietly threw them in the trash.
What gave her the right to make the decision for someone else who may have wanted or needed to see that information to weigh their options? Having a crappy marriage and nine kids she may not have wanted - choices she made in her life, is not a valid reason to sabotage someone else's.
And you praise her for it.
Grundoon, thanks for sharing that. I'm so sorry for your loss.
At the time of Roe, it was legal in all 50 states to kill the baby in defense of the mother's life. And it will still be legal, if and when we recognize the humanity of the child.
But it's still heartbreaking, as your know. God bless.
Grundoon- That's a heartbreaking decision. But it's also not an abortion, because you didn't deliberately kill your child. If the baby had been able to survive at that point, you would have joyfully welcomed both mother and child.
And, if the doc had to deliver early to save your wife, the choice was NOT actually 'mother or baby.' It was 'mother or nobody,' because if your wife had died, your child would have died too.
You guys made the best choice you could under the circumstances, and I'm sure everyone was praying like mad that the due date was wrong and that there was a chance for both of them....
It's got to be especially heartbreaking because as NICU care has advanced, you probably both think "If she had been born today, things would have been different."
Anyway, you guys did NOT kill your child. That was not an abortion. It was an early delivery for medical reasons (something that even the Catholic Church permits)-- And I'm sure you loved and cherished your daughter for the heartbreakingly short time that you had her.
"The first thing I thought when I awoke from the anesthesia was that I'd never be pregnant again."
I was your post-anesthesia nurse. You awoke from deep sleep, first moaning, then visceral sobs, in obvious pain. Ever ready with the analgesic (as I'd witnessed this awakening hundreds of times), I slipped a dose of relief into your IV and watched over you as your sobs ebbed and second, lighter sleep overcame you. My sense of your first thought upon awakening, based on years, is: something much more deeply profound, psychic as well as physical pain--deep right/wrong ambivalence.
Nurses of my generation were taught in training to be nonjudgmental. Yet something profound was changing in me as I witnessed time and time again, not only in Recovery Room but also in the Operating Room the young woman who lied to the doctor about the age of the gestation so that she could legally terminate her pregnancy 'in the first trimester'. The evacuation of uterine contents of a further along pregnancy resembled more infanticide than just 'tissue'. It began to sicken me.
How cognitively dissonant must one be to not view this as something benign and not violent? And so, I left.
I went to work at a nonprofit Catholic hospital, where
I no longer had to care for women who wanted elective terminations of pregnancy. Happily, I found myself in a hospital that, no matter who you were (staff, patients, family), when a new life was born in the OB wing of the hospital, delicate chimes would ring out! I can't begin to describe the affect on all who heard the chimes. Those who didn't know what it meant were quickly informed. It lifted the spirits of nearly all, if only for that moment.
Sorry this is so long; I just had a need to share.
I was your post-anesthesia nurse.
Literally? Doesn't HIPAA become an issue here?
My wife and I have experienced multiple miscarriages.
This experience has sensitized us to the plight of women who miscarry. Our culture has no provision for caring for them--no title for them, no ceremonies for them, no special days for them, no sympathy cards for them. Stories about miscarriage are just not told as part of typical small talk. Several women came forward to comfort my wife. In the course of conversation they shared their miscarriage stories with us. We were surprised that we had not heard some of them before.
My wife now steps forward to comfort the woman when we hear of a case of miscarriage. I try to share the husband's side of the experience with the baby's father. It was a strain on our marriage because it was so much more painful to the mother. It is a very unevenly shared live event.
Life is fragile and living for faith, hope, and love is better than living in despair, anger, and self-pity even if it comes naturally.
We eventually adopted two children from the special needs list. One is now 27 years old but his developmental tests put him at about 3 years old. Most of the time he is excited about life and I think his gift to society is that enthusiasm. People love just being in his presence to see his joy. Parenthood has not been all pain and suffering for us.
Thank you, St Croix!
Thank you, Grundoon!
Thank you for sharing your family's story here on Althouse, for comforting the grieving, and for adopting and raising your other children!
SOJO,
"y still-beautiful, now-elderly, hateful mother"
FIFY. What she did just gives lie to the "choice" mantra. What kind of person wants there to be more abortions, not fewer? What a moral monster...
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